Bright Data vs Exa

• One platform covers proxies, unblocking, SERP, crawling, browsers, scraper APIs and ready-made datasets.
• Large proxy footprint: 400M+ residential IPs in 195 countries, plus ISP and datacenter options.
• Pay-per-use entry pricing, from $1 per 1,000 requests on Unlocker, SERP and Crawl APIs.
• Free tiers on several products and a free MCP server make agent prototyping cheap.
• Managed data acquisition and datasets let teams skip building pipelines entirely.

• Pricing differs for every product (per request, per GB, per IP, per record), so total cost is hard to forecast.
• Broader and heavier than developer-first scrapers like Firecrawl, with a steeper learning curve.
• Enterprise orientation: managed services start at $1,500 to $2,000 per month.
• Performance and customer-outcome claims on the site are vendor-published, not independently tested.

• Purpose-built for agents: returns clean contents and token-efficient highlights instead of raw HTML.
• Configurable latency, from sub-second Instant search to multi-step Deep search, in one API.
• Vertical indexes for companies, people, news, research papers and code make enrichment and coding use cases easy.
• Free starter credits with no card required make evaluation cheap.
• Official MCP server, Claude connector and ChatGPT plugin speed up integration.
• Lists SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and CCPA coverage, with zero data retention available for enterprise.

• Usage-based pricing across several endpoints (search, contents, deep search, agent) takes effort to forecast.
• Aimed at developers; there is no no-code interface for non-technical teams.
• Deep search and Agent runs cost far more per request than Instant search.
• Higher rate limits, zero data retention and HIPAA require an enterprise contract.