Exa vs Firecrawl: pricing, quotas & features (2026)
AI search API for developers — neural + keyword hybrid for agents
vs. AI-native web scraping + crawling API — LLM-ready data extraction
Data sourced from vendor documentation · Last updated June 2026
Summary
Exa and Firecrawl are both ai-search platforms, addressing the same core use case with different implementation philosophies and trade-offs. Both offer a free tier, making it easy to prototype without a credit card. Firecrawl offers paid plans from $19/month; Exa does not publish standard pricing. Firecrawl has a broader documented feature set (16 vs 13 features). The right choice depends on your existing stack, team experience, and feature requirements. All pricing and quota data below is sourced from Exa and Firecrawl's official documentation — not generated by AI or estimated.
Exa vs Firecrawl: Comparativa de precios, cuotas y características (2026)
En esta comparativa analizamos Exa y Firecrawl lado a lado — incluyendo precios mensuales, límites del tier gratuito, características técnicas, cuotas de uso (almacenamiento, transferencia, usuarios activos mensuales) y los interfaces de desarrollo disponibles. Todos los datos proceden de la documentación oficial de cada proveedor, no de respuestas generadas por IA.
Exa es una plataforma de la categoría ai-search — AI search API for developers — neural + keyword hybrid for agents. Ofrece 4 tiers de precio: Free Tier gratuito, Pay-as-you-go gratuito, Startup + Education Grants gratuito, Enterprise (personalizado). Su catálogo en Staxly documenta 13 características y 5 interfazes para desarrolladores.
Firecrawl pertenece a la categoría ai-search — AI-native web scraping + crawling API — LLM-ready data extraction. Ofrece 6 tiers de precio: Free gratuito, Self-Hosted (OSS) gratuito, Hobby desde $19/mes, Standard desde $99/mes. Su catálogo documenta 16 características y 6 interfazes para desarrolladores.
A continuación encontrarás los tiers de precio completos de ambas plataformas, una matriz de cuotas del tier gratuito (transferencia, almacenamiento, MAU, llamadas a la API y otros límites), el listado completo de características y los interfaces (CLI, SDKs, REST, GraphQL, MCP) disponibles para integrar cada servicio.
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Pricing tiers
Exa
Firecrawl
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on Exa vs free on Firecrawl.
| Metric | Exa | Firecrawl |
|---|---|---|
| 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.
Firecrawl · 16 features
- Batch Scrape — Scrape many URLs in parallel.
- Crawl — Crawl an entire site following links. Returns all pages.
- Custom Headers/Cookies — Scrape behind login via headers.
- Deep Research (beta) — AI agent that autonomously researches a query across many sites.
- Extract (AI) — Structured extraction with a JSON schema → Firecrawl runs LLM for you.
- JavaScript Rendering — Headless browser handles SPAs, React/Vue sites.
- LLM-Ready Markdown — Cleaned + normalized Markdown optimized for LLM ingestion.
- MCP Server — Official MCP for Claude / Cursor / Agents.
- Map — Fast — returns all URLs on a site without fetching content.
- Open Source (AGPL) — Self-host the entire stack via Docker.
- PDF Parsing — Extract text from PDFs.
- Residential Proxies — Bypass anti-bot + geoblocks (paid).
- Scrape — Single URL → clean markdown/JSON/HTML.
- Screenshots — Visual screenshot alongside content.
- Search (beta) — Google-like search API returning results + content.
- Structured Output — Extract to JSON schema via LLM.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Exa | Firecrawl |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | — | Firecrawl CLI |
| SDK | exa-js, exa-py | firecrawl-go, firecrawl-js, firecrawl-py |
| REST | Exa REST API | Firecrawl REST API |
| MCP | Exa MCP Server | Firecrawl MCP Server |
| OTHER | Exa Dashboard | — |
Key takeaways
- Both Exa and Firecrawl offer a free tier — Exa ("Free Tier") and Firecrawl ("Free") — with no credit card required to start.
- Firecrawl's entry paid tier (Hobby) costs $19/month; Exa does not list public pricing.
- Firecrawl has a broader documented feature set (16 features) vs. Exa (13 features) in Staxly's catalog.
- Developer integrations differ: only Exa offers OTHER; only Firecrawl offers CLI.
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