Exa vs Serper
A side-by-side look at 2 AI & ML tools for 2026 — the verdict, pricing, ratings, features, and what readers think.
E
exa.ai
Best for Developers building AI agents and coding assistants that need fast, citable web retrieval.
A web search API built for AI agents: fast, accurate retrieval with token-efficient page contents and deep research in one endpoint.
Visit Exa
S
serper.dev
Best for Developers who want cheap, fast Google results as a search tool for agents, RAG pipelines and SEO scripts.
A fast, low-cost Google Search API that gives AI agents and apps structured SERP data in one to two seconds.
Visit SerperPricing compared
Exa
$4/1k requests
Serper
$0.3/1k queries
Head to head
| Exa | Serper | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $4/1k requests | $0.3/1k queries |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Free plan: $10 credits monthly plus $10 bonus, no card | 2,500 free queries, no credit card required |
| Platforms | Web · API | API · Web |
| HQ | San Francisco, USA | — |
Pros & cons
Exa
Pros
- 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.
Cons
- 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.
Serper
Pros
- Google-quality results (organic, knowledge graph, answer box, PAA) through a simple JSON API.
- Among the cheapest per-query pricing in the category, from $0.30 per 1,000 queries at volume.
- 2,500 free queries with no credit card make evaluation risk-free.
- Covers Search, Images, News, Maps, Places, Videos, Shopping, Scholar, Patents and Autocomplete.
- Ships as a ready-made tool in LangChain, so wiring it into an agent takes minutes.
Cons
- Returns snippets and links only; you still need a scraper or extraction API for full page content.
- Not an agent-native or semantic index, so results are not pre-chunked or token-optimised for LLMs.
- Depends on Google results, which makes it a wrapper rather than an independent search index.
- The homepage does not publish rate limits, credit expiry or company details such as HQ and founding year.
Features compared
| Exa | Serper | |
|---|---|---|
| Plans & pricing | ||
| Free tier | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Pricing model | Per usage | Per usage |
| Platforms & access | ||
| Web app | ✓ Yes | — |
| Integrations & extensibility | ||
| Public API | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Security & compliance | ||
| SOC 2 | ✓ Yes | — |
| GDPR compliant | ✓ Yes | — |