Exa vs Tally
AI search API for developers — neural + keyword hybrid for agents
vs. Free, unlimited online forms — the Notion-style form builder
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
Tally
Free
$0. Unlimited forms, unlimited responses, unlimited fields. Tally branding. Basic question types.
Free
Pro
$29/mo. Remove branding, custom domain, conditional logic, calculations, form logic, file uploads, Stripe integration, webhooks.
$29/mo
Business
$89/mo. Workspaces, custom email domain, priority support, team collaboration.
$89/mo
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on Exa vs free on Tally.
| Metric | Exa | Tally |
|---|---|---|
| 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.
Tally · 13 features
- Calculator + Variables — Formulas + variables in questions (Pro).
- Conditional Logic — Show/hide, skip logic (Pro).
- Custom Domain — forms.yoursite.com (Pro).
- Embed Anywhere — Inline, popup, slider — any site.
- E-Signatures — Signature capture block.
- File Uploads — Accept file attachments (Pro).
- Notion-like UX — Block-based editor with slash commands.
- Question Types — 20+ field types (text, choice, file, rating, signature).
- Stripe Payments — Accept payments via Stripe (Pro).
- Template Library — 1,000+ community templates.
- Unlimited Free Plan — Unlimited forms + responses on Free.
- Webhooks — Real-time submission events (Pro).
- Workspaces — Team collaboration (Business).
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Exa | Tally |
|---|---|---|
| SDK | exa-js, exa-py | Popup / Slider API |
| REST | Exa REST API | Tally API |
| MCP | Exa MCP Server | — |
| OTHER | Exa Dashboard | Form Embed Script, Tally Web Editor, Tally Webhooks |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Some links to Exa and Tally may be affiliate links — Staxly may earn a commission if you sign up through them, at no extra cost to you. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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