{
  "video_id": "fgr6Sm-dmmM",
  "channel_slug": "techwithtim",
  "channel_handle": "Tech With Tim",
  "title": "I Replaced OpenClaw With Perplexity Computer…",
  "duration_seconds": 1047,
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgr6Sm-dmmM",
  "upload_date": "20260419",
  "transcript": "Perplexity just released their new computer feature.\nAnd honestly, this is the best\nAI tool that I've used in 2026 this far.\nNow, in this video, I want to break down what it is,\nexplain how it compares to something like OpenClaw\nand why I'm personally switching to it right now\nfor certain tasks compared to OpenClaw.\nLet's get into it.\nOkay, so you can see\nthe computer is running on my machine right now.\nAll I did is just go to the website.\nAnd then I just gave it a prompt.\nNow the important thing here\nis that this computer from perplexity can effectively\ndo everything that Open Claw can do, except\nit doesn't require any configuration on your end.\nYou just make sure you have the max plan,\nwhich I guess is $200 per month.\nBut I do believe that they're bringing it\nto the Pro plan soon and you can start using it.\nIt has skills, it can go to the web,\nit can write code.\nIt can do all of the things\nthat you would want an AI agent to do,\nexcept you don't have to manually configure it\nor worry about the security.\nSo I'll go through a bunch of demos here\nso you can see what this is capable of.\nBut I really do want to explain what it is\nand how it compares to open Claw,\nbecause I know a lot of you watching\nthis channel have watched my Open Claw videos,\nand you've seen that even me as an experienced\ndeveloper can take hours\nto configure the instance properly\nand while it's super powerful, it's definitely not\nbeginner friendly\nand it eats a massive amount of time and can also\nbe configured incorrectly\nand lead to a bunch of security issues.\nSo this effectively fixes all of that.\nBut there are some pros and cons. Let's get into it.\nOkay, so there's kind of two approaches\nthat I want to talk about in this video.\nFirst is open\nclaw. Second is the perplexity computer.\nNow you can see that with open claw\nyou effectively have full local control,\nwhich means you configure everything.\nYou set it up exactly how you want,\nand it makes it extremely powerful\nbecause you can effectively do anything right.\nIt's infinitely configurable.\nThat also means you own everything\nand you own the complexity and the responsibility\nof setting up an instance like that.\nWhereas with Perplexity computer, it's cloud native,\nso it just runs on perplexity infrastructure.\nThere is actually zero set up.\nYou literally just sign up, you pay the 200\nbucks per month and then you can start using it.\nAnd then it has model agnostic orchestration,\nwhich means that it automatically routes\ntwo different models based on what needs to be used.\nYou don't pay for API\nkeys, you just pay for credits for the computer.\nAnd this means that you don't need to\nfine tune your cost.\nI know some people are literally spending\n$200 per day using open cloud, right?\nAnd then in general, you just describe what you want\nand you get the result.\nYou might need to connect\nyour Google Drive or something, but that's about it.\nAnd just to give you kind of an analogy here,\nthe computer is like hiring a general contractor.\nYou just describe what you want\nthe finished product to be, in this case the kitchen.\nAnd then they pick the plumber, the electrician,\nyou know, the tile guy or whatever, and spin up\na bunch of sub agents to accomplish the task\nthat you really need to do anything.\nSo let's talk about what the computer actually is.\nNow, if you remember perplexity a few years ago,\nthey were really just doing search with AI.\nThey then released the comet browser, the Comet\nassistant, and now they have the computer feature,\nwhich is really the most capable one\nthat they've had to date.\nNow, effectively, what this allows you to do\nis have model agnostic orchestration.\nLike I said, parallel sub agents\njust like you would have inside of something\nlike cloud Code if you were triggering them yourself,\nself-healing, problem solving\nand then isolated compute environment,\nwhich I think is the important part here, where\nwhen you use this computer, it's essentially using\na virtual private server that's already configured,\nwhere you can't configure it incorrectly\nbecause you don't have the ability to configure it.