By use case · Firecrawl vs Exa

Firecrawl vs Exa pricing and cost per 1,000 pages and searches for AI agents

The short answer

Firecrawl is cheaper when you already know the pages and Exa is cheaper when the agent has to find them. A plain page costs 1 Firecrawl credit, $0.83 per 1,000 on the Standard plan billed yearly, against $1 per 1,000 on Exa Contents. Search flips the order once you count the content. Exa charges $7 per 1,000 Fast searches with the text of up to 10 results included. Firecrawl charges 2 credits for the 10 links and 1 more for each result you scrape, 12 credits in all, which is about $9.96 per 1,000 searches on the same plan. Firecrawl crawls whole sites and Exa does not. Exa has a semantic index and Firecrawl does not. If the deliverable is typed records from whole public sites, ClawEngine crawls and extracts them from $99 a month for about 250,000 pages.

Clean markdown & JSON · JavaScript rendered · robots.txt respected

Extraction demo

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Hit Extract to turn this page into clean, LLM-ready data.

robots.txt respected · public data only ·

Markdown · JSON · structured fields, from one API call. Crawling, rendering and extracting ... Samples are recorded. Your own URL is crawled live.

Firecrawl and Exa end up in the same evaluation because both describe themselves as the web layer for AI agents, both expose search, and both hand a model clean text instead of raw HTML. Underneath they are different products. Firecrawl is a scraper that learned to search: point it at a URL or a domain and it renders the pages, follows the links and returns markdown or JSON. Exa is a search engine that learned to read: it keeps its own neural index of the web, ranks pages by meaning rather than keywords, and returns the text, highlights or a summary of what it found.

The pricing follows the product. Firecrawl sells monthly plans of credits, where one credit is one page, so a known crawl is easy to forecast and the surprise comes from multipliers such as JSON output. Exa sells no plan at all. You prepay, each request draws down the balance at a published rate, and the surprise comes from result counts and content views. Every figure on this page was read on 14 October 2026 from the pricing pages and documentation both vendors publish, not from a review aggregator, and the four workloads further down are priced from those figures alone.

For the full ladder on either side, see our Firecrawl pricing breakdown and the Exa pricing guide with cost per search. If search is the half you care about, Exa vs Tavily pricing and Firecrawl vs Tavily cover the other two corners of the usual three-way shortlist, Linkup API pricing covers a fourth option billed per call, and Exa alternatives lists the rest.

Developer at a standing desk weighing two API invoices next to a laptop with usage charts

CRAWL RENDER JS EXTRACT MARKDOWN JSON

Any URL in LLM-ready data out

robots.txt respected public data only

Why it works

Three questions that settle Firecrawl vs Exa

Does the agent know where to look?

If the job is a documentation site, a product catalog or a fixed list of domains, there is nothing to search for. You need every page, and Firecrawl crawls it for a credit each. If the job starts from a question, such as which companies launched a pricing change this month, you need ranking first, and that is the thing Exa built its index for.

Will you read the pages a search returns?

This is where the two price lists cross. Firecrawl search costs 2 credits for 10 links, then 1 credit for each one you scrape. Exa folds the text of the first 10 results into the search price. An agent that reads what it finds pays about $9.96 per 1,000 searches on Firecrawl Standard and $7 on Exa Fast, or $4 on Instant.

How much of the output must be typed?

Firecrawl charges 5 credits for a page returned as JSON, five times the plain rate. Exa passes a schema through its summary view at $1 per 1,000 pages, cheaper per page but one model call on every page and a JSON string you parse yourself. If typed records are the product, price this line before the page count.

What it handles

Any URL in, clean structured data out

Point ClawEngine at a public page and it crawls, renders the JavaScript and extracts clean markdown or typed JSON in one call. Define a schema for structured fields, and respect robots.txt and Terms of Service by default.

Compares prices read firsthand from both vendors
Explains credits against prepaid per-request billing
Prices four agent workloads on each vendor
Shows why search with content flips the order
Separates crawling known sites from finding pages
States plainly what ClawEngine does not do

POST /v1/extract extraction result

200 · JSON

{
  "url": "https://example.com/products/atlas",
  "title": "Atlas Field Notebook",
  "markdown": "# Atlas Field Notebook\n\nDurable...",
  "data": {
    "name": "Atlas Field Notebook",
    "price": 24.00,
    "currency": "USD",
    "rating": 4.7
  },
  "links": [ "/products", "/cart" ],
  "metadata": { "rendered": true }
}

JS rendered · boilerplate stripped ✓ robots.txt respected

Head to head

Firecrawl vs Exa side by side

Every Firecrawl and Exa figure below was read from the vendor pricing page or documentation on 14 October 2026. ClawEngine is the third column, and it does not win every row.

