Auth0 vs Exa
Customer identity platform from Okta
vs. AI search API for developers — neural + keyword hybrid for agents
Pricing tiers
Auth0
B2C Essentials
Starting at 500 MAUs. Pro MFA, RBAC, passwordless, SAML, 10 orgs.
$35/mo
B2B Essentials
Unlimited orgs, 3 SSO connections, RBAC.
$150/mo
B2C Professional
Starting at 500 MAUs. Includes attack protection, custom DB, enterprise MFA.
$240/mo
B2B Professional
5+ SSO connections, attack protection, custom DB.
$800/mo
Enterprise
Custom. 99.99% SLA, dedicated support.
Custom
Exa
Free Tier
1,000 requests/month at no cost. Access to all core products.
Free
Pay-as-you-go
Usage-based per endpoint. No monthly minimum.
$0 base (usage-based)
Startup + Education Grants
$1,000 in free credits for qualifying projects.
$0 base (usage-based)
Enterprise
Custom. High-volume, custom datasets, rate limits, SLA, dedicated support.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing b2c-essentials on Auth0 vs free on Exa.
| Metric | Auth0 | Exa |
|---|---|---|
| mau start | 500 MAU | — |
| sso connections | 0 conns | — |
Features
Auth0 · 14 features
- Attack Protection — Bot detection, brute-force protection, breached-password detection, suspicious I…
- Auth0 Actions — Node.js + TS hooks that run during auth flows (login, post-login, signup, MFA). …
- Auth0 FGA (OpenFGA) — Fine-grained relationship-based authorization (ReBAC). Based on Google Zanzibar.
- Custom Database — BYO user DB: scripts in Actions read from your database and create Auth0 users o…
- Custom Domain — Serve auth at auth.yourbrand.com with managed cert.
- Enterprise SSO — SAML 2.0 + OIDC + AD/LDAP enterprise connections. Per-tenant or per-org.
- Log Streaming — Stream tenant logs to Datadog, Splunk, Sumo Logic, Azure Sentinel, HTTP, Mixpane…
- Machine-to-Machine — Client-credentials grant for backend services.
- Multi-Factor Auth — SMS, Voice, Email, TOTP, WebAuthn (biometrics), Push (Guardian app), Duo.
- Organizations — Multi-tenant B2B: orgs with invitations, roles, branding, enterprise connections…
- Passkeys — FIDO2/WebAuthn passkey sign-in.
- Passwordless — Email magic link + code, SMS code, WebAuthn.
- RBAC — Roles, permissions, API scopes — attach to users or orgs.
- Universal Login — Hosted login page with customization, multi-factor flows, passwordless, social, …
Exa · 13 features
- Answer API — Query → direct answer with citations.
- Category Filter — Filter to news, research papers, company, github, tweet, pdf, financial report, …
- Contents API — Retrieve cleaned full-text + summaries from URLs.
- Custom Datasets (Ent) — Enterprise: private indexing of your own corpus.
- Deep Reasoning Search — Adds LLM reasoning on top of Deep Search.
- Deep Search — Multi-hop iterative search for complex queries.
- Find Similar — Given a URL, find semantically similar pages.
- Highlights — Extract most-relevant passages per result.
- Livecrawl — Fetch pages on-demand (bypass cache) for freshness-critical queries.
- MCP Server — Official Exa MCP for Claude Code / Cursor / Agents.
- Monitors — Scheduled recurring search → alerts on new results.
- Search API — Neural + keyword web search for agents. Returns ranked URLs.
- Summaries — LLM-generated page summaries.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Auth0 | Exa |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | Auth0 CLI | — |
| SDK | Auth0 Android, Auth0 iOS/Swift, @auth0/nextjs-auth0, Auth0 React SDK, Auth0 SPA.js SDK, Go Auth0 SDK, Node Auth0 Backend SDK, Python Auth0 SDK | exa-js, exa-py |
| REST | Authentication API, Management API | Exa REST API |
| MCP | — | Exa MCP Server |
| OTHER | — | Exa Dashboard |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Auth0 and Exa are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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