Brave Search vs Exa: which search API for your agent?
Compared on the same 170-query benchmark (judge κ=0.78). On list price, Brave Search is ~1.4× cheaper.
Brave Search
Cost / 1k (list)$5.00
Quality87% (indicative)
Strong classespage lookup, direct answer, web
Exa
Cost / 1k (list)$7.00
Quality83% (indicative)
Pick Brave Search if… pick Exa if… or route both
Pick Brave Search when your queries are an independent web index with privacy. Pick Exa when your queries are academic, semantic, and page-content retrieval. On plain web/news lookups, a cheaper engine usually matches both — so don't hard-code one.
Don't pick one — route to the cheapest that clears your bar.
GroundRoute sends each query to the best-value engine and caches the result. You keep half of what the cache saves you, never more than going direct.