Two peas, one pod
Exa vs Firecrawl
By Sophie Filer · checked against both servers on 27 Oct 2026
Exa answers "find me pages about this": it is a search engine whose results come back with the page text attached. Firecrawl answers "get me everything on these pages": it scrapes, crawls whole sites and pulls structured data. For an assistant that needs to look things up, start with Exa; for reading or extracting from known sites, Firecrawl.
Firecrawl
Scrape pages, crawl sites and search, returned as clean Markdown.
Side by side
| Compared | Exa | Firecrawl |
|---|---|---|
| Made by | Exa Labs | Firecrawl (Mendable) |
| Main job | Search with page text included | Scraping, crawling and extraction |
| Tools | Two by default: search and fetch | Many: scrape, crawl, map, search, extract, monitors |
| Whole-site crawls | No | Yes, with limits and path filters |
| Hosted URL | Yes, no install | Yes, though our config runs the npm package |
| Pays by | Exa credit | Firecrawl credits per page, crawl or search |
| Tools | 2 (2 only read) | 28 (17 only read) |
| Context its tools take | At least ~300 tokens | At least ~5,500 tokens |
| Runs on | Your computer or hosted | Your computer |
| You need | An Exa API key for the local server | A Firecrawl account and API key (there is a free tier); Node.js 18 or newer |
| Our install check | Started in our test | Started in our test |
| Licence | – | MIT |
| GitHub stars | 5.2K | 7.7K |
| Last commit | 19 Oct 2026 | 26 Oct 2026 |
Stars and commit dates refresh daily; tool counts come from our own run of each server.
Pick Exa if
- You want search with sources in ChatGPT, Claude or Cursor in two minutes
- Questions are open-ended and you do not know which sites hold the answer
- You want a small tool list that does not crowd the model
Pick Firecrawl if
- You already know the site and need its pages as clean Markdown
- You want structured fields (prices, specs, listings) pulled out of pages
- You need to map or crawl a docs site or a whole domain
Can you run both?
They pair well: Exa to find the right pages, Firecrawl to read a site in depth once you know where to look. If you only add one, Exa covers more everyday questions with less setup.