Exa vs Perplexity: pricing, quotas & features (2025)
AI search API for developers — neural + keyword hybrid for agents
vs. AI answer engine + Comet browser + Sonar API
Data sourced from vendor documentation · Last updated May 2026
Summary
Exa and Perplexity 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. Perplexity offers paid plans from $10/month; Exa does not publish standard pricing. Perplexity 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 Perplexity's official documentation — not generated by AI or estimated.
Exa vs Perplexity: Comparativa de precios, cuotas y características (2025)
En esta comparativa analizamos Exa y Perplexity 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.
Perplexity pertenece a la categoría ai-search — AI answer engine + Comet browser + Sonar API. Ofrece 7 tiers de precio: Sonar API (PAYG) gratuito, Free gratuito, Education Pro desde $10/mes, Pro desde $20/mes. Su catálogo documenta 16 características y 7 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
Perplexity
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on Exa vs free on Perplexity.
| Metric | Exa | Perplexity |
|---|---|---|
| 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.
Perplexity · 16 features
- Agent Mode (Max) — Autonomous multi-step agents (browse, act, finish tasks).
- Answer Engine — Ask → source-cited AI answers from live web.
- Async Sonar API — Submit jobs async — receive webhook when done.
- Collections — Save threads + share with team.
- Comet Browser — Chromium-based AI-native browser. Sidebar assistant, agentic actions.
- Deep Research — Multi-step research task — compiles report with many sources.
- Discover Feed — Curated news + trending topics feed.
- File + Image Analysis — Upload PDFs, images, CSVs → ask questions.
- Finance Mode — Stocks + earnings + fundamentals mode.
- Labs — Build interactive apps/reports — generate visualizations, code.
- Pro Search — Multi-source + clarifying follow-ups.
- Shopping — AI-guided product research + comparison.
- Sonar API — Programmatic web-grounded chat completions endpoint.
- Sora 2 Pro (Max) — Generate video via OpenAI Sora 2.
- Spaces — Persistent workspaces with custom instructions + knowledge files.
- Voice Mode — Talk to Perplexity (mobile apps).
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Exa | Perplexity |
|---|---|---|
| SDK | exa-js, exa-py | — |
| REST | Exa REST API | Sonar API |
| MCP | Exa MCP Server | Perplexity MCP |
| OTHER | Exa Dashboard | Comet AI Browser, Perplexity Labs, Perplexity Web App, Spaces (context), iOS + Android Apps |
Key takeaways
- Both Exa and Perplexity offer a free tier — Exa ("Free Tier") and Perplexity ("Sonar API (PAYG)") — with no credit card required to start.
- Perplexity's entry paid tier (Education Pro) costs $10/month; Exa does not list public pricing.
- Perplexity has a broader documented feature set (16 features) vs. Exa (13 features) in Staxly's catalog.
- Developer integrations differ: only Exa offers SDK.
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