Exa vs Zapier
AI search API for developers — neural + keyword hybrid for agents
vs. The OG automation platform — 8,000+ app integrations + Zapier Copilot AI
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
Zapier
Free
100 tasks/month. Two-step Zaps. Zapier Copilot with daily limits. Unlimited Zaps, Tables, Interfaces.
Free
Professional
$19.99/month annual. Multi-step Zaps. Unlimited premium apps. Webhooks. Email + chat support. AI fields.
$20/mo
Team
$69/month annual. 25 users. Shared Zaps/folders. Shared connections. SAML SSO. Premier support.
$69/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Unlimited users, advanced admin, VPC peering, observability, TAM.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on Exa vs free on Zapier.
| Metric | Exa | Zapier |
|---|---|---|
| No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers. | ||
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.
Zapier · 18 features
- AI Actions — LLM-powered actions inside Zaps (summarize, extract, classify).
- Chatbots — AI chatbots that trigger Zaps.
- Code by Zapier — Run JS or Python inside a Zap step.
- Delays — Schedule step execution.
- Filters — Condition-based step skipping.
- Formatter — Data transforms (date, text, number, utilities).
- Paths — If/else branching inside Zaps.
- Premier Support — Team+ chat + email priority.
- SAML SSO — Team+ SAML authentication.
- Storage by Zapier — Simple key-value store across Zaps.
- Webhooks by Zapier — Custom HTTP triggers + actions.
- Zapier Agents — Autonomous AI agents with 8k+ app access.
- Zapier Canvas — Visual workflow diagrams for planning.
- Zapier Copilot — Build Zaps from natural-language description.
- Zapier Interfaces — No-code forms + pages + chatbots from Zaps.
- Zapier MCP — Bring 8k+ Zapier integrations to Claude + other MCP clients.
- Zapier Tables — No-code DB integrated with Zaps.
- Zaps (workflows) — Multi-step automations across apps.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Exa | Zapier |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | — | Zapier Platform CLI |
| SDK | exa-js, exa-py | — |
| REST | Exa REST API | Zapier Platform API |
| MCP | Exa MCP Server | Zapier MCP |
| OTHER | Exa Dashboard | Webhooks by Zapier, Zapier Web App |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Exa and Zapier are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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