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COMPARE/AI INFRASTRUCTURE/APIFY · EXA
AI INFRASTRUCTURE · HEAD TO HEAD● YOU PICK THE WINNER
ApifyvsExa
Two tools. Verified data. Side by side. Everything on this page is vendor-sourced and dated. We don't pick a winner. That's your call. Use the Lens to apply your own criteria.
Apify
Starts at$29/mo
Free planYes
Plans5 tiers
Features10 features
Integrations20 native
PlatformsWeb · API · Terminal
MCP serverYes
Exa
Starts at$5/1k requests
Free planYes
Plans8 tiers
Features9 features
Integrations32 native
PlatformsWeb · API
MCP serverYes
● THE LENS · YOUR COMPARISON · YOUR WINNER
Build the lens. Watch it lean.
Your criteria. Your weighting. Your verdict. Pick your axes and watch the data respond. You decide what's best for you, not us.
PRESETS
Based on your selections, the data leans this way, scroll down to read more.
AXES · 8 · PICK ANY
ALL TOOLS UPDATED 2026.04.30
CAPABILITIES
Where they overlap, where they don't
Functional roles from both tools, split by coverage. The corners are where the two tools become different products.
Only ApifyRoles covered exclusively by this tool.
7- Web Scraper
- Workflow Automator
- Scheduler
- Webhook Manager
- Database
- Code Writer
- Competitive Analyser
Both3 of 11 roles in the verified union.
3- Data Extractor
- Research Assistant
- Api Caller
Only ExaRoles covered exclusively by this tool.
1- Web Researcher
ROLE COVERAGE···
PLAN LADDER
Every plan, mapped to one ladder
Both tools laid out by ascending monthly cost. Expand any plan to see what's included.
AT A GLANCE
More comparable fields
Every data point from both tools, side by side. Nothing hidden, nothing weighted.
FACT
Category
AI Infrastructure
AI Infrastructure
Starting Price
$29/mo
$5/1k requests
Pricing Model
Freemium
Freemium
Plans
5 tiers
8 tiers
Free Plan
Yes
Yes
Free Trial
No
No
Platforms
Web · API · Terminal
Web · API
Top Features
10 features
9 features
Integrations
20 native
32 native
Public API
Yes
Yes
Webhooks (In)
No
No
INTEGRATIONS · 44 TOOLS
Integrations from both tools, side by side
Integrations sourced from each tool's own documentation. Where both tools connect to the same app, you see it once. The rest shows where their ecosystems diverge.
BOTH8
12
24UNION44
INTEGRATION
NOTES
CrewAI
✓api
✓
Both. Coordinate agents with defined roles for research and automation
Gumloop
✓
✓extension
Both. Build automation workflows with Gumloop drag-and-drop interface
LangChain
✓api
✓
Both. Run LangChain Actors and load results into Vector DBs and LLMs
DEEP READ
What it does
Features and capabilities sourced from each tool's own documentation, structured for comparison.
Apify
TOP FEATURES · 10
F01
Apify Store — 25,000+ Ready-Made ActorssearchApify Store is a marketplace of over 25,000 pre-built web scraping and automation tools (Actors) covering social media, e-commerce, lead generation, AI, and more. Users can browse, run, and schedule any Actor instantly without writing code, with each Actor pre-configured with anti-blocking protections tailored to its target website.
F02
Actors — Serverless Automation ProgramscloudActors are lightweight, containerized programs that accept JSON inputs, execute web scraping or automation tasks in the cloud, and return structured outputs. They support long-running jobs beyond a single HTTP transaction, custom memory/CPU allocation, Docker containers, and can be run locally or deployed to Apify's cloud infrastructure at scale.
F03
Actor Standby ModeperformanceActor Standby mode keeps an Actor running in the background as a real-time API server, waiting for incoming HTTP requests just like a standard web server. This eliminates cold-start latency and enables synchronous, low-latency data retrieval for use cases that require immediate responses.
F04
Apify Proxy — IP Rotation & Anti-BlockingsecurityApify Proxy provides datacenter (shared and dedicated), residential, and Google SERP proxy types with dynamic IP rotation, automatic health monitoring, and geolocation targeting for accessing region-specific content. Fixed IP sessions allow retaining the same IP for login-based scraping workflows, and proxies integrate natively with all Actors and the Apify SDK.
