What are the best Exa alternatives in 2026?

Exa alternatives in October 2026 include Parallel, Perplexity, Octen, Tavily, Brave, Firecrawl and You.com, or Grounder (grounder.net) if you want Exa plus other providers behind one MCP address. Exa lists $7 per 1,000 searches; Parallel fast, Perplexity Fast Search and Octen list $1, and Brave and You.com $5.

Last checked: 20 October 2026. Disclosure: Grounder publishes this page and sends searches to Exa, Tavily, Brave, Perplexity, Parallel, You.com, Firecrawl and Octen, among others.

Why people look for Exa alternatives now

• Price structure. Search is $7 per 1,000 for auto or fast, $4 for lite (added 19 October 2026), $12 for deep and $15 for deep-reasoning. Ten results are included; each result beyond 10 adds $1 per 1,000. Page contents are billed per content type through /contents at $1 per 1,000 pages. Exa's 3 March 2026 changelog says contents for the first 10 results are free, which the pricing page does not repeat, so check your usage.
• API changes. Exa retired /research on 1 April 2026 in favor of /search with deep-reasoning, and its pricing page now calls instant, fast and deep-reasoning legacy types that keep their prices.
• Rate limits. 10 queries a second for /search and 5 for deep types. Buying $1,000 in credits within 30 days raises that to 25 for 90 days; more needs sales.
• Retention. Zero data retention is for eligible Enterprise customers.
• Answer tokens. In Grounder's run Exa used the most answer tokens of the 10 providers (5.2k per SimpleQA question), so your model reads more text per search.

Quick comparison

The alternatives

Parallel

• What it is: agent-oriented search on its own index. A query is a natural-language objective, and an Extract API sits beside it.
• Pricing: fast $1 per 1,000, basic and advanced $5, with 10 results each and $1 per 1,000 beyond. Extract is $1 per 1,000 URLs.
• Strengths: the top single-provider SealQA score in Grounder's run (44.9%), 94.8% on SimpleQA, a 652 ms median search.
• Limits: Artificial Analysis index 75 for advanced, against 80 for Exa. Turbo covers English and Japanese only.
• Pick it when: you want similar results for $1 to $5.

Perplexity

• What it is: a Search API returning ranked results and snippets, with no generated answer.
• Pricing: $5 per 1,000 requests, $1 for Fast Search. No free tier is published. The Agent API people_search tool is $5 per 1,000 calls.
• Strengths: index 80, level with Exa. Tied for the top SimpleQA score (96.0%) in Grounder's run, at 275 ms and 1.5k answer tokens.
• Limits: Perplexity-User, its fetcher for pages a user asks for, "generally ignores robots.txt rules", per Perplexity.
• Pick it when: you want accuracy, low latency and small contexts.

Octen

• What it is: real-time web search with highlights and optional full content. Public beta since 15 March 2026.
• Pricing: $1 per 1,000 calls, shown as "80% Off" a $5 list price with no end date. $5 free balance.
• Strengths: 96.0% on SimpleQA at a 276 ms median search in Grounder's run. Index 77.
• Limits: the promotional price may end. No crawler or retention policy on the pages checked. 4.7k answer tokens.
• Pick it when: you want a low list price and accept beta terms.

Tavily

• What it is: search with Extract, Crawl, Map and Research endpoints. Nebius announced its acquisition on 10 February 2026.
• Pricing: $0.008 a credit at pay-as-you-go: $8 per 1,000 basic searches, $16 advanced. Free is 1,000 credits a month.
• Strengths: extraction beside search. Remote MCP with OAuth.
• Limits: 85.8% on SimpleQA and 24.1% on SealQA in Grounder's run, below Exa on both.
• Pick it when: you want extraction from the same vendor. See Tavily alternatives.

Brave

• What it is: a Search API on Brave's own index, with an LLM Context endpoint of extracted chunks.
• Pricing: $5 per 1,000 requests, with a $5 monthly credit if you attribute Brave.
• Strengths: the fewest answer tokens on SimpleQA in Grounder's run (1.1k) at 591 ms. Index 75 (LLM Context).
• Limits: 84.4% on SimpleQA and 16.2% on SealQA. MCP is local only. Brave's terms bar storing results without a storage-rights plan.
• Pick it when: you want speed and short contexts.

Firecrawl

• What it is: a web data API whose search can return scraped content or excerpts, beside scrape, crawl and map.
• Pricing: 2 credits per 10 results. Free is 1,000 credits a month; Hobby is $16 for 5,000 and Standard $83 for 100,000, billed yearly. Scraping results adds 1 credit a page.
• Strengths: contents in the search call. 88.2% on SimpleQA with 1.3k answer tokens.
• Limits: the slowest of the 12 products on Artificial Analysis's leaderboard (60.1 s a task, index 73).
• Pick it when: you want page content without a second vendor.

