Exa vs Semantic Scholar
A side-by-side comparison to help you choose between Exa and Semantic Scholar.
| Exa | Semantic Scholar | |
|---|---|---|
| Description | AI-native search API for agents combining semantic web search, content extraction, deep research, and structured data. | Free AI-powered academic search engine for discovering, understanding, saving, citing, and programmatically accessing scholarly literature. |
| Category | 搜索研究与知识管理 | 搜索研究与知识管理 |
| Pricing | freemium · Exa is priced mainly as usage-based API infrastructure. The public pricing page lists a Free Tier, Search at $7 per 1,000 requests, Contents at $1 per 1,000 pages per content type, Deep Search at $12-15 per 1,000 requests, Monitors at $15 per 1,000 requests, Answer at $5 per 1,000 requests, and Agent runs from $0.012 to $1.00 per fixed-effort request. Enterprise is custom and adds higher limits, custom indexes, custom QPS, moderation, SLAs, MSAs, onboarding, Zero Data Retention, and volume discounts. Official pages currently use two free-tier descriptions: the pricing page says "up to 20,000 requests per month for free," while the Billing documentation says new accounts receive $10 onboarding credits and accounts with a payment method receive $7 monthly credits that expire at month end. Treat dashboard billing as the final source before committing production volume. | freemium · Semantic Scholar is officially positioned as a free, AI-powered academic search and discovery tool. The Librarian Resources page says Semantic Scholar is free and open for all to use. Core search does not require login, while a free account unlocks library folders, saved papers, alerts, Research Feeds, and author-page management. The Academic Graph API and downloadable datasets are also presented as free and open resources, but API use is governed by rate limits, data licenses, attribution requirements, and acceptable-use restrictions. No official Pro, Team, Enterprise, seat, or usage-priced plan was found. |
| Rating | 4.4 | 4.3 |
| Features | Semantic web searchContent extraction with highlightsDeep research agentsConfigurable latencyToken efficient excerpts | Search 236M+ scientific papersAI generated TLDR summariesCitation context for referencesAPI for scholarly app developmentSemantic Reader augmented reading |
| Website | Visit | Visit |
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