I tested all three across the following aspects: i) setup & level of customisation, ii) pricing, iii) professionality and support team. For some people the point 3 may not be core, but when you spend 40K+ month in api credits trust me you WANT to have a good support team. And apparently thats not given for granted as I discovered (see point 3). I want to hear your feedbacks and if you have different takes than me on this. Setup: all three are relatively easy to get running inside Claude Code or Cursor, but the onboarding flow is pretty different technically. For exa all you need is just connecting the remote MCP endpoint and optionally adding an API key/header for production scale. Firecrawl takes a bit more configuration because you can run both remote and local MCP setups, configure browser sessions, crawling and agent tooling, but once connected the infra surface is much broader. Perplexity is the most plug-and-play overall, mainly focused around quick API/MCP integration for lightweight retrieval workflows rather than deeper orchestration layers. Components / Features EXA: mostly focused around semantic retrieval and clean search infrastructure. Main tools are web_search_exa , web_fetch_exa and advanced search with domain filters, summaries, highlights, subpage crawling and date ranges. Very strong for retrieval pipelines but limited once you move into browser-level actions or autonomous workflows. Firecrawl: Much broader product surface compared to the others. It feels built for teams running agent workflows firecrawl_search firecrawl_scrape firecrawl_map firecrawl_crawl firecrawl_agent firecrawl_interact Including but not limited to persistent browser sessions, browser execute tools, JS rendering, schema extraction, markdown/html/json outputs, screenshots, browser automation, async crawling, deduplication, geo-targeting and time-based search filtering Perplexity: Great UX and solid retrieval quality for straightforward research workflows, but less flexibility once you move into more complex agent setups involving crawling, browser interaction, structured extraction or multi-step orchestration. Professionality & Support Team As I anticipated, this is core for us, as we need to interact with technical success teams often and deeply. We cant accept generic customer success team which only goal is trying to upsell stuff. Incredibly so many startups dont understand the importance of having technical ppl in your sales team. In our case, we make approx 20-30 requests per day and need responses fast EXA: Honestly very good here. Technical people. Fast responses. Competent. They actually understood infra-level questions and dont send generic docs like every non technical support team does Firecrawl: Also very solid. Surprisingly hands-on support team. Product moves insanely fast and they were willing to discuss pretty technical implementation details with us. Good developer culture overall. Even the founders jump into discussions and their un-hierarchical structure makes everything better Perplexity: probably one of the worst experiences I had recently with an API company at this scale. Very difficult communication, slow answers, vague documentation around pricing mechanics, and overall not much confidence when discussing enterprise or high-volume usage. I saw on this sub that i am not the only one submitted by /u/HorseInner2573
Originally posted by u/HorseInner2573 on r/ClaudeCode