Pick Exa if
developers wiring retrieval into an agent who will pay per 1k requests.
Read the Exa pageExa vs Parallel
Our take
Pick Exa if developers wiring retrieval into an agent who will pay per 1k requests. Pick Parallel if agent teams who will start on Search Fast at $1 / 1,000 requests and only buy Task or Responses when a lookup is not enough. Skip Exa if people who want a cited answer box without an API (Perplexity) or a scrape-to-markdown crawler (Firecrawl).
Best for
Exa Ranked web results plus page contents in one request
Parallel Ground an agent on the live web at a known dollar
Free plan
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)
Parallel No free plan
Lowest paid
Exa Agent (fixed effort) $0.012
Parallel FindAll $0.25
Next step up
Exa `/contents` $1
Parallel Search $1
Coding agent
Exa Search playground
Parallel Search
Watch out
Exa Credits are prepaid dollars
Parallel There is no seat card
Last checked
Exa 2026-10-21 · exa.ai/docs/admin/pricing
Parallel 2026-10-22 · docs.parallel.ai/getting-started/pricing
Which one, then?
Pick Parallel if
agent teams who will start on Search Fast at $1 / 1,000 requests and only buy Task or Responses when a lookup is not enough.
Read the Parallel page