Best Exa Alternatives: Features and Pricing Compared

Exa is a search API that returns web results and page contents in a format LLMs can use directly. We tested its alternatives and compared their features and pricing.

Exa alternatives comparison

Search:

Fast and deep search modes: the search API lets you trade speed for depth or relevance.

Research, lists and monitoring:

Cited report: searches many sources and returns a written report with citations.

Cited table: returns a list of companies, people or products with a source for each row or field.

Crawling and scraping:

IA answer engine results: answers and cited sources collected from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google IA Mode or IA Overviews.

Pricing comparison

Each point is the monthly cost of the cheapest plan that covers that volume, divided by the number of searches.

• One search is one request in the provider’s default search mode with up to 10 results: Exa auto, Parallel advanced, Tavily basic, Linkup fast, Firecrawl /search, Brave web search, and one Google results page on Bright Data and SerpApi.
• Search + full text adds the full text of all 10 results through each provider’s cheapest option: Exa Contents, Linkup Fetch, Parallel Extract, Bright Data Web Unlocker, SerpApi Extract and Firecrawl scraping on /search. Tavily returns the full text in the same search call at no extra credit. Brave sells no product that returns full pages.
• Bright Data’s SERP API and Web Unlocker have separate plans, so each gets its own cheapest plan and the two costs add up. SerpApi bills one search credit per Extract request, so a search with 10 page texts uses 11 credits.
• Linkup and Parallel share one line in both views, and Brave joins them at $5 in Search.

• $/1K searches uses each provider’s default search mode. Firecrawl, Linkup, SerpApi and Tavily are converted from plan or credit prices.
• Pay per success covers the search product. Parallel and Tavily state it only for other products, such as Parallel’s Task API and Tavily’s Extract.
• Billing rules differ between products of the same provider, so check the documentation of the product you plan to use.

Web unblocking benchmark markdown output performance

We compared Exa’s Contents API with three web unblockers on 10.000 URLs, one per domain. A request counted as successful when the returned markdown contained a text snippet we had collected from the live page. Full results are in our web unblocker benchmark.

• Bright Data’s Web Unlocker returned the correct page in 79% of requests, the highest rate in the test, with a mean response time of 9 seconds.
• Exa and Firecrawl were the fastest at about 3 seconds, with 68% and 71% success.

Best Exa alternatives

Bright Data’s SERP API returns the results that Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yandex show for a query, as raw HTML, parsed JSON or Markdown. Exa searches its own index instead. Full page text takes a second call to Web Unlocker or Fetch API, which return any URL as Markdown, text, HTML and JSON-LD.

• Fast SERP returns Google’s top 10 organic results, faster than a full results page. The SERP API also covers Google Images.
• Deep Lookup, a beta product in the Bright Data dashboard, is the closest match to Exa Websets. A “Find all” query builds a list of companies or people, and Enrichment mode (“For each”) fills new columns for a list. Each row carries source links and confidence indicators.
• Business Search, also in beta, searches people and company records with structured conditions or a plain-language sentence.
• Scraper Studio builds custom scrapers from a plain-English description. Its templates include Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar scrapers for paper data, and Sitemap scrapers that list every URL in a site’s sitemap.
• IA scrapers collect answers and their cited sources from ChatGPT and Google IA Mode.
• Web Archive stores pages collected through Bright Data’s APIs and filters them by domain, URL pattern, date and language. It does not support keyword search.

SerpApi parses results from Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu and Naver, along with sites such as Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Yelp and YouTube. Each engine returns parsed JSON, and output=md returns a Markdown version built for LLMs. Two newer products bring it closer to Exa.

• Search Index API, in preview, queries SerpApi’s own index of 8.39 billion pages without calling an external search engine. The type parameter switches to places, products, videos or publications. mode=deep splits a query into sub-queries for wider recall, but SerpApi has no faster tier, while Linkup, Parallel and Tavily offer several speed levels.
• Extract API returns Markdown for any URL. Map mode lists a site’s URLs from its links and sitemaps, and crawl mode follows links across the site and bills one search credit per extracted page. Extract does not run JavaScript.
• Google IA Mode, IA Overview and Bing Copilot APIs return IA-generated answers together with the sources they cite.
• Google Scholar API returns paper results, with separate endpoints for authors and case law. Google Images API returns image results.

