Exa vs Turso
AI search API for developers — neural + keyword hybrid for agents
vs. Edge SQLite — libSQL at the speed of light
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
Turso
Free
100 DBs, 5 GB storage, 500M row reads/mo, 10M row writes/mo. No credit card.
Free
Developer
Unlimited DBs, 9 GB storage, 2.5B reads, 25M writes.
$5/mo
Scaler
24 GB storage, 100B reads, 100M writes. Teams + DPA support. Price is annual-billed.
$25/mo
Pro
50 GB storage, 250B reads, 250M writes. Teams, DPA, SSO, BYOK, HIPAA, SOC2, priority support. Annual billed.
$417/mo
Enterprise
White-glove support + unlimited usage + dedicated infra.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on Exa vs free on Turso.
| Metric | Exa | Turso |
|---|---|---|
| databases | — | 100 DBs |
| row reads month | — | 500000000 reads/month |
| row writes month | — | 10000000 writes/month |
| storage gb | — | 5 GB |
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.
Turso · 11 features
- Branching — Create DB branches from a primary for staging/test envs.
- BYOK Encryption — Bring your own encryption key (Pro+).
- Edge Routing — Requests route automatically to the nearest replica group.
- Embedded Replicas — Client-side local SQLite file that syncs from the primary — reads are <1ms local…
- libSQL — Turso's open-source SQLite fork with HTTP, WebSocket, and multi-writer support.
- libSQL Server (sqld) — Self-hostable server component. Runs libSQL as a service.
- Multi-Database — Create thousands of DBs cheaply — perfect for per-tenant / per-customer isolatio…
- Point-in-Time Restore — Rollback DB to any moment within backup window.
- Scheduled Backups — Automated point-in-time backups.
- SQLite Compatibility — Drop-in SQLite — same SQL dialect, same file format.
- Teams & RBAC — Org-level access control for Scaler+ tiers.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Exa | Turso |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | — | Turso CLI |
| SDK | exa-js, exa-py | go-libsql, @libsql/client, libsql-experimental (Python), libsql-rs, libsql-swift |
| REST | Exa REST API | libSQL HTTP, Platform API |
| MCP | Exa MCP Server | Turso MCP |
| OTHER | Exa Dashboard | libSQL WebSocket, SQLite wire protocol |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Exa and Turso are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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