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COMPARE/AI INFRASTRUCTURE/EXA · FIRECRAWL
AI INFRASTRUCTURE · HEAD TO HEAD● YOU PICK THE WINNER
ExavsFirecrawl
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.
Exa
Starts at$5/1k requests
Free planYes
Plans8 tiers
Features9 features
Integrations32 native
PlatformsWeb · API
MCP serverYes
Firecrawl
Starts at$16/mo
Free planYes
Plans6 tiers
Features10 features
Integrations29 native
PlatformsWeb · API · Terminal
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 ExaRoles covered exclusively by this tool.
1- Web Researcher
Both3 of 9 roles in the verified union.
3- Api Caller
- Research Assistant
- Data Extractor
Only FirecrawlRoles covered exclusively by this tool.
5- Web Scraper
- Competitive Analyser
- Workflow Automator
- Webhook Manager
- Scheduler
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
$5/1k requests
$16/mo
Pricing Model
Freemium
Freemium
Plans
8 tiers
6 tiers
Free Plan
Yes
Yes
Free Trial
No
No
Platforms
Web · API
Web · API · Terminal
Top Features
9 features
10 features
Integrations
32 native
29 native
Public API
Yes
Yes
Webhooks (In)
No
INTEGRATIONS · 52 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.
BOTH9
23
20UNION52
INTEGRATION
NOTES
Dify
✓plugin
✓
Both. Exa search plugin on the Dify marketplace.
LangChain
✓
✓
Both. Use Exa as a retriever or tool in LangChain/LangGraph apps. Framework integration.
Langflow
✓extension
✓
Both. Exa search bundle for Langflow's visual agent builder.
DEEP READ
What it does
Features and capabilities sourced from each tool's own documentation, structured for comparison.
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.
Firecrawl
TOP FEATURES · 10
F01
Web Scraping (Scrape Endpoint)dataConverts any URL into clean LLM-ready data — outputting markdown, HTML, raw HTML, screenshots, structured JSON, links, images, branding profiles, or audio — all in a single API call. Handles JavaScript rendering, smart wait, proxy routing, rate limits, and dynamic content automatically without manual configuration.
F02
Web Search with Content RetrievalsearchPass a query to the /search endpoint and get back titles, descriptions, and URLs from live web results — with optional scrapeOptions to also retrieve full-page markdown, HTML, links, or screenshots for each result in one operation. Supports result types including web, news, images, and category-filtered searches (GitHub, research, PDF).
F03
Full-Site CrawlcloudSubmit a starting URL and Firecrawl recursively discovers and scrapes every reachable subpage, handling sitemaps, JavaScript rendering, path filtering, depth limits, and subdomain control automatically. Results stream in real-time via polling, WebSocket watcher, or webhook events — with pagination handled automatically in the SDK.
F04
Site Map GenerationapiThe /map endpoint takes a single URL and returns a structured list of all discoverable URLs across that website — extremely fast and priced at 1 credit per call regardless of URL count. Supports search-filtered mapping to surface only topic-relevant pages, and geo-location/language targeting to retrieve location-specific URL sets.
F05
Browser Interaction (Interact Endpoint)automationAfter scraping a page, call /interact to take live browser actions using natural-language prompts or executable Playwright/Python/Bash code within a sandboxed session. Supports clicking, typing, scrolling, form-filling, navigation, and screenshot capture — with a live embeddable view URL and persistent browser profiles for staying logged in across sessions.
F06
Autonomous Data AgentaiThe /agent endpoint is a magic API that searches, navigates, and gathers structured data from the widest range of websites without requiring URLs — just a natural-language prompt. It processes multiple sources in parallel, supports JSON schema output (via Pydantic/Zod), and offers two model tiers: Spark 1 Mini (default, 60% cheaper) and Spark 1 Pro for complex multi-domain research tasks.
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.
developerDevelopers building AI agents, chatbots, or voice assistants integrate Exa to give models real-time web access. The auto and instant search types return current facts, news, and citations in under 200ms, allowing agents to answer time-sensitive questions accurately without hallucinating. Cursor uses Exa to power coding agents with low-latency web search, and OpenRouter uses it to ground 400-plus LLM models in current data.
businessGo-to-market and revenue teams use Websets to build precise lead lists from a natural-language ICP description. AI agents verify each result against multiple sources and add enrichment columns for CEO name, funding stage, tech stack, and contact details, then export to CSV or push directly into Clay or CRM tools. Flatfile replaced hundreds of thousands of dollars in data assembly costs using this approach.
researchResearch scientists and product teams use Exa's research paper category (100M-plus papers indexed) combined with deep-reasoning search to synthesize multi-source answers to complex queries. The /answer endpoint returns grounded summaries with citations from arXiv, Semantic Scholar, and research blogs. Anara uses this workflow to help scientists surface relevant papers inside AI-powered research tools.
researchAI research agents and data science teams use Firecrawl's /search and /scrape endpoints together to power deep research workflows — finding and retrieving hundreds of academic papers, news articles, expert opinions, and industry reports across the live web in minutes. The /agent endpoint autonomously navigates hard-to-reach data sources in parallel, reducing what would take a human many hours to a few minutes of API calls. Used by companies like Aemon to power AI R&D research agents.
KEEP COMPARING
Related comparisons
Other head-to-heads featuring one of these tools.
BROADEN THE SHORTLIST
Alternatives to consider
Other tools in this space, linked to their full profiles.
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