Brave Search API answers every query from Brave’s own index, which Brave crawls and ranks itself. Like Exa, it does not depend on Google or Bing, but it does not fetch full pages: the LLM Context endpoint returns ranked passages from the top pages instead of complete documents.

• LLM Context returns about 1.000 to 33.000 tokens per query, built from text, tables, code, JSON, forum threads and video captions.
• Goggles re-rank and filter results with custom rules, passed inline or as a URL.
• Answers returns a cited answer through an OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Its research mode (enable_research) runs several searches in sequence, and a response can take minutes.
• A separate image search endpoint returns up to 200 results per request.
• The Search plan allows 50 queries per second, and Answers allows 2.

Firecrawl turns web pages into Markdown or JSON through /scrape, /crawl, /map, /search and /agent. Its code is open source, so teams can run it on their own servers. For general web results, Firecrawl’s docs name an upstream search provider rather than an index of its own. Passing scrapeOptions to /search returns the full Markdown of every result in the same call, as Exa does.

• Firecrawl runs three specialized indexes next to web search. The Developer Index covers code repositories and documentation sites, the Government Index covers statutes, regulations and court opinions, and the Research Index covers paper abstracts from PubMed, arXiv, bioRxiv and medRxiv. The research category switches to the Research Index on November 16, 2026.
• The sources parameter adds news and image results to web results in one search call.
• /agent takes a plain-English prompt with no URLs and searches and navigates on its own. One run returns about 150 to 200 rows. It adds sources only if the schema asks for them.
• Actions (click, write, press, wait and screenshot) run on a page before Firecrawl scrapes it.
• The changeTracking format reports whether a page is new, unchanged or changed since the last scrape. Exa Monitors and Parallel Monitor instead rerun a search on a schedule and report new results.

Linkup runs its own index, built by its LinkupBot crawler, and states that it does not scrape Google or other search engines. Search results carry short snippets rather than full pages. Full text comes from the /fetch endpoint, which returns a page as clean Markdown.

• The depth parameter has four levels: flash for the lowest latency, fast, standard for a single agentic pass, and deep for several iterations.
• outputType switches one Search call between ranked results, a sourced answer with optional inline citations, and JSON that matches a supplied schema. includeImages adds images to the results.
• Research runs asynchronous deep research tasks.
• Tasks runs up to 100 Search, Fetch or Research calls as one asynchronous batch.
• Fetch renders JavaScript when renderJs is set and returns structured data when a schema is supplied.

Parallel’s Search API takes a natural-language objective together with short keyword queries and returns LLM-ready excerpts in Markdown rather than whole pages. Extract returns the full content of a URL. Its other APIs mirror Exa’s Agent, Websets and Monitors: Task for research, FindAll for entity lists and Monitor for tracking.

• Search runs in four modes: turbo, fast, basic and advanced. source_policy limits results to listed domains or path prefixes and to content published after a set date.
• Task API attaches a Basis to every output field: citations with excerpts, a reasoning note and a confidence rating of low, medium or high.
• FindAll turns a natural-language query into a list of companies, people or other entities, with citations on the fields it evaluates.
• Monitor watches the web for new results on a query and sends them to a webhook.
• A separate Image Search API returns up to 20 images per request.

Tavily answers queries from its own index, which its documentation describes as completely independent of other search engines. Setting include_raw_content on Search returns each result’s full page as Markdown in the same response, as Exa does.

• search_depth has four levels from ultra-fast to advanced, and advanced costs 2 credits instead of 1.
• Crawl follows links up to 5 levels deep and up to 500 links per page, guided by natural-language instructions and regex path filters. Map returns the URL list without page content. Exa’s subpages option stops at 100 pages.
• Research runs as an asynchronous task on mini or pro models. It accepts up to 5 attached .txt, .md or .json files as sources and formats citations in APA, MLA, Chicago or numbered style.
• include_images returns images related to the query, with optional generated descriptions.

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@misc{sipi2026,
  author = {Şipi, Nazlı},
  title  = {{Best Exa Alternatives: Features and Pricing Compared}},
  year   = {2026},
  month  = nov,
  howpublished    = {\url{https://aimultiple.com/exa-alternatives}},
  note   = {AIMultiple. Acessado em 6 novembro 2026}
}

Nazlı Şipi

Pesquisadora de IA

Siga-nos

Nazlı é analista de dados na AIMultiple. Ela tem experiência anterior em análise de dados em vários setores, onde trabalhou transformando datasets complexos em insights acionáveis.

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