Pick Browserbase if
teams that need a fleet of headless browsers and will pay for concurrent sessions.
Read the Browserbase pageBrowserbase vs Exa
Our take
Pick Browserbase if teams that need a fleet of headless browsers and will pay for concurrent sessions. Pick Exa if developers wiring retrieval into an agent who will pay per 1k requests. Skip Browserbase if people who only want URL → markdown (Firecrawl) or a search-credit API (Tavily). Skip Exa if people who want a cited answer box without an API (Perplexity) or a scrape-to-markdown crawler (Firecrawl).
Best for
Browserbase Spin a remote Playwright/Puppeteer session
Exa Ranked web results plus page contents in one request
Free plan
Browserbase $0 · /mo. 3 concurrent browsers; 1 browser hour; 3 Agent runs; 1,000 Search; 1,000 Fetch; 15 minutes/session; $5 in model tokens
Exa $0 · $10 credits on signup; balance resets to $10 on the 1st of each month. No payment method required. First-team onboarding bonus +$10 one-time (docs)
Lowest paid
Browserbase Developer $20/mo
Exa Agent (fixed effort) $0.012
Next step up
Browserbase Startup $99/mo
Exa `/contents` $1
Coding agent
Browserbase Identity
Exa Search playground
Runs where
Browserbase Hosted
Exa
Watch out
Browserbase Free is 1 browser hour
Exa Credits are prepaid dollars
Last checked
Browserbase 2026-10-21 · browserbase.com/pricing
Exa 2026-10-21 · exa.ai/docs/admin/pricing
Which one, then?
Pick Exa if
developers wiring retrieval into an agent who will pay per 1k requests.
Read the Exa page