Fastcrawl vs Exa

Let's start with the honest part: Exa's search is better than ours. It's a neural, semantic search engine — it retrieves by meaning rather than matching keywords, and on open-ended queries the quality gap is real. If semantic retrieval is the core of what you're building, you should probably use Exa, and this page will tell you why.

Where the comparison gets interesting is everywhere else. Exa is pay-as-you-go with add-ons that stack, and it doesn't do crawling, PDF parsing or screenshots. Fastcrawl covers the full scraping pipeline at one flat credit per call.

Side by side

Where Exa wins

Semantic search quality. This is the headline and it's not close. Exa indexes the web for meaning, so a query like "companies whose pricing became unpredictable after scaling" returns relevant results where keyword search returns noise. Our search endpoint is keyword-based. If that's your workload, use Exa.

Search latency. Exa offers configurable latency from 180ms to 1 second, with sub-200ms options for latency-sensitive agent loops. That's faster than a typical scrape round-trip.

Specialised indexes. Exa maintains people, company and scholarly-works indexes alongside its web index, plus Exa Connect for pulling from third-party data providers. That breadth is genuinely useful for research workflows.

Where Fastcrawl wins

Predictable billing. Exa's headline rate is $7 per 1,000 searches, but the add-ons stack: every result above 10 adds $1 per 1,000, and AI page summaries add another $1 per 1,000 pages. A 25-result query with summaries costs materially more than the $7 suggests. Monitors are $15 per 1,000. With Fastcrawl it's one flat credit per call — the number of results doesn't change the price.

The scraping pipeline. Exa doesn't crawl sites, parse PDFs, or capture screenshots and PDFs. If your project needs those, you're stitching together a second provider. Fastcrawl includes all of them on one key.

Monitors included. Both products have monitors, but Exa bills them at $15 per 1,000 requests — its most expensive endpoint. Ours are one credit each, same as everything else.

No rate limit on paid. Fastcrawl's Go plan ($5/mo, 5,000 credits) has no concurrency cap. Exa's paid tier allows 10 search queries per second.

Which should you pick?

Pick Exa if your core workload is semantic search — retrieval by meaning, research workflows, or latency-sensitive agent search where quality matters more than cost predictability.

Pick Fastcrawl if you're building a scraping or monitoring pipeline — you need crawl, PDF parsing, screenshots or change detection — or you want a bill you can forecast without modelling add-on stacking.

Plenty of teams use both: Exa to decide which pages matter, Fastcrawl to fetch, render and monitor them.