Exa vs Firecrawl
Compare Exa and Firecrawl on pricing, free tier, open source, API, self-host, verdict and momentum.
Both are data tools. Exa is freemium (free $10 credits/mo; usage-based PayGO; Enterprise custom) with an API, a free tier; Firecrawl is freemium (open source self-host free; cloud 1,000 credits/mo free, then Hobby/Standard/Growth paid) with open source, an API, self-hostable and a free tier. The catalog stamp is ship for Exa and ship for Firecrawl, last verified 2026-09-01 and 2026-08-19 respectively.
Auto-paired from catalog data — the verdicts are hand-set, the pairing is algorithmic.
Exa
Neural search engine for finding and ranking web pages by meaning.
Firecrawl
Turn entire websites into clean, LLM-ready markdown or structured data.
| field | Exa | Firecrawl |
|---|---|---|
| pricing | freemium · free $10 credits/mo; usage-based PayGO; Enterprise custom | freemium · open source self-host free; cloud 1,000 credits/mo free, then Hobby/Standard/Growth paid |
| free tier | yes | yes |
| open source | no | yes |
| api | yes | yes |
| self-host | no | yes |
| verdict | ship | ship |
| momentum | blueshift | blueshift |
| last verified | 2026-09-01 | 2026-08-19 |
| key limitation | Smaller index than Google/Bing for real-time news. | Large sites require careful rate limiting and caching. |
The call
Pick Exa for agent retrieval that should find the page, not the keyword…
Pick Firecrawl if open source matters.
Exa sources
Firecrawl sources
Open live compare →Exa pageFirecrawl pageExa.jsonFirecrawl.json