Exa is a search API that developers use to build account lists. Ocean ranks your market from your own won and lost deals, with no engineer to maintain it.
Used by teams at
ExaGiving developers and agents a neural search index to find companies and people.
Exa is a search engine built for AI, with its own neural web index sold as an API. Its Websets product finds large sets of companies or people that match plain-English criteria and checks each result against them. It also powers search inside HubSpot.
Giving revenue teams a maintained ICP model and a ranked market, with no engineer.
Ocean is contextual intelligence for go-to-market. It reads what every company actually does from its own website, learns what good looks like from your closed-won and closed-lost deals, and ranks your whole market against it, with the reason behind each score. The ranked accounts arrive in your CRM, your rep queue or your AI agents.
What buyers weigh, grouped by the job each part does. A green check marks the stronger side.
| Topic | Ocean.io logo Ocean | Exa |
|---|---|---|
| Finding the right accounts | ||
| Lookalikes from your closed-won deals | Ocean is stronger here. Core of the product. Segments and models learned from your won and lost CRM deals. | You write the criteria. Websets returns results that match or don’t. |
| Ranking against your best customers | Ocean is stronger here. Scores every account against segments learned from your wins. | A match or no match against the criteria you stated. |
| Verification of each result | Ocean is stronger here. Segment, score, tier and matched signals on every account and every export. | Websets checks each result against each criterion you write. |
| Search quality | Reads what each company does from its own website. | Exa is stronger here. Its own neural web index, with strong semantic matching. |
| Contacts and data | ||
| Contacts | Ocean is stronger here. Verified emails and direct phones from a waterfall across 16+ data sources. Charged only when a contact is found, and exports are free. | People search, plus email and phone enrichment priced per run. |
| Company data | 85M+ companies, built from the open web. | The open web, plus 211M local businesses through Exa Places. |
| Workflow and pricing | ||
| CRM delivery | Ocean is stronger here. Two-way with HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive and Attio. Reads your deals to learn, then writes scores, segments and signals back. | API and CSV. You build the pipe to your CRM. |
| Who runs it | Ocean is stronger here. Revenue teams, with no engineering. | Developers and GTM engineers. |
| Pricing | Ocean is stronger here. Two ways to buy: a flat-rate plan with credits included, or a custom plan built around your deals and credit volume. | Search from $4 per 1,000 requests, and Websets from $49 a month. |
Exa publishes its prices, and they’re by usage. What a list costs depends on how many results and runs you use.
Exa launched Exa 3.0 on October 19, 2026, with a new $4 Lite search tier, and says it has passed $100M in annualized revenue. Cheaper, better search makes building your own account lists easier.
A flat-rate plan with credits included, or a custom plan built around your deals.
Contacts are charged only when one is found. Exports are free.
See Ocean pricingYou can build a list with Exa. Ocean gives you a maintained model of your ICP.
Choose Exa if Ocean.io logo Use both ifFive steps. Most teams keep Exa for search and use Ocean for the ranking.
Find your monthly request and credit use, and what a full run across your market costs.
Keep the criteria and lists your agents use today, so you can compare them with Ocean on the same accounts.
Connect HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive or Attio. Ocean reads your closed-won and closed-lost deals to learn what a good account looks like.
Ocean proposes segments and scores, with the reason on each. Correct anything that doesn’t match how you sell.
Scores, segments and matched signals go back to your CRM, or into Apollo, Instantly or Lemlist sequences.
The right alternative depends on what you use Exa for. Here’s what each is built for and where Ocean starts.
ClayBuilt for GTM engineers who assemble custom enrichment and research workflows from many data sources.
Where Ocean starts Ocean starts from your closed-won deals and ranks the market, instead of a build.
tregBuilt for Technical founders who give a coding agent thousands of data APIs at provider cost.
Where Ocean starts Ocean tells the agent which companies to spend those calls on.
ExploriumBuilt for Teams and AI agents that need a B2B data foundation for go-to-market.
Where Ocean starts Ocean ships the ranking itself, learned from your deals, instead of a data layer you build on.
LandbaseBuilt for Teams that want natural-language audience search and outreach from one AI platform.
Where Ocean starts Ocean learns from your own closed-won deals and leaves outreach to the tools you already use.
DiscoLikeBuilt for Teams that find every company in a market, then check ICP fit, signals and contacts.
Where Ocean starts Ocean learns what a good account looks like from your closed-won deals, then ranks the whole market against it.
Short answers on Exa’s cost, what Websets does, how Ocean compares and when to build or buy.
Search runs from $4 per 1,000 requests on Lite to $12 on Deep. Websets starts at $49 a month and Pro is $449, with usage metered separately.
A list-building product that finds large sets of companies or people matching plain-English criteria and checks each result against them. It charges only for matches.
You can build a list. Ocean gives you a maintained ICP model, a ranked market and projected pipeline, without an engineer owning it.
No. You write the criteria, and Websets returns matches. Ocean learns the ICP from your won and lost deals.
Yes. Use Exa for open-ended research, and Ocean to rank which accounts fit your best customers.
Ocean reads what each company does from its own website, learns from your closed-won and closed-lost deals, and returns ranked matches with the reason on each one.
Connect your CRM so Ocean reads your won and lost deals, review the segments and scores it proposes, then compare them with the lists your Exa workflow builds.
