Exa vs Stytch
AI search API for developers — neural + keyword hybrid for agents
vs. Authentication platform for B2C and B2B
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
Stytch
Free
10,000 MAU. Unlimited orgs. 5 SSO/SCIM connections. 1,000 M2M tokens. 10,000 fraud fingerprints. Full auth suite.
Free
Pay as you go
Usage-based after free allowances. Volume discounts for high MAU.
$0 base (usage-based)
Enterprise
Custom. 99.99% SLA, private Slack, migration assistance, HIPAA/BAA.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on Exa vs free on Stytch.
| Metric | Exa | Stytch |
|---|---|---|
| fraud fingerprints included | — | 10000 fingerprints/month |
| m2m tokens included | — | 1000 tokens |
| mau included | — | 10000 users/month |
| organizations | — | unlimited orgs |
| sso connections included | — | 5 conns |
Features
Exa · 13 features
- Answer API — Query → direct answer with citations.
- Category Filter — Filter to news, research papers, company, github, tweet, pdf, financial report, …
- Contents API — Retrieve cleaned full-text + summaries from URLs.
- Custom Datasets (Ent) — Enterprise: private indexing of your own corpus.
- Deep Reasoning Search — Adds LLM reasoning on top of Deep Search.
- Deep Search — Multi-hop iterative search for complex queries.
- Find Similar — Given a URL, find semantically similar pages.
- Highlights — Extract most-relevant passages per result.
- Livecrawl — Fetch pages on-demand (bypass cache) for freshness-critical queries.
- MCP Server — Official Exa MCP for Claude Code / Cursor / Agents.
- Monitors — Scheduled recurring search → alerts on new results.
- Search API — Neural + keyword web search for agents. Returns ranked URLs.
- Summaries — LLM-generated page summaries.
Stytch · 15 features
- B2B Auth — Multi-tenant auth: organizations, roles, JIT provisioning, enterprise SSO, SCIM.
- B2C Auth — Consumer auth: passwordless (magic links, OTP), passwords, OAuth, passkeys, WebA…
- Device Fingerprinting — Fingerprint devices at signup/login. Block bots, credential stuffing, and ATO at…
- Device-Fingerprint Risk API — Real-time risk scoring API usable even without full auth.
- Enterprise SSO (OIDC) — OIDC SSO per organization.
- Enterprise SSO (SAML) — SAML 2.0 SSO per organization. Self-serve admin portal.
- JIT Provisioning — Auto-create users in an org on first SSO sign-in.
- Machine-to-Machine — Client-credentials OAuth for service-to-service.
- OAuth / Social — Google, Apple, Microsoft, GitHub, Slack, Discord, Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon, Bi…
- Organizations — Multi-tenant primitive with policies per org.
- Passkeys (WebAuthn) — FIDO2 passkey enrollment and authentication.
- Passwordless — Magic links (email) + OTP (email/SMS/WhatsApp) + embeddable magic links.
- RBAC — Roles and permissions per organization (B2B).
- SCIM Provisioning — Directory user/group provisioning from Okta, Azure, Google Workspace.
- Sessions — JWT or opaque session tokens. Configurable lifetime.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Exa | Stytch |
|---|---|---|
| SDK | exa-js, exa-py | Android SDK, Go backend SDK, iOS SDK, Java backend SDK, JavaScript SDK, Next.js SDK, Node backend SDK, Python backend SDK, React SDK, Ruby backend SDK |
| REST | Exa REST API | B2B API, B2C API |
| MCP | Exa MCP Server | — |
| OTHER | Exa Dashboard | — |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Exa and Stytch are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
Want this comparison in your AI agent's context? Install the free Staxly MCP server.