The short version
- Choose Exa if your app needs to find pages across the whole web by meaning, with clean content, highlights or summaries for each result.
- Choose SarvCrawl if you need a known set of sites and documents crawled, parsed and kept searchable as your own knowledge base.
SarvCrawl and Exa, side by side
| SarvCrawl | Exa | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Crawl-to-knowledge-base API | Search engine for AI over its own web index |
| Best for | Content you want to search — web pages and documents together | Finding relevant pages across the whole web |
| Output | Markdown, HTML, JSON, links, images | Results with text, highlights, summaries or structured output |
| JavaScript rendering | Yes, where a page needs it | Not a documented focus |
| Documents | PDF, Office, EPUB, images and audio; OCR for scans | Not a documented focus |
| Chunking, embeddings, search | Built in (search on paid plans) | Searches its own web index; no index of your content |
| Anti-bot and proxies | Not the focus | Not the focus |
| Pricing | 1 billion free tokens, no card; paid plans | $10 free credit a month; search from $4 per 1,000 requests |
| Hosting and licence | Hosted, or self-host: Apache-2.0 with an AGPL-3.0 engine | Hosted; SDKs and MCP server are MIT |
| Integrations | REST, Node, Python, CLI, n8n, 21 MCP tools | Python and JS SDKs, MCP server, LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, n8n |
Where they really differ
Exa is a search engine built for machines: it maintains its own index of the web, answers queries with results and their content — full text, highlights or LLM summaries — and adds deep search, answers, monitors and Websets for building lists. If the question is 'what on the web is relevant to this', it is one of the strongest answers.
It is priced per request: from $4 per 1,000 searches and $1 per 1,000 pages of content, with a monthly free credit. It can fetch subpages of a result, but it is not a site crawler, and there is no place to put your own documents.
SarvCrawl works from the other direction. You choose the sources, it crawls whole sites and parses PDFs, Office files and scans, and everything lands in a knowledge base that is chunked, embedded and searchable — your corpus, rather than the web.
Using both
Use Exa to discover relevant sources across the web, then crawl the ones that matter into SarvCrawl so your app can search them in depth and keep them fresh with monitors.
SarvCrawl vs Exa: questions
Is SarvCrawl an Exa alternative?
For searching a corpus you choose, yes. For discovering pages across the whole web, Exa is built for that and SarvCrawl is not.
Can Exa search my private documents?
No. It searches its own index of the public web. SarvCrawl indexes the sites and files you give it, with search on paid plans.
How is Exa priced?
Pay as you go: from $4 per 1,000 searches, $1 per 1,000 pages of content, with $10 of free credit each month.
Does Exa crawl whole websites?
It can fetch a limited number of subpages per result. SarvCrawl's crawl endpoint follows links across a whole site, bounded by depth, page limit and exclude paths.