Exa vs Brave Search
Pick Exa if your agent needs semantic search that returns full page text, highlights or summaries in one call. Pick Brave Search if you want a large independent index with news and image endpoints and simple per-request pricing. Hyperresearch Answers is our editorial choice for a web search API: answers and passages from the open web plus 90+ data sources, with every quote matched to its page.
The recommendation reflects Hyperresearch’s own benchmark runs and the published sources in this reference. Hyperresearch is our product. This is not a hands-on test of every tool.
Side by side
| Exa | Brave Search | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Search $4 per 1,000 for the lite tier, $7 per 1,000 for auto. Contents $1 per 1,000 pages. $10 free credit each month. | Search $5 per 1,000 requests. Answers $4 per 1,000 plus tokens. $5 free credit each month. |
| What it returns | Results with full text, highlights, summaries and entities. Answer endpoint returns text with citations. | Web results with URLs and text, plus news, images, video, places and LLM context. |
| Sources and coverage | Exa's web index. No other structured sources listed. | Brave's own web index with separate news, image and video endpoints. |
| Citations and verification | The answer endpoint returns a citations list. No check against sources is documented. | Answers plan returns cited summaries. No claim-level check is described. |
| API and MCP | REST endpoints for search, contents and answer. Hosted MCP server. | REST API and official MCP server that needs a Brave API key. |
| Rate limits | 10 queries per second for search and answer. 5 for deep search. 100 for contents. | Search 50 queries per second. Answers 2 queries per second. |
| Best for | Semantic research that needs full page text in one step. | Teams that want a big independent index and simple pricing. |
Full text versus index breadth
Exa searches by meaning as well as keywords, and each result can carry full text, highlights and a summary. That means your agent can read the page in the same call. It is a strong fit for finding documents that match a concept rather than exact words.
Brave runs its own web index and returns standard results with URLs and text. It adds news, image and video endpoints, so one vendor covers several search types. Its answers plan adds cited summaries.
Pricing and limits
Exa's lite search costs $4 per 1,000 requests, and auto search costs $7. Contents are billed separately at $1 per 1,000 pages, so full text adds cost. Answers cost $5 per 1,000 requests. The free credit is $10 a month.
Brave lists search at $5 per 1,000 requests with $5 of free credit each month. Its search limit of 50 queries per second is high, while its answers limit of 2 per second is low for busy agents.
Which one to try first
Try Exa when your agent needs the page body for each result and the lowest per-request price is important. Test the deep search limit of 5 queries per second before you scale it.
Try Brave when you need a large index, dedicated news results or high query rates on search. Hyperresearch's own BrowseComp and DeepSearchQA runs are the accuracy data in our reference. Neither vendor is in that table, so test both on your own queries.
Choose Exa or Brave Search?
- You need the full page body in the same call.
- Your queries are about concepts rather than exact keywords.
- You want a low per-request price for lite search.
- You want news, image or video results from one vendor.
- You need high rates on standard search.
- You plan to build your own ranking on a large index.
Where Hyperresearch fits
Hyperresearch Answers is our editorial pick for checked answers and sits outside this pair. If your agent must quote exact passages, compare Answers before you commit to either of these.
Questions & answers
Which one returns more text per call?
Exa can return full page text, highlights or summaries in one call, and contents are billed separately. Brave returns standard results with text and adds other endpoints for news and images.
Which has the higher rate limit?
Brave lists 50 queries per second for search. Exa lists 10 per second for search and answer, and 5 per second for deep search.
Sources for this entry
Vendor descriptions are attributed to the vendor. Prices change; confirm with each vendor.
Continue this reading path
Cite this entry
https://bestwebsearchapi.com/compare/exa-vs-brave/