Exa vs FutureHouse Platform

A side-by-side look at pricing, capabilities, pros, cons, and our editorial scores.

Tagline

Exa

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

FutureHouse Platform

Multi-agent AI research stack for scientists, with retrieval over 175M+ papers, patents, and trials.

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

FutureHouse Platform

Freemium· Basic: $10 · Pro: $25 · Enterprise: Contact sales

Lowest paid tier

Exa

$0.012–$1.00/run · Agent

captured 2026-08-08

FutureHouse Platform

$10 · Basic

captured 2026-08-10

Free trial

Exa

Yes

FutureHouse Platform

Yes

API

Exa

Yes

FutureHouse Platform

Yes

Platforms

Exa

api

FutureHouse Platform

api

Company

Exa

—

FutureHouse Platform

Edison Scientific

Model used

Exa

Proprietary neural + keyword search

FutureHouse Platform

Multi-model

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.

FutureHouse Platform

Pick FutureHouse Platform if you are a working scientist who needs autonomous, citation-grounded literature and data agents over real biomedical corpora.

Not for

Exa

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

FutureHouse Platform

Skip it if you just want a general 'chat with my PDFs' tool or you need a self-hostable open-source RAG stack.

Editorial score

Exa

8.0 / 10

FutureHouse Platform

7.1 / 10

Use cases

Exa

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

FutureHouse Platform

scientific-literature-searchautonomous-research-agenthypothesis-generationrna-seq-analysismolecular-designcitation-grounded-qa

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

FutureHouse Platform

Citation-grounded answers across 175M+ papers, trials, and patents
Kosmos agent runs autonomous, code-executing literature deep-dives
Specialised agents for bio data, chemistry, and novelty checks
Generous academic free tier and documented Python client
Lineage from PaperQA/PaperQA2, both reputable open-source projects

Cons

Exa

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

FutureHouse Platform

Hosted commercial platform; not open source like upstream PaperQA
Aimed at life-sciences workflows, less useful outside biomed/chem
Rebrand to Edison Scientific muddies the product naming

Website

Exa

exa.ai

FutureHouse Platform

docs.edisonscientific.com

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.

Pick Exa if

✅ 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

Pick FutureHouse Platform if

✅ Citation-grounded answers across 175M+ papers, trials, and patents
✅ Kosmos agent runs autonomous, code-executing literature deep-dives
✅ Specialised agents for bio data, chemistry, and novelty checks
✅ Generous academic free tier and documented Python client

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