Swipe to compare all columns →

What you are comparing	Firecrawl	Exa	ClawEngine
What it is	Scrape, crawl, map and search API that turns sites into markdown or JSON, open source under AGPL	Neural search engine with its own index, plus Contents, Answer, Monitors and Agent endpoints, proprietary	One API that crawls, renders JavaScript and extracts typed fields in a single call
What the meter counts	Credits on a monthly plan. 1 per page, 2 per 10 search results	Dollars on a prepaid balance. A rate per request and per content view	Pages on a monthly plan. One page of allowance per page returned
Entry price	Hobby $19/mo, or $16 billed yearly, for 5,000 credits	No subscription and no minimum spend	$49/mo Hobby ($24/mo billed yearly)
Free usage	1,000 credits a month	$10 of credit, reset to $10 on the first of each month	No free plan
Cost per 1,000 known pages	$0.83 on Standard yearly, $0.99 monthly, $0.60 on Scale yearly	$1.00 on Contents for one view, $2.00 for text plus highlights	$0.98 on Hobby, $0.40 on Startup, $0.27 on Scale
Cost per 1,000 searches, links only	2 credits per 10 results, about $1.66 on Standard yearly	$4 Instant, $7 Fast or Auto, $12 Deep, $15 Deep-Reasoning	Not offered. We fetch sites you name
Cost per 1,000 searches with the text of 10 results	12 credits a search, about $9.96 on Standard yearly, $7.19 on Scale yearly	The same $4 or $7. Contents for the first 10 results are included	Not offered
Typed output against your schema	JSON format adds 4 credits, 5 per page, about $4.15 per 1,000 on Standard yearly	A JSON schema on the summary view, $1 per 1,000 pages, returned as a JSON string	From Startup, up to 900 model-mapped pages a month, 3,500 on Scale. Pages with schema.org data are mapped without the model
Whole-site crawl	Yes. Crawl and map endpoints walk the link graph	No. A subpages count follows links from each result, which Exa itself calls a bounded hop	Yes, from a start URL with a page limit you set
Search quality	Web search results you can scrape in the same call	Semantic ranking over its own index, with category filters and up to 100 results on request	No search product
Freshness	Pages fetched when you request them, with an optional cache	Cached by default. maxAgeHours set to 0 forces a live fetch	Pages fetched when you request them
When the allowance runs out	Extra credits in $5 packs on paid plans, 1,000 to 5,000 credits by tier	Requests return 402 until you add credit. Auto recharge is available	A fixed monthly page allowance
Self-hosting	Yes, AGPL-3.0 code on GitHub	No	Private deployment on Enterprise
Best for	Turning known sites and docs into clean markdown for RAG	Agents that must find the right pages for an open question	Typed records from whole public sites at a flat per-page price
Main gotcha	Search is cheap until you scrape the results, and a 403 or 404 page still bills a credit	Each result above ten adds $1 per 1,000, and every content view is charged separately	No search, no free plan, and defended sites are out of scope

US list prices in USD. Firecrawl monthly billing is $19, $99, $399 and $749 for Hobby, Standard, Growth and Scale, with 5,000, 100,000, 500,000 and 1,000,000 credits. Exa search prices are per 1,000 requests with up to 10 results included.

Why ClawEngine

One API that crawls, renders and extracts

Not a raw HTML dump, not a headless browser fleet to run, and not a brittle parser to maintain. One call crawls a public page, renders its JavaScript and returns clean markdown or typed JSON, built for RAG pipelines and AI agents.

LLM-ready output

Clean markdown or typed JSON with the boilerplate stripped, so the data drops straight into a vector store, a prompt or an agent without a cleanup step.

JavaScript rendered

Each page loads in a real browser environment before extraction, so single-page apps and client-rendered content come back complete, not as an empty shell.

Compliance-first

ClawEngine works on public, permitted data only. It respects robots.txt and site Terms of Service and honors crawl-delay, so responsible scraping is the default.

Code examples

The known-site half of this job in one request

When the agent already knows which site it needs, there is no search to pay for and no result list to scrape one page at a time. One call crawls from the start URL, renders JavaScript, respects robots.txt and returns one typed record per page.

curl Crawl a pricing section and return typed records per page

curl https://clawengine.ai/v1/crawl \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CLAWENGINE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://www.example.com/pricing",
    "limit": 25,
    "render": true,
    "format": "structured",
    "schema": {
      "plan_name": "string",
      "monthly_price": "string",
      "included_usage": "string",
      "overage_rule": "string"
    }
  }'

# The POST answers 202 with the crawl id. Read the pages when it completes:
curl https://clawengine.ai/v1/crawl/<id> \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CLAWENGINE_API_KEY"

# No search step and no per-result scrape to budget for.
# Each page comes back as one record in your schema.

Firecrawl vs Exa AI, the questions buyers ask

Is Exa better than Firecrawl?

