Perplexity vs Exa (formerly Metaphor)
These serve different buyers: Perplexity is a consumer research app (free core search; Pro pricing was not re-verified on 2026-10-26 and is unconfirmed in this pass), while Exa (formerly Metaphor; metaphor.systems redirects to exa.ai) is a search API for AI agents, not a consumer chat product. Starter is free with $10 in credits every month plus a $10 onboarding bonus and no payment method required; Developer is pay as you go (Lite search from $4 per 1,000 requests, Auto search $7, Deep search $12, Contents $1 per 1,000 pages, Monitors $15 per 1,000 requests, Answer from $5); Enterprise is custom. There is no Core plan on the current pricing page. If you are a human doing research, pick Perplexity. If you are a developer giving an agent live web access, pick Exa. No measured quality winner; the products do not overlap enough to rank.
| Decision point | Perplexity | Exa (formerly Metaphor) |
|---|---|---|
| Best suited to | Finding source leads for changing topics, then checking the original pages before drafting a comparison or brief. | Engineering teams building coding agents, research copilots, RAG pipelines or sales-enrichment flows that need programmatic, citation-ready web access with clean excerpts. |
| Plans and cost | Core search is free. Pro and Max prices were not re-verified on 2026-10-26 (vendor bot verification) and are unconfirmed in this pass. Confirm the regional checkout before quoting a price. | Starter: free, with $10 in credits every month plus a $10 onboarding bonus and no payment method required. Developer: pay as you go. Enterprise: custom. Endpoint prices: Lite search from $4 per 1,000 requests, Auto search $7, Deep search $12, Contents $1 per 1,000 pages, Monitors $15 per 1,000 requests, Answer from $5. Currency is not explicitly labeled. |
| Limitations | Citations make answers inspectable but do not confirm that each claim is supported or current. The free Standard plan has three Pro Searches per day and one Research query per month, with limited basic file uploads. | Pricing is per request and endpoint, and usage is metered by calls, pages and agent runs; check the endpoint table for the call type you use. Exa is a search API for agents and applications, not a consumer chat product. |
Use the same input
Build a small research assistant: feed a live query to an agent and check whether the returned results are clean, structured, and cheap enough per thousand calls.
What a successful result must preserve
The solution must return machine-readable results with excerpts, cost under $10 per 1,000 queries at low volume, and offer a no-card free tier for prototyping.
Evidence and test status
Pricing and feature comparison based on the vendors' official pages. Exa endpoint prices are from exa.ai/pricing captured on 2026-10-26; the Metaphor-to-Exa redirect was re-frozen the same day. Perplexity prices rest on the prior official review; Perplexity plan pages could not be re-captured on 2026-10-26 (vendor bot verification). No third-party pricing reads are used as a current-price basis. We did not run a scored hands-on test; no quality ranking is claimed.
- Perplexity — Official product homepage ↗ (reviewed 2026-10-15), Official product and pricing overview ↗ (reviewed 2026-10-15), Official subscription plans and limits ↗ (reviewed 2026-10-15)
- Exa (formerly Metaphor) — Official Exa homepage (formerly Metaphor) ↗ (reviewed 2026-10-26), Official Exa endpoint pricing ↗ (reviewed 2026-10-26), Former Metaphor homepage, redirects to exa.ai ↗ (reviewed 2026-10-26)