Exa vs Firecrawl

Exa

RAG

Firecrawl

RAG

Tagline

Exa

Web search API built for AI agents, with structured outputs and token-efficient highlights.

Firecrawl

Web scraping and crawling API that returns LLM-ready markdown, JSON, or structured data from any URL.

Pricing

Exa

Freemium· Free Tier: Free · Search: $7/1k requests · Agent: $0.012–$1.00/run · Contents: $1/1k pages per content type · Deep Search: $12–15/1k requests

Firecrawl

Freemium· Free Plan: $0 · Hobby: $16 · Standard: $83 · Growth: $333 · Scale: $599/monthly

Lowest paid tier

Exa

$0.012–$1.00/run · Agent

captured 2026-08-08

Firecrawl

$16 · Hobby

captured 2026-08-10

Free trial

Exa

Yes

Firecrawl

Yes

API

Exa

Yes

Firecrawl

Yes

Platforms

Exa

api

Firecrawl

apicli

Open source

Exa

Not listed

Firecrawl

Yes · AGPL-3.0

GitHub stars

Exa

—

Firecrawl

186,626

checked 2026-09-29

Last GitHub push

Exa

—

Firecrawl

2026-09-29

First commit

Exa

—

Firecrawl

2024-04

Model used

Exa

Proprietary neural + keyword search

Firecrawl

Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, OpenAI, Gemini

Best for

Exa

Pick Exa if you are wiring web retrieval into an AI agent and want a single API that returns clean, schema-shaped, token-efficient results.

Firecrawl

Pick Firecrawl if you are building a RAG pipeline or AI agent and want one API call to turn any URL into clean, token-efficient markdown.

Not for

Exa

Skip it if you need a self-hosted or open-source search stack, or your retrieval is purely over internal documents.

Firecrawl

Skip it if you only need to scrape a handful of static pages and a quick fetch+cheerio script would do, or if you have hard data-egress constraints.

Editorial score

Exa

8.0 / 10

Firecrawl

8.0 / 10

Use cases

Exa

agent-web-searchrag-retrievalcompany-researchpeople-searchcode-searchdeep-research

Firecrawl

web-scrapingrag-ingestionagent-browsingsite-crawlingpdf-parsing

Pros

Exa

• Purpose-built for LLM/agent use, not retrofitted consumer search
• Highlights mode dramatically cuts tokens sent to the model
• Structured JSON outputs against custom schemas
• Vertical indexes for companies, people, and code
• SOC 2 Type II with zero-retention enterprise option

Firecrawl

• Returns clean LLM-ready markdown/JSON without custom scraper code
• Handles JS rendering, anti-bot, and PDFs out of the box
• Open source with SDKs in six languages plus an MCP server
• Generous 1,000-credit free tier and predictable per-page pricing

Cons

Exa

• Proprietary, closed source
• Pricing not transparent on homepage beyond the free playground
• Coverage and freshness depend on Exa's crawl, not yours

Firecrawl

• Credit model gets expensive on million-URL crawls vs DIY scrapers
• Self-hosting is non-trivial compared with the managed API
• Browser interact actions burn credits quickly on long sessions

Website

Exa

exa.ai

Firecrawl

firecrawl.dev

Editorial score: rule-based, 0–10, from AI-assisted profile inputs (see /methodology) — not a user rating; “—” means unscored. “Not listed” means we have no record of it, not that it is absent. GitHub figures and prices carry the date they were checked or captured; prices are shown as published, unconverted.