\nAnd perplexity has set it up for you.\nNow, the model orchestration is super interesting,\nbecause that means that you're able to access\nall of the frontier models,\nand even the new ones when they come out,\nwithout you having to actually select them\nand set all of them up.\nSo if you want to use grok, if you want to use\nGemini, in fact, you don't even have to pick\nit will just automatically related\nto all of the different models based on what\nthe task requires, rather\nthan you having to configure that yourself.\nAnd you may have seen that recently,\nI had an hour long video explaining to you\nhow to configure this to save money.\nIn this case, it's already done.\nSo what I want to do now is show\nyou exactly how this works.\nYou can see what I mean.\nAnd by the way,\nthis presentation that I'm going through here\nwas actually generated with perplexity computer.\nAnd the entire script that you're hearing\nwas also generated with perplexity computer.\nAnyways, let me go over and show you what's possible.\nAll right.\nSo I'm in the app\nnow, and I do want to remind you that in order to use\nthis feature, you do need the Max plan.\nAnd I believe it's going to be available\nfor the enterprise plans\nif it's not already, as well as the Pro plans later.\nBut for now, you do need that $200\nper month subscription,\nwhich will give you 10,000 credits\nby default for the computer.\nAnd then I believe\nthat you can get some bonus credits when you sign up.\nIn my case, I was able to actually partner\nwith perplexity for this video, and they gave me\na bunch of additional credits,\nso I haven't had any issues running into limits.\nAnd to be honest, it hasn't used as many credits\nas I would have expected it to.\nRegardless, I'm\ngoing to start running you through a few demos.\nSo what I'm going to do\nis just switch over to the computer tab here,\nwhere you can see a bunch of different tasks.\nI had another account\nwhere I was messing around with this.\nI just made a fresh one for this video,\nand what I'm going to do is just give it a prompt\nand let's see what it does.\nOkay. So I'm just going to go here.\nI'm going to paste in a prompt where I'm asking this\nto research the top five AI agent tools right now.\nSo open claw man is clod co-work perplexity etc..\nAnd then give me one of your choice.\nGive me the pricing, positioning, key strengths,\nweaknesses, and then I want it to put it\ninto an interactive report as a web application.\nSo we could actually send this to, for example,\nlike an executive team.\nSo let's go ahead and press enter here\nand see the result that we get.\nAll right.\nSo this is the resulting web page that it created.\nYou can see it gave us a bunch of information.\nIt created a full comparison report.\nAnd we can actually see all of the files\nthat were generated up here in this kind of little\nwindow here, as well as the usage of the computer\nduring this particular task\nand how long it worked for.\nIn this case, it was eight minutes, 25 seconds.\nAnd if we scroll down, let's have a look at this\nby just making it full screen okay.\nSo you can see this actually deployed\nlike a full website I guess.\nAnd from here\nlet's start scrolling through and see what we got.\nSo we get a comparison for developers\nknowledge workers power users.\nMake sense.\nEngineering teams all okay.\nHead to head analysis\nwhere we can kind of click through and, you know,\ntoggle these various things and see this cool\nkind of like skill graph\nof what each is good at, overall pricing breakdown\nin terms of how much it costs.\nAnd kind of nice tables.\nAnd overall this is quite good.\nI mean, I'm pretty impressed\nthat's able to whip this up in literally\neight minutes without me having to do anything.\nAnd it's even given me this kind of light\nand dark mode, which I didn't even ask for.\nNow, just to draw a comparison here to open claw.\nObviously I could do this as well\nwith Open Claw and create a website like this,\nbut when I've done that in the past,\nit requires, first of all, that I'm going to set up\nall of the different routing for the models\nso we could use like Gemini\nfor research, you know, opus for planning,\nall of that kind of stuff.\nIt also requires that I have everything\npre-configured and that I have a coding task.\nI have a git task I have or sorry skill.\nI have all these other skills already added.