Exa vs Hookdeck
Exa and Hookdeck are both developer tools tools. Exa is aimed at developers and enterprise, while Hookdeck is aimed at developers and small businesses. Both have a free plan.
Web search and content API built for AI agents and LLM apps
Event gateway that queues, routes and retries inbound webhooks
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium · $39 |
| Starting price | Not published | $39/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Built for | Developers, Enterprise, Small businesses | Developers, Small businesses, Enterprise |
| Platforms | web | web |
| Country | US · 2021 | CA |
| Rating | — | — |
Choose Exa if
Developers and AI teams who need a fast, controllable web search and content layer for agents, RAG or research products.
- Free $10 monthly credit grant with no card required
- Lite search at $4 per 1,000 requests suits high-volume agents
- Highlights cut token usage and LLM costs compared with full pages
Look elsewhere if: Non-technical users who want a finished answer engine or chat app rather than an API (Perplexity, You.com).
Choose Hookdeck if
Engineering teams that depend on third-party webhooks and want queuing, retries and observability without building it themselves.
- Free Developer plan with 10,000 events a month
- Works with any framework, with no SDK required
- Retries are included in event pricing
Look elsewhere if: Teams that only need a local tunnel or a general workflow automation tool (ngrok, Pipedream).
Exa vs Hookdeck pricing
Exa
- Free$0$10 in credits every month plus a one-time $10 onboarding bonus
- Search Lite$4/1,000 requestsUp to 10 results per request; $1 per 1k extra results
- Search Auto$7/1,000 requestsUp to 10 results per request; AI summaries $1 per 1k pages
- Deep Search$12/1,000 requestsdeep-lite (about 4 seconds) and deep (4 to 15 seconds) types
- Contents$1/1,000 pagesPer content type; prepaid credits, no subscription or minimum
Hookdeck
- Developer$010,000 events/mo, 3-day retention, 1 user
- Team$39/moFrom $39; pay-as-you-go events, 7-day retention, unlimited users
- Growth$499/moFrom $499; 30-day retention, SSO/SCIM, HIPAA, uptime SLA
- EnterpriseCustomCustom retention, SLAs and contracts, Slack Connect support
Exa · Key features
- Search API with lite, auto, deep-lite and deep types on one independent index
- Dynamic Highlights that pass only the most relevant tokens to the model
- Contents API for full page text, highlights and AI summaries
- Agent API for cited research, list building and enrichment with structured output
- Coverage of people, companies, code, papers, ecommerce listings and local businesses
- Monitors for recurring searches and Websets for verified datasets
Cons
- No flat monthly plan, so spend rises directly with traffic
- Websets API needs a separate paid Websets plan and credits
- Benchmark leadership is reported by Exa itself
Hookdeck · Key features
- Signature verification and authentication for incoming webhooks
- Durable queues with retries and exponential backoff
- Filters, routing, fan-out, deduplication and JavaScript transformations
- Issues, alerts to Slack, Teams or PagerDuty, and bulk replay
- CLI that forwards events to a local server for development
- Terraform provider and API for configuration as code
Cons
- Event and throughput metering makes high volume costly
- Only 5 events per second per destination included before add-ons
- SSO, SCIM and HIPAA require the $499 Growth plan
Exa vs Hookdeck: FAQ
Do Exa and Hookdeck have a free plan?
Yes, both Exa and Hookdeck have a free plan; paid plans add more usage and features.