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webxwebx

vs search APIs

Last reviewed 2026-10-04. Prices move — check each provider’s pricing page. webx eval --vs exa,tavily,firecrawl re-scores the same corpus identically through each engine when you have keys.

TL;DR

Section titled “TL;DR”

Exa and Tavily sell answers from indexes they own. webx is a metasearch layer + page toolkit you run — it fuses providers (ddg, brave, searxng, kagi, mojeek, hn, so, reddit, gh, npm, crates, grep.app, wikipedia, your own index) and then reads the results. Different product, overlapping job. Where webx is genuinely different: webx index + webx query --semantic gives you a private neural+lexical index — the “Exa for your own corpus” — at flat cost on your hardware.

webx Exa Tavily Brave API Sonar
Index Yours (FTS5 + embeddings) + metasearch Proprietary neural Managed aggregate Brave’s web index Managed + LLM answer
Price Free / flat license ~$7/1k searches w/contents; $5/1k answer; $12–15/1k deep research ~$8/1k PAYG basic Subscription tiers Per-token
Self-host Yes — it’s the point No No No No
Page reading First-class (scrape, --fit, render) Contents/highlights Extract + crawl Snippets only Answer text
Research webx research → cited report research endpoints Research API — Core product
Grounding check verify + citation_check — Grounding/injection defense — —

Where the APIs win

Section titled “Where the APIs win”
  • Search quality on general web queries. Owned indexes beat metasearch fusion — our own eval measured 20.5% hit@10 on the free-provider corpus vs what a dedicated index delivers. If general-web recall is the product, pay for an index. (webx’s number rises with WEBX_SEARXNG_URL/BRAVE_API_KEY.)
  • Latency. No cold fetch — answers are pre-indexed.
  • Zero ops, SLAs, and answer-quality engineering you don’t maintain.

Where webx wins

Section titled “Where webx wins”
  • Private corpus search. webx index yourdocs.com --collection eng then webx query --semantic "auth flow" — lexical + embedding fusion over your sites. None of these APIs index your private corpus for offline querying.
  • Read after search. search --scrape --highlights fuses search and extraction in one call — results arrive as clean excerpts, not URLs you still have to fetch through a second API.
  • Metering you control. Per-key quotas on your deployment vs per-call bills; agent-heavy workloads stop being a meter anxiety.
  • Provider independence. Add/drop providers per query (--site, searxng categories, domain priors). No single-index lock-in; when a provider degrades, webx doctor tells you which.

When to pick which

Section titled “When to pick which”
  • Pick Exa/Tavily for general-web search quality inside a product, deep research at scale, or when per-call pricing is simply cheaper than ops.
  • Pick webx for agent toolbelts (MCP), private/offline corpora, search+read in one hop, compliance-constrained environments, or cost-predictable high-volume workloads.
  • Compose them: webx can sit in front of Brave/SearXNG and will happily share a pipeline with Exa — search for discovery, scrape --fit for reading, index for the durable corpus.