Exa vs Vespa
Exa scores higher on the AgentReady, 92/100 against 56/100. They differ on 12 of the 41 signals. Which ones decides whether an agent can adopt them without a person watching.
What each one is
Exa. Exa is a custom search engine built for AIs, offering an API to search the largest index of public web and private information.
Vespa. Vespa.ai develops the Vespa AI Search Platform, a distributed serving engine that unifies retrieval, ranking, machine learning inference, and real-time serving for business-critical AI applications.
Where Exa is ahead
Exa passes mcp discoverable, and Vespa does not. That is discover, whether an agent can find the product at all without being told it exists.
It also holds understand: openapi / spec quality, authentication documented, request examples provided, response examples provided and errors and status codes documented. Vespa misses those.
And on adopt, programmatic credential creation and mcp integration available. Vespa misses those.
Finally, on operate, structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, rate-limit behavior predictable and agent compatibility verified. Vespa 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 87. Exa misses nothing; Vespa misses mcp discoverable.
Understand is whether an agent can read the docs and work out how the API behaves before calling it. Exa leads 100 to 46. Exa misses nothing; Vespa misses openapi / spec quality, authentication documented, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented.
Adopt. Exa leads 81 to 55. Exa misses no mandatory sales call, agent-compatible signup flow; Vespa misses no mandatory sales call, agent-compatible signup flow, programmatic credential creation, mcp integration available.
Operate. Exa leads 88 to 35. Exa misses retry behavior documented, idempotency support; Vespa misses structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable, agent compatibility verified.
Pricing
Exa starts at $0 (free tier with credits) and has a free tier. Vespa starts at $0.05/hour with no free tier.
| Exa plans | Vespa plans |
|---|---|
| - | Startup vCPU $0.05/hour, Memory GB $0.005/hour, Disk GB $0.0002/hour, GPU Memory GB $0.03/hour |
| - | Basic vCPU $0.1/hour, Memory GB $0.01/hour, Disk GB $0.0004/hour, GPU Memory GB $0.07/hour |
| - | Commercial vCPU $0.145/hour, Memory GB $0.0145/hour, Disk GB $0.0005/hour, GPU Memory GB $0.1/hour |
| - | Enterprise vCPU $0.18/hour, Memory GB $0.018/hour, Disk GB $0.0007/hour, GPU Memory GB $0.125/hour |
| - | Self Managed Contact Sales |
Signal by signal
| Signal | Exa | Vespa |
|---|---|---|
| AgentReady | 92 | 56 |
| Discovery | 100 | 87 |
| Understanding | 100 | 46 |
| Adoption | 81 | 55 |
| Operability | 88 | 35 |
| Public API | Yes | Yes |
| MCP server | Yes | No |
| OpenAPI spec | Yes | Yes |
| CLI | Yes | Yes |
| llms.txt | Yes | Yes |
| Self-serve signup | Yes | Yes |
| Free tier | Yes | No |
Which to pick
Exa clears more of the signals an agent needs, so it is the safer default for unattended use. Full profiles: Exa and Vespa. Alternatives to each: Exa, Vespa.
An agent can fetch this as data: POST /v1/compare {"slugs": ["exa", "vespa"]}