Exa vs Living Brain
Exa and Living Brain are both AI assistants tools. Exa is aimed at developers and enterprise, while Living Brain is aimed at developers and small businesses. Only Exa has a free plan.
Web search and content API built for AI agents and LLM apps
Shared memory layer for AI agents via API, SDK, CLI and MCP
| Pricing | Freemium | Paid |
| Starting price | Not published | Not published |
| Free plan | Yes | No |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Built for | Developers, Enterprise, Small businesses | Developers, Small businesses, Enterprise |
| Platforms | web | web |
| Country | US · 2021 | — |
| 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 Living Brain if
Developers and AI-heavy teams who use several models and agents and want one portable memory layer behind them.
- Model-independent memory that follows you across AI tools
- Pay-as-you-go API with a $5 minimum and no subscription
- Many access routes: API, SDKs, CLI and MCP
Look elsewhere if: Teams that just need a note-taking app or a proven enterprise knowledge platform (Notion, Obsidian, Context Engine).
Exa vs Living Brain 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
Living Brain
- API$8 per 1M input tokens$0.50 per 1M output, prepaid from $5, 1 GB, 1 seat
- Workspace$99/mo3 seats, 10 GB; included with ChatChat Pro+, no direct checkout
- BusinessCustomDedicated, customer-cloud or on-prem deployment options
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
Living Brain · Key features
- Captures chats, files, notes and URLs into source-linked pages
- Knowledge graph with automatic connection discovery
- Hosted MCP server for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, VS Code and more
- Sign-in connection for ChatGPT and Claude without an API key
- REST API, TypeScript and Python SDKs and a CLI
- PDF, Word, PPTX and HTML extraction plus audio transcription
Cons
- Benchmark results are the vendor's own evaluations
- Docs describe the product as early access
- Workspace has no direct checkout and comes with ChatChat Pro+
Exa vs Living Brain: FAQ
Do Exa and Living Brain have a free plan?
Exa has a free plan. Living Brain has no free plan.