For finding pages, yes. Exa ranks results by meaning over its own index, filters by category and can return up to 100 results per search, which Firecrawl search does not try to match. For collecting pages you already know, no. Firecrawl crawls and maps whole domains, and Exa only follows a limited number of links from each result. Choose by whether the agent starts from a question or a site.

Is Exa cheaper than Firecrawl?

It depends on the call. For plain pages Firecrawl is slightly cheaper, $0.83 per 1,000 on Standard billed yearly against $1 on Exa Contents. For a search where the agent reads the results Exa is cheaper, $4 to $7 per 1,000 with the text of ten results included, against about $9.96 on Firecrawl once each result is scraped. At low volume Exa wins on its $10 monthly credit and no subscription.

What is the difference between Exa and Firecrawl?

Exa is a search engine and Firecrawl is a scraper. Exa keeps a neural index of the web and answers a query with ranked pages and their text. Firecrawl takes a URL or a domain and returns the content of those pages, crawling the links between them. Each has added a version of the other feature, but the pricing and the strengths still follow where each one started.

Can Exa crawl a whole website like Firecrawl?

No. Exa has no crawl or map endpoint. Its Contents endpoint accepts a subpages count that follows links from each starting URL, steered by a subpageTarget hint, and Exa describes this as a bounded hop from a known URL rather than full-domain enumeration. To capture every page of a site you need a crawler such as Firecrawl or ClawEngine, which walk the link graph within the limits you set.

Does Firecrawl have a search API?

Yes. Firecrawl search costs 2 credits per 10 results and draws on the same credit balance as scraping, so the Standard plan covers 50,000 searches a month if you only want links. Scraping a result is billed as a normal page at 1 credit, or 5 with JSON output. It is a web search with scraping attached, not a semantic index like Exa.

How much does Exa cost?

Exa is prepaid with no subscription. Search is $4 per 1,000 requests on Instant and $7 on Fast or Auto, with up to 10 results and their contents included. Deep search is $12 to $15, Answer $5, Monitors $15, and Contents $1 per 1,000 pages for each view. Each result above ten adds $1 per 1,000. Every account gets $10 of credit a month.

How much does Firecrawl cost?

Firecrawl has a free tier of 1,000 credits a month, then Hobby at $16 a month for 5,000 credits, Standard at $83 for 100,000, Growth at $333 for 500,000 and Scale at $599 for 1,000,000 on yearly billing, or $19, $99, $399 and $749 billed monthly. A plain page is 1 credit, JSON output 5 and a search 2 credits per 10 results.

Firecrawl vs Exa vs Tavily, which should I use?

Use Firecrawl when you know the sites and want every page as markdown. Use Exa when the agent needs semantic search over a broad index and reads what it finds. Use Tavily when you want a simple search tool for an agent framework with credit plans rather than a prepaid balance. Many teams pair one search API with one crawler, because no single vendor is cheapest at both jobs.

Can I use Exa and Firecrawl together?

Yes, and it is a common setup. Exa finds the right domains or pages for an open question, then Firecrawl crawls those sites in full when the agent needs every page rather than ten results. You pay both meters, so keep the search step small and let the crawl carry the volume. A crawled page costs less than a tenth of a cent on either vendor.

What is a good alternative to Firecrawl and Exa?

It depends on the half you are replacing. For search, Tavily, Linkup and Parallel are the closest to Exa. For crawling known sites into markdown, Jina Reader, Spider and Crawl4AI compete with Firecrawl. If the output you need is typed records from whole public sites, ClawEngine crawls, renders JavaScript and extracts to your schema at a flat per-page price from $99 a month.

Good questions

Questions about Firecrawl vs Exa

On Firecrawl it is exactly the Standard plan: 100,000 credits for $83 a month billed yearly or $99 monthly. On Exa Contents it is $100 for one view, or about $90 after the $10 monthly credit, and $200 if you ask for text and highlights together. The two are within a few dollars for plain text. Firecrawl pulls ahead above 500,000 pages, where Scale works out at $0.60 per 1,000.

For links only, Firecrawl needs 100,000 credits, which is Standard at $83 to $99, and Exa costs $200 on Instant or $350 on Fast. Reading all ten results changes it. Firecrawl then needs 600,000 credits, which is Growth at $333 plus about $200 of extra credit packs, or Scale at $599 billed yearly. Exa stays at $200 or $350 because the content of ten results is already in the price.

Firecrawl JSON output is 5 credits a page, so 500,000 credits, which is Growth at $333 a month billed yearly or $399 monthly. Exa is $100 for a schema on the summary view alone, or $200 if you also keep the page text. ClawEngine includes schema extraction from Startup at $99, with up to 900 model-mapped pages a month on that plan and 3,500 on Scale. Pages that publish the fields as schema.org data are mapped without the model and sit outside that cap.

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Point ClawEngine at a public page and one call crawls, renders the JavaScript and extracts clean markdown or typed JSON, ready for your RAG pipeline or AI agent. Public, permitted data only.

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