Staxly

Exa vs LangSmith

AI search API for developers — neural + keyword hybrid for agents
vs. LLM observability, testing & evaluation — by LangChain

Exa websiteLangSmith website

Pricing tiers

Exa

Free Tier
1,000 requests/month at no cost. Access to all core products.
Free
Pay-as-you-go
Usage-based per endpoint. No monthly minimum.
$0 base (usage-based)
Startup + Education Grants
$1,000 in free credits for qualifying projects.
$0 base (usage-based)
Enterprise
Custom. High-volume, custom datasets, rate limits, SLA, dedicated support.
Custom
Exa website

LangSmith

Developer (Free)
Free forever. 5,000 traces/month. 14-day retention. 1 seat. Basic evaluations.
Free
Plus
$39/seat/month. 10k base traces included ($2.50 per 1k overage). Full evaluations, custom dashboards, email support.
$39/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Self-host option, SSO, custom retention, dedicated support.
Custom
LangSmith website

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing free on Exa vs developer on LangSmith.

MetricExaLangSmith
No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers.

Features

Exa · 13 features

  • Answer APIQuery → direct answer with citations.
  • Category FilterFilter to news, research papers, company, github, tweet, pdf, financial report,
  • Contents APIRetrieve cleaned full-text + summaries from URLs.
  • Custom Datasets (Ent)Enterprise: private indexing of your own corpus.
  • Deep Reasoning SearchAdds LLM reasoning on top of Deep Search.
  • Deep SearchMulti-hop iterative search for complex queries.
  • Find SimilarGiven a URL, find semantically similar pages.
  • HighlightsExtract most-relevant passages per result.
  • LivecrawlFetch pages on-demand (bypass cache) for freshness-critical queries.
  • MCP ServerOfficial Exa MCP for Claude Code / Cursor / Agents.
  • MonitorsScheduled recurring search → alerts on new results.
  • Search APINeural + keyword web search for agents. Returns ranked URLs.
  • SummariesLLM-generated page summaries.

LangSmith · 14 features

  • AlertsThreshold alerts on latency, cost, eval metrics.
  • Annotation QueuesHuman-review workflows for trace quality rating.
  • Custom DashboardsAggregate metrics dashboards per project/tag.
  • DatasetsCollect examples → use as eval sets or training data.
  • EvaluationsLLM-as-judge, embedding similarity, custom Python evaluators, offline batch eval
  • LangChain IntegrationAuto-trace any LangChain/LangGraph run with env var.
  • LangGraph IntegrationFirst-class trace + eval for LangGraph agents.
  • LLM TracingAutomatic trace every LLM call + tool call + chain step.
  • OpenTelemetry ExportExport traces as OTLP to Datadog/Honeycomb/etc.
  • PlaygroundTest prompts + models inline before deploying.
  • Prompt CanvasVisual prompt editor with live test + eval.
  • Prompt HubPublic + private prompt library with versioning.
  • Self-Hosted (Enterprise)Docker + k8s deployment in your infra.
  • Threads + SessionsGroup traces into conversational sessions.

Developer interfaces

KindExaLangSmith
CLILangSmith CLI
SDKexa-js, exa-pylangsmith-js, langsmith-python
RESTExa REST APILangSmith REST API
MCPExa MCP ServerLangSmith MCP
OTHERExa DashboardLangSmith Dashboard
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Exa and LangSmith are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.

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