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Deepset vs Exa

Exa scores higher on the AgentReady, 92/100 against 44/100. They differ on 18 of the 41 signals. Which ones decides whether an agent can adopt them without a person watching.

What each one is

Deepset. Deepset is a company that provides Haystack, an open platform to build, run, and govern AI agents and applications.

Exa. Exa is a custom search engine built for AIs, offering an API to search the largest index of public web and private information.

Where Exa is ahead

Exa passes clear product positioning, public docs discoverable and llms-full.txt / full agent docs, and Deepset does not. That is discover, whether an agent can find the product at all without being told it exists.

It also holds understand: structured api reference, openapi / spec quality, authentication documented, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented and limits / constraints documented. Deepset misses those.

And on adopt, programmatic credential creation, fast time to first request, copyable quickstart and official typescript sdk. Deepset misses those.

Finally, on operate, structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, rate-limit behavior predictable and agent compatibility verified. Deepset misses those.

What neither does

Both fail no mandatory sales call, agent-compatible signup flow, retry behavior documented, idempotency support. If your agent needs any of those, you will be building it yourself either way.

Score, pillar by pillar

The AgentReady splits into four pillars, scored separately, because a product can be easy to find and still impossible to adopt.

Discover. Exa leads 100 to 67. Deepset misses clear product positioning, public docs discoverable, llms-full.txt / full agent docs; Exa misses nothing.

Understand is whether an agent can read the docs and work out how the API behaves before calling it. Exa leads 100 to 23. Deepset misses structured api reference, openapi / spec quality, authentication documented, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, limits / constraints documented; Exa misses nothing.

Adopt. Exa leads 81 to 50. Deepset misses no mandatory sales call, agent-compatible signup flow, programmatic credential creation, fast time to first request, copyable quickstart, official typescript sdk; Exa misses no mandatory sales call, agent-compatible signup flow.

Operate. Exa leads 88 to 35. Deepset misses structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable, agent compatibility verified; Exa misses retry behavior documented, idempotency support.

Pricing

Deepset starts at $0/mo and has a free tier. Exa starts at $0 (free tier with credits) and has a free tier.

Signal by signal

Which to pick

Exa clears more of the signals an agent needs, so it is the safer default for unattended use. Full profiles: Deepset and Exa. Alternatives to each: Deepset, Exa.

An agent can fetch this as data: POST /v1/compare {"slugs": ["deepset", "exa"]}