\nAnd then in terms of actually running and viewing\nthe site, it's a lot more difficult to have open\nautomatically deploy this and put it in a format\nwhere I could actually instantly\nshare it with someone, because if you, configure\nthe instance properly, usually you're shutting down\nall external traffic, meaning you can only run it\nthrough something like tail scale, right?\nOr you're going to expose the site publicly,\nwhich you probably don't want to do\ndirectly on the virtual private server\nthat's hosting your open.\nFor instance.\nSo at minimum,\njust being able to have the site deployed instantly\nso I can actually start using it right away\nis a massive benefit.\nAnd again, like I said, I can do this in open claw,\nbut it's just going to take me a lot\nlonger to set up.\nAnd for any beginners,\nI don't know if it's actually even going\nto be possible for you to get a result like this,\nunless you really know what you're doing\nin terms of the config set up, deployment,\nall of that kind of stuff. Okay,\nso I've got another prompt here.\nResearch Nvidia, Microsoft and anthropic\npull the latest news, do the analyst sentiment\nand then give me any financial developments and build\na comprehensive dashboard that I can actually use.\nLet's see what this can do.\nAll right.\nSo we've got the finished result\nhere. Let's pop it open.\nAnd then we can go through and see how it built this\nall right.\nSo we've got AI Titans comparison dashboard.\nWe have Nvidia Microsoft and Anthropic\nand their stock price okay.\nWe can see kind of a financial comparison\nhere of the latest reported quarter.\nWe have quarterly revenue trends showing us\nNvidia versus Microsoft and then anthropic.\nIt's giving us a trajectory\nbecause this is a private company.\nSo it actually separate those two out\nwhere we have the publicly traded ones\nand the privately traded\nkeep going forward estimates okay.\nAnalyst sentiment bull case bear case.\nWe can have a look at this here and see.\nAnd then it gives us\nthe latest news from all of them.\nAnd we can see Microsoft okay.\nFrontier Suite March 9th GTC 2026 March 14th.\nPretty cool.\nAll right. So again\nsingle prompt I don't know why it always gives us\nlight and dark mode, but we've got that here.\nAnd if we go back to the task let's have a look\nat some of the things that actually did here.\nBecause again I'm trying to make the comparison of\nlike if I was going to do this\nin open floor,\nwhat would be required to have this work?\nSo first of all, you can see we had four sub agents\nrunning in parallel, or three\nI guess, when we're loading the skills here.\nSo research assistant, finance markets,\nwebsite building which are already made for us.\nWe also can add our own skills.\nIn fact, if I go here like I don't have any right\nnow, but I can make my own skill if I want.\nIt actually has the create skill skill.\nAnd then you can view the markdown file\nand actually just copy this or use it how you want.\nAnyways, we'll go back here.\nSo point\nis it ran a bunch of these tasks in parallel.\nIt's going to start setting up the research.\nSo it's researching this doing\nthe financial data collection.\nAnd then we can see it's running\nall of these in parallel fetching the tool details.\nSame thing.\nRunning all of these in parallel\nrunning the tasks in parallel.\nYou can see here\nthis used opus 4.6 was telling us the specific model.\nAnd then again it goes and completes everything else.\nSo if we were just to look at all of the things\nthat were ran here again, we can emulate this\nin open clone, but most people are probably\nnever going to get to a point where they're open,\nclosed, configured with all of these things\nand have it functioning properly.\nIn this case,\nI just used it and it worked right away.\nAnd I think that's the massive benefit of this tool,\nis that if you just want something done\ninstantly, right away without any config,\nyou open it up and it works.\nIf I was to try to build this an open clock again,\nlike I mentioned,\nI would have to have some way of previewing the site,\nwhich is not easy.\nI'd probably ssh into the instance\nI'm going to have to set up all of the model config.\nI'm going to have to be a little bit more explicit\nin terms of what I want it to do.\nI'm going to have to configure all of the skills,\nand even me, probably one of the top\n1% users of open cloud right now\nin terms of tokens is going to spend, you know,\n45 minutes, 60 minutes\ngetting this site up. We're here.\nLet's check this ran in 12 minutes, right.\nAnd spun everything up.