Kagi Review: Features, Pricing & Alternatives

What is Kagi?

Kagi is a subscription search engine that shows no ads and does not track you. Instead of earning money from advertisers, it charges users a monthly fee, which it argues keeps its incentives aligned with giving you the best results. Around the search engine it has built a small family of tools: Kagi Assistant, Kagi Translate, Kagi News, a Summarizer and the Orion web browser.

Kagi is made by Kagi Inc., a company based in Palo Alto, California, and the search engine launched publicly in 2022. Kagi Assistant arrived in 2024 for Ultimate members and was opened to all paid plans in April 2025. Kagi News, a daily AI-summarised news brief built from open RSS feeds, launched on 30 September 2025, and Kagi’s public stats showed roughly 50,000 paying members in June 2025.

What sets Kagi apart from AI answer engines is that search comes first and AI is opt-in. You can block, raise or lower any website in your results, filter with Lenses and ask for a Quick Answer only when you want one. When you do want AI, the Assistant lets you pick from more than 30 models from providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Mistral, all grounded in Kagi search results.

Key features of Kagi

• Ad-free, tracker-free searchResults carry no ads or sponsored links, and Kagi’s business model is subscriptions rather than advertising.
• Personalised resultsBlock sites you never want to see, and raise or lower domains so your favourite sources rank higher across every search.
• Lenses and bangsLenses narrow results to forums, academic sources, programming sites or your own custom set, and bangs jump straight to other sites.
• Kagi AssistantChat with 30+ language models grounded in Kagi search, switch models mid-conversation, upload files up to 30 MB and build custom assistants.
• Quick Answer and SummarizerGet a cited AI summary at the top of results on request, or summarise any article, PDF or video page.
• Privacy controlsKagi says Assistant data is never used to train models, threads expire after 24 hours by default, and Privacy Pass enables anonymous searching.

Who is Kagi best for?

• Researchers and analysts because personalised rankings and Lenses cut through SEO spam and surface trusted sources faster.
• Privacy-conscious users who want a search engine that is paid for by subscriptions rather than advertising and profiling.
• Heavy AI users since the Ultimate plan bundles many flagship models in one place instead of separate chatbot subscriptions.

Popular ways to use Kagi

• Everyday web search: replace Google or Bing as your browser’s default for clean, ad-free results.
• Source-focused research: raise journals, documentation and trusted outlets while blocking content farms.
• Model comparison: ask the same question to several AI models in Kagi Assistant and compare answers.
• Deep research questions: use Research mode on the Ultimate plan for multi-step, cited answers.
• Fast reading: summarise long articles, papers or videos with the Summarizer before deciding what to read in full.

Kagi pricing (October 2026)

Prices exclude tax, and annual billing is about 10% cheaper. Kagi’s fair pricing policy credits your account automatically in any month you do not use your plan.

Kagi pros and cons

How to get started with Kagi

1. Create an account at kagi.com and use the free trial searches.
2. Set Kagi as the default search engine in your browser or install the Kagi extension.
3. Block or raise a few domains you already know you dislike or trust.
4. Open Kagi Assistant, pick a model and toggle web access on or off.
5. Choose Starter, Professional or Ultimate based on how much you searched during the trial.

Tips to get better results from Kagi

• End a query with a question mark to trigger a Quick Answer without leaving the results page.
• Create a custom Lens for the sites you use for work, such as journals or documentation.
• Use bangs like !code or !study to open specialised Assistant modes directly.

Kagi vs alternatives

Kagi is closest to Perplexity and You.com, but the emphasis differs. Perplexity leads with an AI-written answer and treats links as citations, while Kagi leads with traditional ranked results and adds AI only when you ask. If you mainly want synthesised answers, Perplexity is quicker; if you want control over which websites you see, Kagi is stronger.

Against privacy-first free options such as Duck.ai, Kagi costs money but offers deeper personalisation and a wider choice of models. Compared with paying for ChatGPT or Claude alone, Kagi Ultimate bundles several flagship models, though each provider’s own app has more features. See all best AI research tools.

Our verdict: is Kagi worth it?

Kagi FAQs

Pricing and features change often. Details on this page were last reviewed in October 2026. Always confirm current plans on the official Kagi website.