Crawl4AI vs Exa
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
| CRA Crawl4AI Open-source Python crawler that turns web pages into clean, LLM-ready... Visit |
Exa
Web search and retrieval API built for AI agents and apps
Visit
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| RECATOOLS Score | 8 / 10 | 7.7 / 10 |
| Capability | — | |
| Value for money | — | |
| Ease of use | — | |
| ASEAN readiness | — | |
| API quality | — | |
| Pricing | Free | Freemium |
| Free tier | Fully free and open source (Apache-2.0); self-host as a Python library or Docker server. A hosted Cloud API is in closed beta with no published pricing. | 20,000 search requests per month on the free plan; startup and education grants of $1,000 in free API credits also available |
| Paid from | — | API search billed at $7 per 1,000 requests (as of March 2026 pricing update) |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✓ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ |
| Users | — | — |
| Founded | — | 2021 |
| Maker | — | — |
| Verdict | Crawl4AI is for turning websites into LLM-ready data without paying a scraping API. It fetches pages through a real Playwright browser, strips the noise, and emits clean Markdown or structured JSON — with CSS, XPath, or... |
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... |
| Full review → | Full review → |
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Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.