Exa vs Tessary
Exa and Tessary are both developer tools tools. Exa is aimed at developers and enterprise, while Tessary is aimed at developers and small businesses. Both have a free plan.
Web search and content API built for AI agents and LLM apps
Open-source monitoring that finds why production AI agents fail
| Pricing | Freemium | Open source |
| Starting price | Not published | Not published |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Built for | Developers, Enterprise, Small businesses | Developers, Small businesses, Enterprise |
| Platforms | web | web, linux |
| 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 Tessary if
Engineering teams running AI agents in production with OpenTelemetry traces who want every trace checked and failures explained.
- Apache 2.0 open source with free self-hosting
- Checks every trace instead of a sampled subset
- RCA links failures to specific commits when a repo is connected
Look elsewhere if: Teams that want a mature, fully supported observability suite or an eval-first workflow (Datadog, Braintrust).
Exa vs Tessary 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
Tessary
- Open Source$0Self-host with Docker Compose; all core features
- Cloud Free$010k traces/mo, 1 GB, 30-day retention, $10 one-time RCA credit
- PaidCustomCustom classifiers, managed dedicated instance, Slack 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
Tessary · Key features
- Classifiers run on every production trace with no sampling
- Built-in checks for drift, tool errors, secret leaks and malformed output
- LLM triage groups real deviations into trackable cases
- Root-cause analysis over failing traces and your GitHub repository
- OTLP ingestion over HTTP and gRPC with OpenTelemetry gen_ai conventions
- PII redaction before traces are stored
Cons
- Very new project with a short track record
- Paid plan prices are not published
- Frustration classifier requires your own OpenRouter or TypeSafe key
Exa vs Tessary: FAQ
Do Exa and Tessary have a free plan?
Yes, both Exa and Tessary have a free plan; paid plans add more usage and features.