Hard facts side by side: free tiers, prices, limits, SDKs and privacy. Every value links to the official page it came from and is re-checked every week.
| For agents |  Exa |  LangChain |  Anthropic (Claude API) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Yes $10 in credits each month (up to 2,500 Instant searches). Source, Sep 29, 2026 | Free & open source MIT library; LangSmith Developer plan is free with up to 5k base traces/month, 1 seat. Source, Sep 29, 2026 | Trial credits New users receive a small amount of free credits to test the API. Source, Sep 29, 2026 |
| Starting price | $4 per 1,000 searches |
Pay-as-you-go Instant search, up to 10 results per request.
| Free, open source Hosted LangSmith Plus is $39/seat/month with up to 10k base traces/month, then pay-as-you-go. Source, Sep 29, 2026 |
| $2 per 1M input tokens Claude Sonnet 5.5; $10 per 1M output tokens (Haiku 4.5 from $1 input). Source, Sep 29, 2026 |
| Rate limit | 10 QPS Default for /search, /answer and /chat/completions; /contents is 100 QPS. Source, Sep 29, 2026 | 5k traces/month LangSmith free Developer plan, then pay-as-you-go. Source, Sep 29, 2026 | 1,000 requests/min Start tier, Claude Sonnet 5.5 (2M input tokens/min); new orgs may start lower. Source, Sep 29, 2026 |
|---|
| Size limit | 100 results per query Public max for numResults; higher limits via sales. Source, Sep 29, 2026 | Not listed | 1M token context Claude Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 (Haiku 4.5: 200K). Source, Sep 29, 2026 |
|---|
| Storage | Not listed | Traces kept 14 days LangSmith base traces; extended traces kept 400 days at extra cost. Source, Sep 29, 2026 | Not listed |
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| Official SDKs | PythonJavaScript / TypeScriptSource, Sep 29, 2026 | PythonJavaScript / TypeScript | PythonJavaScript / TypeScript |
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| Open source | Not listed | Yes MIT licence Source, Sep 29, 2026 | Not listed |
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| Trains on your data | Not listed | No Runs in your own code; LangSmith states it does not use your data to train models. Source, Sep 29, 2026 | No Inputs and outputs from the Anthropic API are not used for training by default. Source, Sep 29, 2026 |
|---|
| EU hosting | Not listed | Yes LangSmith cloud offers an EU region (eu.smith.langchain.com, GCP EU). Source, Sep 29, 2026 | No Inference geo is only us or global; workspace (storage) geo is only us. Source, Sep 29, 2026 |
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| Compliance | SOC 2HIPAASource, Sep 29, 2026 | SOC 2ISO 27001GDPRHIPAASource, Sep 29, 2026 | SOC 2ISO 27001HIPAASource, Sep 29, 2026 |
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