Pick Exa if
developers wiring retrieval into an agent who will pay per 1k requests.
Read the Exa pageExa vs Perplexity
Our take
Pick Exa if developers wiring retrieval into an agent who will pay per 1k requests. Pick Perplexity if researchers, analysts, and anyone who wants a sourced first pass before opening ten tabs. Skip Exa if people who want a cited answer box without an API (Perplexity) or a scrape-to-markdown crawler (Firecrawl). Skip Perplexity if teams that cannot send queries to Perplexity, or users who need a repo-aware IDE
Best for
Exa Ranked web results plus page contents in one request
Perplexity Research with sources you can click
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)
Perplexity $0 · standard Search on the public composer
Lowest paid
Exa Agent (fixed effort) $0.012
Perplexity Pro $17/mo yearly
Next step up
Exa `/contents` $1
Perplexity Max from $167/mo yearly
Coding agent
Exa Search playground
Perplexity API platform
Runs where
Exa
Perplexity Hosted
Watch out
Exa Credits are prepaid dollars
Perplexity Citations are not a guarantee
Last checked
Exa 2026-10-21 · exa.ai/docs/admin/pricing
Perplexity 2026-10-19 · perplexity.ai/pro
Which one, then?
Pick Perplexity if
researchers, analysts, and anyone who wants a sourced first pass before opening ten tabs.
Read the Perplexity page