DuckDuckGo's AI beats Perplexity in one big way – and it's free to use

I’ve been a fan of DuckDuckGo for a long time. I find the search engine to be far more trustworthy than Google and I do enjoy my privacy. But when I heard that the company was dipping its webbed feet into the AI waters, my initial reaction was a roll of the eyes.

Then I gave Duck.ai a go — and was immediately impressed. (DuckDuck Go’s AI features launched in June 2024 and came out of beta last week.)

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Duck.ai does something that other similar products don’t — it gives you a choice. You can choose between the proprietary GPT-4o mini, o3-mini, and Claude 3 services or go open-source with Llama 3.3  and Mistral Small 3. Duck.ai is also private: All of your queries are anonymized by DuckDuckGo, so you can be sure no third-party will ever have access to your AI chats.

After giving Duck.ai a trial over the weekend, I found myself favoring it more and more over Perplexity, primarily because I could select which LLM I use. That’s a big deal because every model is different. For example, GPT-4o excels in real-time interactions, voice nuance, and sentiment analysis across modalities, whereas Llama 3.2 is particularly strong in image recognition and visual understanding tasks.

I typically find Llama 3.3 a much better option than GPT-4o because it offers a better understanding of your queries. Although GPT-4o is lightning fast, I’d rather dig deeper into the topics. Which LLM you choose is up to your needs and what you’re researching.

Did I mention that Duck.ai is free?

That’s right, it even saves your chats locally (and only locally), so you can always save a chat and come back to it later for further “discourse.”

Another thing DuckDuckGo does differently with Duck.ai is that it strips personal metadata from chats, so they cannot be tied back to the user in any way. Although recent chats are stored locally, there is an exception for data needed by providers to respond to prompts (this is stated in the End User License Agreement). However, DuckDuckGo has agreements that limit how data can be used for training, and all chats must be deleted within 30 days. You can also disable Recent Chats, so nothing is saved.

Duck.ai also includes prompt suggestions you can click on to get instant results. For example, I see four prompt suggestions:

• Suggest a title for a blog post
• Write code
• Lookup basic facts
• Prepare for a conversation

If I click New Chat (top left), those suggestions might change. You can’t click one prompt suggestion repeatedly for different results, but by clicking New Chat, you’ll get a different set of four prompt suggestions.

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My favorite aspect of Duck.ai is easily switching between different LLMs without downloading and installing them. I typically use Msty/Ollama on my desktop for AI-based research, but if I want to use a different model, I must download and install it. On top of that, when I use Msty, I’m doing everything locally, so it can be a bit slower.

With Duck.ai, everything (even the slower models) is exponentially faster than what’s on my desktop. If you’re curious, I found myself defaulting to the Llama 3.3 model over Duck.ai’s other options. I find it fast enough but delivers better, more accurate results.  

How to use Duck.ai

This is simple. All you have to do is point your desktop browser (any will do) to Duck.ai, click Get Started, agree with the EULA, select your model, and chat. That’s it. No installing, no account to create… just fast access to AI.

Even better, it’s free. Duck.ai (and all the models it includes) is free to use as much as you like. If you’re looking for a fast, easy-to-use AI service that won’t cost you a penny, I highly recommend giving Duck.ai a try. I’ve been using their services and apps for a long time, and if there’s a company in this particular sector that I trust, it’s DuckDuckGo.

Also: The best secure browsers for privacy in 2025: Expert tested

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the new Duck.ai service is available in the latest release of the DuckDuckGo browser for Android, iOS, MacOS, and Windows. Sadly, there is no DuckDuckGo browser for Linux yet.  

And there you have it: the simplicity and functionality of Duck.ai. After using the service for a few days, you can call me a convert.