LLM API Providers · reliability comparison
Perplexity API vs xAI API: which is more reliable? (2026)
Perplexity API is more reliable than xAI API, scoring 93.8 vs 82.1 out of 100. Over the last 90 days Perplexity API reported 3 incidents and xAI API reported 5, with effective uptime of 99.94% and 99.76% respectively. Perplexity API resolves incidents faster on average (36m).
Data updated Nov 2, 2026 · How we score
| Metric | Perplexity API | xAI API |
|---|---|---|
| Reliability score | 93.8 | 82.1 |
| Rank (LLM API providers) | #1 | #5 |
| Uptime (90 days) | 99.94% | 99.76% |
| Incidents (90 days) | 3 | 5 |
| Partial / major outages | 1 | 5 |
| Avg time to resolve | 36m | 1h 10m |
| Outages we detected | 0 | 0 |
| Transparency score | 100/100 | 100/100 |
Where Perplexity API and xAI API differ
- xAI API reported 67% more incidents than Perplexity API over the last 90 days (5 vs 3).
- xAI API had 5 partial or major outages, compared with 1 for Perplexity API.
- Perplexity API fixes problems faster: 36m on average, against 1h 10m for xAI API (2.0× quicker).
- Perplexity API's longest outage on record lasted 4h 31m (Jun 4, 2026); xAI API's lasted 3h 39m (Sep 3, 2026).
90-day uptime
Perplexity API
xAI API
- No incidents
- Degraded
- Partial outage
- Major outage
- No data
Recent Perplexity API incidents
- Degraded performanceOct 9, 2026 · resolved in 37m
Elevated API errors and timeouts
Affected: Website, App, Computer, API
- Major outageAug 13, 2026 · resolved in 1h 4m
Investigating API issueofficial update ↗
Affected: App
- Degraded performanceAug 11, 2026 · resolved in 6m
Recent xAI API incidents
- Partial outageOct 24, 2026 · resolved in <1m
- Major outageSep 22, 2026 · resolved in 26m
[Global (api.x.ai)] Outages across API, Grok.com, and Grok Build
- Partial outageSep 10, 2026 · resolved in 12m
- Major outageSep 3, 2026 · resolved in 3h 39m
- Partial outageAug 17, 2026 · resolved in 1h 31m
Other LLM API providers to consider
- Cohere · #2 · 99.94% uptime
- Groq · #3 · 99.94% uptime
- Cerebras Inference · #4 · 99.88% uptime
- DeepSeek API · #6 · 100% uptime