You.com

• What it is: web and news search in one call, optional live full-page extraction, and licensed "knowledge" data.
• Pricing: $5 per 1,000 calls whether a call returns 1 result or 100; extraction adds $1 per 1,000 pages crawled live. The pricing page shows $100 of free credit.
• Strengths: a flat price for long result lists, where Exa adds $1 per 1,000 per result beyond 10. Keyless MCP profile, 100 queries a day.
• Limits: 84.2% on SimpleQA and 20.4% on SealQA in Grounder's run. Zero data retention is enterprise-only.
• Pick it when: you need many results per call at one price.

Where Grounder fits

Grounder (grounder.net) is a web search API and MCP server for AI agents. One search goes across 10 web search providers, results are deduplicated, and each result is marked with the provider that found it and whether it is licensed. Exa is one of the ten, with 6 search modes, and so are Parallel, Perplexity, Octen, Tavily, Brave, Firecrawl and You.com.

It does not replace Exa Websets, Monitors, the Agent API or the people and company categories, and it writes no answer. Results come from the providers and the sites they index.

• Connect: add https://api.grounder.net/mcp to an MCP client and sign in with Google, GitHub or Apple.
• Free tier: your first 1,000 searches are free, up to 100 a day, no card needed, at 120 requests a minute per key. Need more? Write to support@grounder.net.
• Keep Exa: pin a search to Exa with requested_provider, or set Exa to Always on the account page so every search that names no provider uses it. An account can add its own Exa key; Exa then bills the account.
• Licensed sources only: on by default for signed-up accounts. A search then returns only licensed results, so it can return fewer than you ask for. Turn it off on the account page (Routing, Licensing: Any source) or per search with routing_settings.licensed_only set to false.
• Data: search records are kept indefinitely, and opting out of routing statistics deletes nothing. No model is trained on your data. See privacy.

Benchmark table as of 20 October 2026; the run was 8 to 13 October 2026. Tokens and latency are for SimpleQA.

Grounder optimized answers only from licensed sources, so it gets fewer answers right than the all-sources row, which searches every source. Grounder ran this benchmark itself, and its routing was tuned on these same searches. Among single providers Exa is fourth on SimpleQA, behind Octen, Perplexity and Parallel, and third on SealQA, behind Parallel and Perplexity. On SimpleQA the all-sources row is first; on SealQA Parallel (44.9%) is ahead of it (36.1%).

How we compared

We compared price, free tier, accuracy, latency, output type, extraction, data terms and MCP support, from each vendor's own pages (below). Figures marked derived are computed from credit prices.

The benchmark uses 887 questions: 671 from SimpleQA and 216 from SealQA Seal-Hard. From 8 to 13 October 2026 each question was searched once on every provider's default search, taking its top 10 results within 60 seconds. Z.ai's GLM-5.3-Flash, at high reasoning effort, answered from those results alone, and OpenAI's SimpleQA grader graded each answer. Grounder optimized is each question routed as Grounder routes it on 19 October 2026. It searches as every account does by default, with licensed sources only; Grounder optimized, all sources is the same routing with nothing filtered out.

Artificial Analysis uses the same answer model for every provider; its leaderboard of 19 October 2026 shows 12 of 27 products, not Tavily, so we quote no score for it. See also best search API for AI agents.

FAQ

What is the cheapest alternative to Exa?

Parallel fast, Perplexity Fast Search and Octen list $1 per 1,000 searches, against $7 for Exa auto. Octen's price is promotional against a $5 list price.

Which alternative is closest to Exa's semantic search?

Exa says its search works by meaning and takes natural-language queries, and the other providers' pages we checked make no equivalent claim. Parallel takes a natural-language objective instead of keywords, and Perplexity and Octen both beat Exa on SimpleQA in Grounder's run.

Does Exa have an MCP server?

Yes. https://mcp.exa.ai/mcp is free and rate-limited without a key, and also takes OAuth or a key header. Parallel, Perplexity, Tavily, Firecrawl and You.com also run remote servers; Brave's is a local install.

Which Exa alternatives have people or company search?

Parallel has a FindAll API priced per match, and Perplexity's Agent API has a people_search tool at $5 per 1,000 calls. Check that their fields match what you use from Exa's people and company categories.

Does Exa respect robots.txt?

Exa's FAQ names its crawler ExaSearchBot, says it respects the Robots Exclusion Protocol and that robots.txt controls crawling, and says it does not attempt to bypass logins, paywalls or CAPTCHAs.

Which Exa alternative offers licensed content?

Grounder marks each result as licensed or not and can return licensed results only. You.com's docs describe licensed "knowledge" data in its search calls. See licensed content search API.

Next step

Your first 1,000 searches are free, up to 100 a day; connect at https://api.grounder.net/mcp or read the docs.