Exa vs Tavily vs Firecrawl vs Browserbase
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Exa
Web search and retrieval API built for AI agents and apps
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Firecrawl
Scrapes any site into LLM-ready markdown for RAG and agents
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Browserbase
Managed-browser infrastructure for AI agents
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| RECATOOLS Score | 7.7 / 10 | 8.2 / 10 | 8.1 / 10 | 7.6 / 10 |
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| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium | Freemium | Paid |
| Free tier | 20,000 search requests per month on the free plan; startup and education grants of $1,000 in free API credits also available | 1,000 API credits/month, no credit card required | — | — |
| Paid from | API search billed at $7 per 1,000 requests (as of March 2026 pricing update) | $30/month (Researcher plan, 4,000 credits/month) | — | — |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Users | — | 1M+ developer community; 3M+ monthly SDK downloads | — | — |
| Founded | 2021 | 2024 | 2024 | 2024 |
| Maker | — | Nebius | — | — |
| Verdict | Exa earns its credibility through customer names, not just claims: Cursor, Notion AI, Cognition and OpenRouter all use it in production, and a $250M Series C at a $2.2B valuation (May 2026, led by a16z) backs that up. Th... |
Tavily is the default search API for agent builders for a reason: SDKs for Python and JS, native LangChain/LlamaIndex hooks, and clean structured output that drops straight into an LLM context window. The free tier (1,00... |
Firecrawl is the default choice for turning messy web pages into markdown an LLM can actually use — it handles JS-heavy sites, full-site crawls, and now agentic extraction, and the open-source core (over 130,000 GitHub s... |
Browserbase provides managed, scalable headless-browser infrastructure purpose-built for AI agents and web automation, with session recording, stealth/anti-bot handling, and the Stagehand SDK for natural-language browser... |
| Full review → | Full review → | Full review → | Full review → |
Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.