Exa vs Deepgram
AI search API for developers — neural + keyword hybrid for agents
vs. Enterprise-grade speech-to-text + voice agents — Nova + Flux + Aura TTS
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
Deepgram
Pay-as-you-go
$200 free credit. No minimums, no expiration.
$0 base (usage-based)
Growth
Starting $4K+/year prepay. Up to 20% savings.
$4000/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Data residency, dedicated support, on-prem option.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on Exa vs payg on Deepgram.
| Metric | Exa | Deepgram |
|---|---|---|
| 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.
Deepgram · 15 features
- Aura TTS — Low-latency text-to-speech (<250ms).
- Data Residency — EU / US / custom regions.
- Diarization — Speaker identification.
- Intent Detection — Detect speaker intents automatically.
- Keyterm Prompting — Boost accuracy for proper nouns + domain terms.
- Language Detection — Auto-detect spoken language.
- On-Prem Deployment — Enterprise: run Deepgram in your infra.
- PII Redaction — Auto-redact sensitive info.
- Pre-recorded STT — Transcribe audio/video files.
- Sentiment Analysis — Per-segment sentiment scores.
- Smart Format — Numbers, dates, times auto-formatted.
- Streaming STT — Realtime WebSocket-based transcription.
- Summarization — Automatic transcript summaries.
- Topic Detection — Auto-extract conversation topics.
- Voice Agent API — Unified STT + LLM + TTS for voice bots.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Exa | Deepgram |
|---|---|---|
| SDK | exa-js, exa-py | deepgram-dotnet-sdk, deepgram-go-sdk, deepgram-rust-sdk, @deepgram/sdk (Node), deepgram-sdk (Python) |
| REST | Exa REST API | Deepgram REST API |
| MCP | Exa MCP Server | — |
| OTHER | Exa Dashboard | Streaming WebSocket, Voice Agent API |
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