Exa answers a question most search APIs cannot. Ask it for pages about a concept, or companies like this one, or research similar to that paper, and it returns semantically relevant results from an index it has already built. That neural relevance is the whole point, and for discovery it is very good. Exa runs its queries over a prebuilt index of web pages rather than crawling the live web at request time, which is exactly what makes semantic ranking fast and precise.
The limit shows up when the page you actually need is not in that index yet, or is protected, or has changed since it was last crawled. An index can only return what it has already captured. Anakin starts from the other end: point it at a specific URL, including one behind Cloudflare or a login, and it fetches that page live and returns structured data from it. The two tools are answering different halves of the same job, and knowing which half you are on decides which one you reach for.
Two different jobs
Exa is a neural search engine with an API. You send a query, and it ranks pages from its own index of the web using embeddings-based semantic search, with dedicated entity indexes for companies, people, and research papers. Its /contents, /answer, /findSimilar, and /research endpoints all sit on top of that index. The design assumption is that the page you want has already been crawled and is waiting to be surfaced.
Anakin is a general web-data platform built around live fetching. The URL Scraper takes any URL and returns the page as it is right now. Crawl walks a whole site, Map discovers its links, the Browser API drives a real browser over CDP, and a Search API covers the discovery half of the job by returning full page content rather than a list of links. The design assumption is the opposite of an index: the page might be brand new, long-tail, dynamic, or actively defended, and the platform is built to reach it on demand and hand back content or structured JSON shaped to your schema.
Discovery over an index versus fetching the live page
This is the wedge, and it is worth stating plainly rather than as a knock. Exa is excellent at discovery. When the question is "which pages are about X," searching a curated index gives fast, semantically ranked answers that a keyword scrape cannot match. Exa can also pull content: its /contents endpoint returns clean text, highlights, and summaries for a URL, and can live-crawl on demand when you pass maxAgeHours=0. For freshness-sensitive lookups that flag matters, and Exa documents it openly.
What Exa does not present itself as is an extraction-first scraper. There are no proxy, anti-bot, or CAPTCHA guarantees in its product surface, because bypassing site defenses is not the job an index is built for. When a target sits behind Cloudflare, DataDome, or Akamai, or has simply not been crawled into the index, the honest answer from an index-first tool is a gap: fill-rate empties, stale snapshots, or missing long-tail pages.
Anakin is built for exactly that gap. Residential IP rotation, fingerprint variation, and CAPTCHA handling run automatically with no configuration, and the platform is built to get through Cloudflare, Akamai, PerimeterX, and DataDome. Pages behind a login are reachable through Browser Sessions, which hold an authenticated session encrypted with AES-256-GCM and isolated per user. The point is not that one tool is smarter. It is that discovery over an index and live extraction from a defended page are two different problems, and Anakin owns the second one.
Pricing and how you get billed
Exa sells pay-as-you-go with no subscription, priced per operation. By its own rate card, search runs around $7 per thousand requests for up to ten results, contents around $1 per thousand pages, and answer around $5 per thousand, with a free tier of credits to start. For discovery-heavy workloads that per-query model is clean and predictable.
Anakin bills per credit. A scrape is one credit, JavaScript rendering is included rather than a surcharge, and you are charged only on success, so failed requests and cache hits cost nothing. Purchased credits do not expire. The two models price different things: Exa prices queries against an index and content pulls from it, while Anakin prices successful retrievals of specific pages, including the ones that require getting past a defense. The live per-plan numbers sit on the Anakin pricing page.
| Exa | Anakin | |
|---|---|---|
| Core model | Neural search over a prebuilt index | Live fetch of a specific URL |
| Best at | Semantic discovery of pages and entities | Extracting a specific or protected page |
| Freshness | Index snapshot, live-crawl via maxAgeHours=0 | Fetched live on every call |
| Anti-bot | Not the product | Beats Cloudflare, Akamai, DataDome |
| Behind login | Out of scope | Browser Sessions, AES-256-GCM |
| Structured JSON | Schema output via /research | outputSchema on any page |
| Billing | Per request, per operation | Per credit, charged only on success |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA, Zero Data Retention | SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001:2022, GDPR |
What the call looks like
Anakin starts from a URL, submits a job, and returns the content when it is ready.
curl -s -X POST https://api.anakin.io/v1/url-scraper \
-H "X-API-Key: $ANAKIN_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"url": "https://example.com/product/9912", "country": "us"}'The call returns a jobId. Poll GET /v1/url-scraper/{id} until the status reads completed, and the page comes back. Add an outputSchema and the response is JSON shaped to it, on any page you choose, whether or not it has ever been indexed.
Structured output
Both tools can return JSON rather than raw text. Exa does it through an outputSchema parameter on its answer and research endpoints, which returns the response as structured JSON matching your schema, with citations, synthesized from sources in its index. Anakin does it through an outputSchema parameter on the URL Scraper, which constrains the response to JSON shaped to your schema for a single page you name. The difference is the input: Exa structures an answer drawn from what it has indexed, Anakin structures the exact page you send it, including one the index has never seen.
Discovery is not only Exa now
If switching away from an index means losing semantic discovery, that gap is smaller than it looks. Anakin's Search API returns full page content and citations rather than just links, and its Agentic Research runs a plan, search, read, verify, and answer loop across many sources with citations. That covers the discovery half of a workflow while keeping live extraction of any specific target in the same platform, under one API key.
Compliance
Give Exa its due here. Exa's trust posture is genuinely strong: it documents SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA, and a Zero Data Retention policy. HIPAA and Zero Data Retention are a real Exa edge, and for a team handling regulated data that pair is worth naming. Anakin documents SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001:2022, and GDPR, with data encrypted in transit and at rest and Browser Sessions isolated per user under AES-256-GCM. ISO 27001:2022 is Anakin's edge on the certification side. The right read is that both companies take compliance seriously and each documents a slightly different set, so the deciding factor is which controls your review actually requires.
When Exa is the right call
If the job is semantic discovery, finding pages about a concept, companies like a given one, or research similar to a paper, Exa is purpose-built and hard to beat. Its neural relevance is real, its entity indexes for companies, people, and publications are a genuine asset, /findSimilar and the /research agent are strong, instant search returns in well under 200 milliseconds, and it ships an MCP server plus LangChain, LlamaIndex, and CrewAI integrations. For discovery over the indexed web, it earns its place.
The bottom line
The real question is whether you are searching or fetching. If you need to discover which pages are relevant to an idea, an index like Exa is a great answer and a fast one. If you need the specific page behind the result, the fresh one, the long-tail one, or the one behind Cloudflare or a login, an index can only return what it already crawled. That is a live-extraction problem, and it is what Anakin is built for: any URL, fetched on demand, past the defenses, structured to your schema, charged only on success.