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Brave Search API vs Exa

Two independent indexes with different design targets: a conventional web search API against a neural one built for AI.

Verified 5 August 2026·Figures from vendors' own pages

We are not a participant in this comparison

Price

  • Brave Search API$5
  • Exa$7
Per 1,000 comparable web searches — about ten results, no extraction, no summarisation.
ProviderOwn index?$ / 1,000 queriesSource
Exa

Base search is $7 per 1,000 requests. Results beyond the first 10 add $1 per 1,000, contents add $1 per 1,000 pages, and AI summaries another $1 per 1,000 — so a realistic RAG call costs more than the headline.

Yes

Proprietary AI-native semantic index

$7Exa pricing
Brave Search API

Search is $5 per 1,000 requests. The Answers plan is $4 per 1,000 plus $5 per million tokens.

Yes

40B+ pages, no Google or Bing dependency

$5Brave Search API pricing
unlob — Build

$29 per month for 50,000 requests.

Yes

Our own crawl and index

$0.58This page
unlob — Scale

$199 per month for 500,000 requests.

Yes

Our own crawl and index

$0.40This page
Rates are the cheapest directly comparable web search call — roughly ten results, no extraction and no summarisation — because that is the only way a table across credit systems, token pricing and per-request pricing means anything. Where a vendor does not publish a flat per-1,000 rate they are omitted from this table and covered in full on the landscape page. Figures read from each vendor’s own pricing page on 5 August 2026.

Where each one wins

Neither product on this page is ours. This comparison exists because it is asked often and answered badly.

Brave Search API

  • Brave: index size, price, throughput, and a conventional result shape.
  • Exa: semantic retrieval, Websets, and an AI-first product surface.

Exa

  • Exa: semantic retrieval, Websets, and an AI-first product surface.

The substantive differences

Brave Search APIExa
RetrievalBrave: conventional keyword-and-rank web search.Exa: neural, trained on link prediction.
PriceBrave: $5 per 1,000.Exa: $7 per 1,000 base.
Free tierBrave: $5 monthly credit (perpetual free tier retired Feb 2026).Exa: $20 signup credit, $10 monthly.

Sources

Every figure on this page was read from the vendor's own pricing page or funding announcement on the date shown.

Frequently asked questions

Which has the bigger index, Brave or Exa?

Brave publishes a figure of over 40 billion pages. Exa does not publish a comparable index size, describing its index as AI-native and semantic rather than competing on raw page count.

Check the claims yourself

The free tier is 10,000 requests a month with no card. That is enough to test coverage, latency and result quality against your own queries — which is a better comparison than this page.

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