Promptmonitor — How often does AI recommend your brand to customers? BrowserAct vs Exa AI vs Perplexity: Complete Comparison (2026)
BrowserAct is best when you need no-code, cloud browser automation and scraping that can run workflows for you. Exa AI is the strongest choice for developers building RAG and agents that need fast semantic web search, crawling, and structured outputs. Perplexity is the most accessible for end-user research and cited answers, but its Search API is more limited for raw retrieval than Exa.
Comparison Overview
| Criteria |  Perplexity |  Exa AI |  BrowserAct |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing transparency and value Measures how clear and predictable pricing is (published tiers, unit economics) and how much capability you get for the cost at typical usage levels. | 7Freemium access is easy, but API and higher-tier pricing details are less concrete publicly. | 8Clear paid tiers and credits, plus multiple free-credit paths for testing and startups. |
Choosing between BrowserAct, Exa AI, and Perplexity usually comes down to what you’re trying to automate: actions in a browser, retrieval of web data for an app, or getting a cited answer quickly.
BrowserAct is positioned as a no-code, natural-language browser automation and scraping platform. Instead of returning links, it can navigate websites, handle common anti-bot friction (like CAPTCHAs), and run always-on workflows in the cloud. That makes it closer to “AI-powered RPA for the web” than a search engine.
Exa AI is a developer-first web search and crawling API built for AI agents and RAG pipelines. It emphasizes semantic retrieval, full-page content access, structured JSON outputs, and filtering controls that help teams target specific sources or time windows. If you are building an AI product and want predictable retrieval primitives (search, crawl, contents, answer endpoints), Exa is typically evaluated as infrastructure.
Perplexity is a consumer and team-facing answer engine that combines chat UX with citations, plus deeper workflows like multi-step research and browser-agent style features. It is often compared to Exa when teams want both “answers” and an API, and compared to BrowserAct when the job is not just finding information, but taking actions in the browser.
In practice, many teams use more than one: Perplexity for interactive research, Exa for retrieval in production systems, and BrowserAct for website workflows that require clicking, logging in, or scraping at scale.
Detailed Analysis
Pricing transparency and value
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BrowserAct
6BrowserAct offers a freemium model with 1,000 free daily credits for new users, which is attractive for trials and small recurring jobs. Beyond the free tier it is pay-as-you-go, but exact overage rates and what a “credit” maps to could not be independently verified from publicly available sources. That makes cost forecasting harder for teams planning high-volume scraping or 24/7 workflows.
Verdict
If your primary goal is automating browser work (scraping, form filling, navigating dynamic sites, scheduled runs), BrowserAct is the most directly aligned choice because it converts prompts into cloud browser workflows and emphasizes self-healing execution plus anti-bot handling.
If you are building agentic products or RAG systems and need fast semantic web search with full-page content and structured outputs, Exa AI is the most purpose-built option. Its API-first design, crawling, highlights, and filtering controls are better suited to production retrieval than answer-first tools.
If you want the best end-user research experience with cited answers, “deep research” style workflows, and broad accessibility for individuals and teams, Perplexity is the safest default. However, for developers who need raw retrieval depth (full text, richer filtering), Perplexity’s Search API constraints can be a real limiter.
Recommendation: pick BrowserAct for web automation, Exa AI for retrieval infrastructure, and Perplexity for human-in-the-loop research and cited answering. If you can only choose one for a dev stack, Exa is generally the more controllable retrieval foundation; if you can only choose one for a non-technical team, Perplexity is usually the fastest to adopt.
Frequently Asked Questions
BrowserAct vs Exa AI: which is better for web scraping at scale?
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They solve different parts of “scraping.” BrowserAct is better when scraping requires browser actions (clicking, logins, dynamic pages, CAPTCHA handling) and you want a workflow that runs in the cloud. Exa AI is better when you want programmatic web retrieval and crawling as an API for RAG, especially when semantic search, filtering, and structured JSON outputs matter more than interacting with a site like a user.
Exa AI vs Perplexity: which is better for RAG and agent grounding?
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Some details in this comparison could not be fully verified. Please double-check the following before making decisions:
- Exact pay-as-you-go pricing and credit-to-usage mapping for BrowserAct could not be independently verified from publicly available sources
- BrowserAct’s customer support SLAs, compliance attestations (for example SOC 2), and data retention policies could not be independently verified from publicly available sources
- Perplexity Pro and Max plan pricing, included API credits, and current feature gating could not be consistently verified from publicly available sources
- Perplexity Search API limits (maximum results, content length behavior across endpoints) can vary by configuration, and current defaults could not be fully verified from publicly available sources
- The cited accuracy comparison numbers between Exa AI and Perplexity depend on the methodology of a specific evaluation, which could not be independently reproduced here