F05
Anti-Blocking & FingerprintingsettingsApify's anti-blocking stack includes CAPTCHA solving, browser fingerprinting with real-world fingerprint datasets (via Crawlee's open-source Fingerprint Suite), TLS-level HTTP clients to pass network checks, and headless browser support for JavaScript-heavy sites. Actors in the Store come pre-configured with site-specific anti-blocking, and users are only charged for successful results.
F06
MCP Server for AI AgentsaiThe Apify MCP Server exposes all Actors as tools accessible by AI agents via the Model Context Protocol, compatible with Claude Desktop, Claude.ai, Cursor, ChatGPT, VS Code, and other MCP clients. Agents can dynamically search Apify Store for suitable Actors, run them, and retrieve structured results — enabling autonomous web data workflows without human intervention.
Exa
TOP FEATURES · 9
F01
Neural Web Search APIsearchExa's search endpoint uses an embeddings-based ranking model to return semantically relevant results for natural-language queries. Six search types cover the latency-quality range from auto and fast (under 200ms) to deep-lite, deep, and deep-reasoning (up to 60s), with each type tuned for a different speed-quality tradeoff. Each result includes title, URL, published date, author, and optional page content.
F02
Token-Efficient Content HighlightsaiThe Contents API retrieves full page text, AI-generated summaries, or highlights. Highlights are ML-extracted excerpts of the most relevant tokens from a page, reducing LLM token consumption by up to 90% compared to passing full page text. Results are served from Exa's cache with automatic live-crawl fallback for uncached pages.
F03
LLM Answer Endpoint with CitationstextThe /answer endpoint runs an Exa search and uses an LLM to generate a direct factual answer or a detailed summary with grounded source citations. It supports streaming via SSE, structured JSON output via the outputSchema parameter, and is compatible with OpenAI's chat completions interface for drop-in integration into existing pipelines.
F04
Structured Output ExtractiondataAny search or answer endpoint call accepts an outputSchema JSON Schema parameter, which causes the API to synthesize and return structured data matching that schema from web results. This enables complex enrichment workflows such as extracting company names, founding years, and funding stages across a list of URLs at scale, without additional parsing or downstream LLM calls.
F05
Find Similar LinkssearchThe /findSimilar endpoint accepts a source URL and returns a ranked list of semantically similar web pages. Developers apply optional domain inclusion and exclusion filters, crawl and publish date ranges, and can request full page content, highlights, or summaries for each result within the same API call.
F06
Websets — AI-Powered List BuilderautomationWebsets converts a natural-language description of any target list into a curated, AI-verified dataset. Users describe a target population in plain language and Websets returns matching companies, people, research papers, or articles, with AI agents cross-referencing each result across multiple data sources, scoring relevance, and adding enrichment columns defined by custom AI prompts.
WHO IT'S FOR
Who each tool is built for
Use cases and fit tags from each tool's own positioning. Match these to your context, not their marketing.
AI/ML engineers and data scientists building generative AI modelsTeams use Apify's Website Content Crawler and other Actors to extract clean, structured text from documentation sites, knowledge bases, forums, blog posts, and PDFs at scale. The scraped data is loaded directly into vector databases (Pinecone, Qdrant, Milvus) via LangChain or LlamaIndex integrations for RAG pipelines, or used to fine-tune models via the OpenAI fine-tuning API and similar services. Apify handles CAPTCHA, anti-blocking, and Markdown-formatted output so ML teams receive clean training datasets without managing scraper infrastructure.
B2B sales teams, marketing agencies, and growth teamsSales teams use Apify's Google Maps Scraper to extract thousands of business records — including full names, emails, phone numbers, websites, social profiles, opening hours, and ratings — filtered by category, location, and rating. Results are exported to CSV or pushed directly to CRMs like Salesforce via API. Groupon used Apify to enrich thousands of merchant records and sync them with Salesforce, accelerating time-to-campaign; LFG reached 2,500+ prospects daily using this automated workflow.
AI product developers and agent framework engineersAI agents connected to the Apify MCP Server can autonomously search for the right Actor for any web data task, execute it, and retrieve structured results — all without manual prompting. This gives agents access to up-to-the-second data from any website through frameworks like LangGraph, CrewAI, Haystack, and OpenAI Agents SDK. Agents can also operate with agentic payments via Skyfire tokens, running Actor jobs and paying for compute without human-in-the-loop approval.
KEEP COMPARING
Related comparisons
Other head-to-heads featuring one of these tools.
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