\nAnd to be honest is probably cheaper\nif I do the math on the token usage pro-rata\nthan it would be if I just used, you know, my own API\nkey with anthropic or something from Open Claw.\nOkay, now the next thing that I want to run here\nand this is the one that I was\nthinking about the most when I heard perplexity\ncomputer coming out is something\nthat's going to run on some kind of schedule\nor respond to some kind of events.\nSo what I like about open Claw is that because it's\nso configurable, it can actually be proactive.\nIt can like send you a daily report,\nit can run cron jobs.\nIt can react to like a message\ncoming in or something.\nRight.\nSo what I want to try to do, first of all, is make it\nso that I can message this in slack,\nwhich I believe is possible.\nAnd then I want to see, okay, if I'm not actually\ntelling it to do something directly,\ncan it go ahead and do that proactively\nbased on some instruction I gave it previously.\nSo like send me a daily report or something,\nanalyze my business.\nYou know, complete something. Right.\nAnd the advantage of the computer is that it's\nalways on and just running in the background.\nSo unlike even OpenCL,\nif you're running it on like a mac mini or something,\nif the power goes out or you turn your Mac\nmini off each, it stops working, right?\nIt can also very easily crash, as I'm sure\nmany of you have probably seen even on a VP's.\nOkay, yeah, it's always running\nas long as the VP's is running.\nKind of same thing here, right?\nIt's just always on in the background,\nwhich I think is a massive benefit.\nSo let's try.\nLet's go back here to the computer and let's\ngive this like a business automation task okay.\nSo the next task I'm going to give\nit is to monitor my inbox every morning, summarize\nwhat's important flag anything urgent draft responses\nfor my approval, and then format the whole briefing\nto look like a clean notion.\nDashboard. Run this daily.\nAnd just because I think it's going to be funny,\nspeak like Mario and let's see if we can do that now.\nBy the way, I did have a few connectors on\nbefore I'm running this, so I just want to show you\nfor the connectors.\nI did connect Google Drive, Gmail and Slack\nand with slack it was actually very simple.\nAll I had to do was just authenticate\nmy slack and add the bot.\nAnd now if I go here,\nI was just testing this earlier, you can see that\nI have computer and I can actually just tell it\nto do something directly from slack.\nSo if we take that same prompt,\nI can just put it here.\nI'm going to say speak like Mario and I'm\njust going to send it to the computer from slack.\nAnd you can see now the computer is working\nreplying to my message.\nAnd hopefully that will be done in a second\nand then we can see it give us\nkind of these daily briefs\nby reading through my email.\nOkay, so we just gave me a reply here.\nIt says our daily\nMario inbox briefing is set up and ready to go.\nHere's\nwhat's going to happen at 9:00 Am Bangkok time.\nSo I guess it just decided\nthat is going to be the time.\nSo as the first briefing drops\ntomorrow, Monday, March 16th.\nAnd if you want to test or right now\njust time or tell me are you going to take a day off,\njust let me know. Okay.\nSo I'm just going to say test it now\nand let's see what it's going to give me here.\nAnd if it's able to actually go to the inbox,\npull the emails, etc..\nAnd interestingly here\nyou can actually see what was sent from slack.\nSo you can see I just said test it now\nright inside of the interface for perplexity.\nSo you can see it says like,\nlet me run the briefing now is a test.\nAnd it's running sonnet 4.6 and generating it.\nSo if you want to see what it's doing,\nyou can so see that directly in the UI\nas opposed to obviously in slack here\nwe're just going to give you the response.\nAll right.\nSo it just sent me the DM notice. It\nactually sent it to myself.\nSo it's like me sending it to myself\nwhich is kind of weird.\nBut anyways, that's how I got it.\nAnd you can see it's a meet\nyour morning briefing okay.\nSunday. So it's talking like Mario.\nObviously\nI'm going to have to blur a few things out here\nbecause it is my actual real email\nthat I got this to go to.\nAnd obviously we need to blur out some of the names\nand the details, but you can see it's\ngiving us some urgent stuff on like new sponsorship\ndeals or opportunities in my inbox.\n51 new emails.