Convex vs Exa

Convex

Exa

Convex · 18 features

• Actions — Non-deterministic functions for external I/O (fetch, AI APIs, email). Cannot rea…
• Authentication — Convex Auth (built-in) or BYO provider (Clerk, Auth0, Kinde, WorkOS). ID tokens …
• Convex Agents — AI agent framework with durable memory, threads, tool use. Works with OpenAI / A…
• Convex Auth — First-party auth library: passwords, magic links, OAuth, phone — stored in your …
• Convex Components — Reusable backend modules (rate limiter, workflow, aggregate, action-retrier, etc…
• Cron Jobs — Recurring schedules defined in convex/crons.ts. UTC, cron-style patterns.
• Durable Workflows — Long-running multi-step workflows with retries and at-least-once guarantees.
• Exception Reporting — Auto-capture errors to Sentry, Axiom, Datadog.
• File Storage — Upload/download via storage API. Returns storage IDs referenced in documents.
• Full-Text Search — BM25 search index on table fields. withSearchIndex query helper.
• HTTP Actions — Expose public HTTP endpoints for webhooks, OAuth callbacks, third-party integrat…
• Log Streams — Stream function logs to Axiom, Datadog, Sentry. Pro+.
• Mutations — Transactional write functions. All reads + writes in one mutation are ACID; conf…
• Preview Deployments — Every Git branch gets its own isolated deployment. Integrates with Vercel/Netlif…
• Queries — Deterministic read-only TS functions. Automatically cached and re-run when under…
• Real-Time Subscriptions — useQuery auto-subscribes; server invalidates when data a query read changes. No …
• Scheduler — schedule.after / schedule.at — enqueue functions to run later. Durable, survives…
• Vector Search — Native vector index on tables. withIndex + filter fields. Up to 4096 dims.

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.