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Side-by-side features, use cases and pricing — because the right pick depends on your job and budget, not just the ranking.
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Liner
✓ verifiedFreemium
AI research and search assistant for professionals and academics, with cited answers, deep research and file uploads.
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You.com
✓ verifiedPaid
Real-time web search, page-extraction, and cited multi-step research APIs built for developers powering AI agents and LLMs.
1.3M visits/mo30K saves
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exa.ai
✓ verifiedFreemium
Search, crawling and research API built for AI agents, with token-efficient results and structured web-data enrichment.
761K visits/mo1.7K saves
Pricing
Free: $0 (advanced search, ads)
Pro: $14.99/mo billed annually (deep research, 20 uploads/day)
Max: $29.99/mo billed annually (unlimited uploads)
Team: $26.99/user/mo
Web Search API: $5.00/1k calls
Contents API: $1.00/1k pages
Research API (Lite): $12.00/1k calls
Finance Research API (Deep): $110.00/1k calls
Free trial available
Free: $0 (20,000 requests/mo)
Search: $7/1k requests
Contents: $1/1k pages
Deep Search: $12-15/1k requests
Monitors: $15/1k requests
Agent: $0.012-$1.00/run
Core features
- ✦AI agents for search, research and writing
- ✦Advanced search with cited, accurate answers
- ✦Deep research reports
- ✦File upload and analysis
- ✦Access to major AI models (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude)
- ✦Ad-free experience on paid tiers
- ✦Web Search API returning ranked results with LLM-ready snippets
- ✦Contents API for fetching clean Markdown or HTML from URLs at scale
- ✦Tiered Research API (Lite through Frontier) for cited, source-backed answers
- ✦Finance Research API covering filings, macro data, and financial calculations
- ✦Country and language targeting filters
- ✦SOC2-certified, zero-data-retention enterprise infrastructure
- ✦Python SDK, MCP server, and REST API access
- ✦Web search API tuned for agents
- ✦Full-page contents with token-efficient highlights
- ✦Asynchronous agents for deep research and enrichment
- ✦Structured outputs with grounded citations
- ✦Web monitors that track new events on a schedule
- ✦Zero data retention and SOC 2 Type II controls
Use cases
- →Conduct academic and professional research
- →Get cited answers to factual questions
- →Draft documents with AI support
- →Analyze uploaded files
- →Grounding AI agents and chatbots in current web information
- →Building research assistants that need cited, multi-source answers
- →Financial analysis tools needing sourced company and market data
- →Content aggregation pipelines needing clean page text at scale
- →Give coding agents current docs and repo context
- →Power chatbots with real-time web answers
- →Enrich company and people data at scale
- →Monitor the web for fresh events
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