Exa vs ClickUp
AI search API for developers — neural + keyword hybrid for agents
vs. One app to replace them all — tasks, docs, chat, goals, time tracking
Pricing tiers
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
ClickUp
Free Forever
$0. Unlimited tasks + members. 100MB storage. 2 lists. Basic features.
Free
Unlimited
$7/user/mo annual ($10/mo). Unlimited storage, integrations, dashboards, Gantt.
$7/mo
ClickUp Brain (AI)
$7/user/mo add-on. AI writing, auto-summary, Q&A over workspace.
$7/mo
Business
$12/user/mo annual ($19/mo). Advanced time tracking, automations (10k/mo), workload mgmt.
$12/mo
Business Plus
$19/user/mo annual ($29/mo). Team sharing, custom roles, permissions, 25k automations.
$19/mo
Enterprise
Custom. SSO, HIPAA, white labeling, advanced permissions, unlimited automations, dedicated CSM.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on Exa vs free on ClickUp.
| Metric | Exa | ClickUp |
|---|---|---|
| No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers. | ||
Features
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.
ClickUp · 17 features
- 15+ Views — List/Board/Gantt/Timeline/etc.
- Automations — No-code workflow builder.
- Chat — Native team chat.
- ClickUp Brain (AI) — AI across workspace.
- Custom Fields — 15+ field types.
- Dashboards — Custom widget boards.
- Desktop Apps — Mac + Windows + Linux.
- Docs — Rich text docs + wikis.
- Forms — Collect tasks via form.
- Goals — OKRs + progress tracking.
- iOS + Android Apps — Native mobile.
- REST API — Public API for integrations.
- Sprints — Agile sprint views.
- Subtasks + Dependencies — Nested + blocking.
- Tasks — Full task management.
- Time Tracking — Native timers + timesheets.
- Whiteboards — Collaborative canvas.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Exa | ClickUp |
|---|---|---|
| SDK | exa-js, exa-py | clickup.js (community) |
| REST | Exa REST API | ClickUp REST API v2 |
| MCP | Exa MCP Server | — |
| OTHER | Exa Dashboard | ClickUp Apps, ClickUp Chrome Extension, ClickUp Webhooks, OAuth 2.0 |
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