Skip to content
whatismyalternative

Captain

Self-tuning file search for AI agents.

Visit Captain

Captain is a file search platform that ingests documents, images, audio, video, and spreadsheets from cloud storage and object stores, then exposes ranked results through a single query API. It addresses the problem of searching complex files such as scanned PDFs, DOCX documents, and video, where parsing quality and retrieval accuracy determine whether content is findable.

The platform includes Captain Search, a fully managed file search API covering OCR, embeddings, vector storage, and evaluation; Captain Evals, which builds Q&A evaluations from your own files and tunes retrieval toward accuracy or latency targets; and Captain Sync, which keeps indexes current via bucket change notifications and scheduled reconciliation. Advanced search controls include metadata filters, semantic ratio tuning, boosts, and chunk relations. It supports PII masking at index time, cross-cloud indexing from sources like S3, R2, GCS, Supabase, and Backblaze, and integration with MCP-compatible coding agents. Observability features cover usage insights, knowledge gap discovery, and retrieval attack detection.

Captain offers a free Developer plan with usage-based pricing, a Scale plan with bulk credits and unlimited queries, and an Enterprise tier supporting BYOC, private networking, and custom deployment. Indexing is credit-based by file type and processing level, with query credits billed separately on the Developer plan.

12 alternatives to Captain

Ranked by how well each tool replaces Captain: shared features, audience, price and popularity.

  1. The world's data for AI agents

    Covers 6 of 15 key features.

    Free plan
    62 out of 100 matchUsage-based
  2. One API for agents to scrape, search, monitor, and collect data from the web.

    Covers 9 of 15 key features and starts cheaper.

    Free plan
    62 out of 100 match$19/mo
  3. A powerful search experience for your website—without the learning curve.

    Covers 7 of 15 key features and starts cheaper.

    61 out of 100 match$79/mo
  4. Fast, easy on-site search with semantic and full-text capabilities.

    Covers 3 of 15 key features and starts cheaper.

    Free plan
    60 out of 100 match$9/mo
  5. The Leading Web Search APIs for AI

    Covers 2 of 15 key features.

    Free plan
    60 out of 100 matchFree
  6. AI search and conversational content discovery platform for websites

    Covers 1 of 15 key features and starts cheaper.

    60 out of 100 match$119/mo
  7. AI site search and AI answer layers for content-heavy websites

    Covers 2 of 15 key features and starts cheaper.

    59 out of 100 match$666.67/mo
  8. An AI-powered search and discovery platform for eCommerce.

    Covers 1 of 15 key features and starts cheaper.

    59 out of 100 match$500/mo
  9. The API for Google Search and AI Answers.

    Covers 7 of 15 key features and starts cheaper.

    Free plan
    58 out of 100 match$30/mo
  10. Unified search and AI retrieval platform.

    Covers 0 of 15 key features, starts cheaper and is open source.

    Open source
    58 out of 100 match$20/mo
  11. Open-source, typo-tolerant search engine for site and app search

    Covers 2 of 15 key features and is open source.

    Free planOpen source
    58 out of 100 matchUsage-based
  12. Google Search API

    Covers 3 of 15 key features and starts cheaper.

    Free plan
    58 out of 100 match$25/mo