\nOkay, sponsorship and coins\ngoing over like different deals,\nwhatever that we've been signing, videos being live,\nall of this kind of stuff.\nCollaboration and crew.\nNow again, most of this I'm going to blur\nbecause I can't, yet show it all to you,\nbut it looks like it is working\nand it is pretty accurate.\nAnd if we go here, it's also giving us another,\nkind of what is it message here\nwith replies that we could send to people.\nSo let me read one of them here.\nLike sorry for the slow reply.\nI watched the trial edit.\nReally appreciate the effort, blah blah blah.\nHey Abby, thanks for the note etc. etc. etc.\nyou get the idea. And we have all of that here. Cool.\nAll right.\nSo it works inside of slack, giving me the daily\nbriefing and hopefully it will trigger again\nat 9 a.m.\ntomorrow because that's actually going\nto be pretty useful and I will just leave that on.\nAll right.\nSo at this point guys\nlet me talk about who this is actually for\nand when I would use this over using open OpenCL.\nBecause the truth is\nI'm not just completely ditching open class.\nI've been using it since it came out.\nI have a bunch of instances configured,\nthey work extremely well, and while they were\nvery time consuming to get up and running\nbecause of how flexible it is, it's open source.\nIt is really up to you to configure it\nand make it better.\nYou can do a lot more with it, in my opinion,\nthan you can\nwith something purely like this\nbecause of that infinite customization.\nSo I think for those of you that are\nyou know, the top 5% of open core users, you're\nprobably not getting rid of that tomorrow\nand switching over to a tool like this.\nYou're probably going to keep using that\nbecause you're okay with the complexity, the set up,\nand you're you're confident in what you're doing.\nLike I am, right?\nHowever, what I have noticed\nis that when you just want to do something,\nwhen you have like a task that you wanted\nto get done quickly, that's not something\nthat's like a repeatable workflow in your business,\nthis works a lot better.\nSo building a quick dashboard, spinning up,\nyou know, a quick research report, whatever.\nIn my experience,\nI get better results from perplexity computer\nthan I do from my open floor\nbecause my open close is not designed to do that.\nBut for like analyzing sales calls, data,\nor doing an automation or operation\nthat I do all the time in my business.\nOpen cloud works better for that\nbecause I've set it up specifically to do that.\nSo the agent is designed just for that.\nAnd it's not like a general purpose\nagent like we have here.\nSo that's kind of my take\nfor all my business automation stuff.\nYou know, repeatable tasks, things\nthat I'm going to do over and over and over again.\nI'm going to stick with OpenClaw because I know\nI can configure it properly, and the time is worth it\nto have that just running exactly as I want\nwith all of the config that I'm responsible for.\nWhereas with this,\nif I just want to get something done quickly,\nI want a relatively complex task\nthat I need an agent for and I need computer use.\nI'm going to go to Perplexity Computer.\nAnd I think for those of you\nwatching, you have to ask yourself\nthe question, do I want to deal with the complexity?\nDo I want to deal with the security concerns?\nAm I confident\nsetting this up, on my own with Open Claw?\nIf so, go ahead and you have the advantage\nof the open source software.\nAnd also the cost is in your control.\nWhereas this it is $200 per month\nif you're barely using AI, if you need a few tasks,\nthis probably doesn't make sense.\nAnd having a quick open class spun up on a $10\nper month MVP's where you spend $5 in tokens.\nMaybe that's worth it for you over\nsomething like this.\nSo really, you guys have to use your own judgment.\nIn my case,\nlike I said, I'm going to keep using Open claw.\nI'm going to use this more for those one off tasks\nand things that just don't require\nas much configuration.\nAnd I'm really interested to hear\nwhat you guys think about this, because genuinely,\nyes, I know they reach up to partner,\nbut this is a very cool tool.\nIt works better than I was expecting,\nand I'm just going to be using it a lot\nnow because of how effective it is.\nAnyways. Guys, that's my take.\nLet me know what you think about it\nin the comments down below.\nI'm genuinely curious to hear your opinion\nand I look forward to seeing you in another video.",
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