Exa vs Linkup

Detailed side-by-side comparison to help you choose the right tool

Exa

🔴Developer

AI Search

Neural web search API and AI search engine built for LLM agents, with embedding-based retrieval and structured content extraction.

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Starting Price

Free
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Linkup

🔴Developer

AI Search

Production-grade web search API for AI, ranked #1 on OpenAI's SimpleQA benchmark and used by McKinsey, Cohere, and Polymarket.

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Starting Price

Custom
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Feature Comparison

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FeatureExaLinkup
CategoryAI SearchAI Search
Pricing Plans150 tiers6 tiers
Starting PriceFree
Key Features
  • • Search API optimized for AI applications
  • • Neural and keyword search modes
  • • Content extraction, highlights, and answers

    Exa - Pros & Cons

    Pros

    • ✓Neural ranking surfaces semantically relevant pages traditional SERPs miss
    • ✓Clean Markdown content extraction saves the usual scraping headaches
    • ✓Official MCP server makes Claude Desktop and Cursor integration trivial
    • ✓Generous $10 free credit and granular pay-as-you-go pricing
    • ✓/findSimilar is a unique primitive for clustering and competitive research

    Cons

    • ✗Neural mode can miss obvious navigational queries that keyword search nails
    • ✗Full content extraction multiplies per-query cost meaningfully
    • ✗Deep Research is powerful but slow and not cheap per call
    • ✗Index freshness lags real-time news vs Brave or Bing-style APIs

    Linkup - Pros & Cons

    Pros

    • ✓Top-ranked factual accuracy on OpenAI's SimpleQA benchmark
    • ✓Deep-search mode returns synthesized, citation-backed answers in one call
    • ✓Transparent per-call pricing — no opaque enterprise quotes for small teams
    • ✓Official MCP server for Claude Desktop, Cursor, and Goose
    • ✓First-class integrations with LangChain, LlamaIndex, and the Vercel AI SDK

    Cons

    • ✗Deep-search calls are seconds-slow and ~10x the cost of standard search
    • ✗Fewer query knobs than Exa or Tavily (no neural-vs-keyword toggle, less rerank tuning)
    • ✗Smaller customer-visible status page — less operational transparency than incumbents
    • ✗Index is strong on factual queries but less tuned for navigational lookups

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    🔒 Security & Compliance Comparison

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    Security FeatureExaLinkup
    SOC2✅ Yes—
    GDPR✅ Yes—
    HIPAA——
    SSO✅ Yes—
    Self-Hosted❌ No—
    On-Prem❌ No—
    RBAC✅ Yes—
    Audit Log——
    Open Source❌ No—
    API Key Auth✅ Yes—
    Encryption at Rest✅ Yes—
    Encryption in Transit✅ Yes—
    Data ResidencyUS—
    Data Retentionzero-retention-option—
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