Octopart vs Next Everything: can your AI search for parts, or also order them?

Most engineers assume that the hard part of buying components is finding them. Type the part number into Octopart, see every distributor's stock and price, pick the cheapest line. Done.

Finding is the easy half. The hard half comes after: the part is out of stock at the distributor you wanted, the alternate has a different package, the BOM has forty more lines, and none of it is connected to the printed case and the machined bracket that ship in the same box. So the real question is: once your AI can search for parts, can it also get them ordered? This post compares Octopart, now part of Nexar, with Next Everything as of October 14, 2026.

What Octopart and Nexar are

Octopart is a component search engine and aggregator. Enter a part number or a description and it returns matching parts with stock, pricing and datasheets across distributors. Altium bought it in 2015, and Renesas bought Altium for $5.9 billion in a deal announced in February 2024 and closed in August 2024 (Wikipedia).

Nexar is the Altium business unit that packages this for developers: a GraphQL API described as programmatic access to Altium 365 and Octopart, a Supply product built on Spectra market insights, and Octocart, which turns a BOM into a prefilled distributor cart (nexar.com). The old Octopart REST API has been renamed the Nexar Legacy API (Altium resources). We could not retrieve the current API pricing page; a free tier with OAuth2 is reported by a third party, but we did not confirm it.

As a research tool, Octopart is the broadest free component search there is. For the question "who has this part, at what price, right now", it remains the first tab most engineers open.

What Next Everything is

Next Everything is a free service that prices every part of a hardware project in one quote: electronic components, circuit boards, 3D prints and CNC metal parts, with delivery included. You ask your AI assistant to order the parts for a build; the service finds every part, shows you the price, and orders exactly the ones you tick. Your assistant prepares the order; you approve the payment (product page).

For part search specifically, the nx_search_parts tool returns live stock and pricing by manufacturer part number, by parametric spec, or by a plain-English description. Alternates are ranked by compatibility, and you can filter by package, temperature range, RoHS, minimum stock and region. The same assistant can then quote the whole build and create a checkout link that you approve (docs).

Side by side

	Octopart / Nexar	Next Everything
What it is	Component search aggregator plus developer API and BOM tools (nexar.com)	Project-level quoting and ordering for electronics, PCBs, 3D prints and CNC, driven from your AI assistant
Search	Part number or description across distributors, web and API	MPN, parametric spec or plain English from your assistant; alternates ranked by compatibility
BOM tools	Octocart: BOM to prefilled distributor cart	nx_scan_project extracts a BOM from a repository or folder and resolves each line to an orderable part
API	Nexar GraphQL API; old REST API now Nexar Legacy API	Remote MCP server, Streamable HTTP, personal nx_live_ key
MCP	No official server found as of October 2026; community mcp-nexar wraps supply search (Glama)	Official, six tools: scan, search, quote, fabrication quote, checkout, track
Ordering	Hands off to distributor carts	One checkout link per order covering components and manufactured parts; the agent cannot pay
Price	Free search; API pricing not retrieved	Free; you pay only for parts in an order you approve
Scope	Search and BOM tools, under Altium since 2015, Renesas since 2024	Search, quote and order, electronics and mechanical in one

Search: a website and an API, or a tool your assistant calls

Octopart's strength is breadth. Its data covers the distributor landscape and the GraphQL API lets a team build its own tooling on top: BOM health checks, price tracking, lifecycle flags. Octocart closes the gap to purchase by filling a cart at a distributor, after which you pay there.

What Octopart does not have, as of October 14, 2026, is an official MCP server or any product that lets an AI agent act on the results. The community mcp-nexar server from SpectraSynq wraps Nexar supply search so an assistant can query it (Glama); it is a wrapper, not a Nexar product, and it searches rather than orders. The same pattern holds for distributors: Digi-Key has a full developer API with product information, quotes, ordering and lists, and no MCP or agent mention (developer.digikey.com), with only a community digikey-mcp (Glama). Mouser is covered, along with Digi-Key and JLCPCB, by the community pcbparts-mcp (GitHub).

Next Everything starts from the assistant. One line in Claude Code connects it:

claude mcp add --transport http nexteverything https://mcp.nexteverything.io/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer nx_live_your_key"

Then "find a 3.3 V LDO in SOT-23 with at least 500 mA, in stock in the US" is a tool call, not a tab. The results come back with alternates ranked by compatibility, and the assistant can feed the one you pick straight into a quote. MCP in five minutes explains how that works under the hood.

AI part search: what else is out there

"AI part search" has become its own category, and it is fair to name the field. PartGenie advertises search over tens of millions of parts, datasheet Q&A and an alternative finder, and lists MCP as a channel, though its part counts are stated inconsistently across its own pages (partgenie.ai). Zenode offers AI search over "40M+ part sources" with datasheet Q&A; its Show HN thread in September 2025 raised the questions you would expect about trusting AI datasheet summaries, slow responses and broken links (Hacker News). On the data side, datasheets.md runs an official MCP server for pin tables, footprints and datasheet extraction with provenance down to the PDF page and cell, with a free rate-limited tier and a $10 per user per month Builder plan (datasheets.md, pricing).

These are search and data tools. None of them, by their own descriptions, quotes a printed enclosure or a machined bracket next to the components, and none of them creates a checkout for the whole build.

From search to a delivered box

Here is the practical difference. A search engine ends with a list. Octocart ends with a cart at one distributor. Next Everything ends with a single quote covering the components, the board, the prints and the metal parts, priced landed (parts, fabrication, shipping and import duties), valid for 24 hours, with one payment through a hosted checkout and one tracking view for every sub-order. If a part cannot be delivered the refund for that part is automatic; if it is out of stock you get a clearly marked matching replacement and nothing is swapped without your OK.

Delivery covers the US, Europe and the UK. And it is not a replacement for a research tool with Octopart's breadth; the product page does not claim to index every distributor, so we do not claim it either.

Verdict

Use Octopart to research. It is the broadest free component search, the Nexar API is a solid base for your own tooling, and Octocart gets a BOM into a cart quickly. It is the right tab for "who has this part today".

Use an agent tool when you want the parts ordered. Next Everything lets the assistant you already work with search by spec or plain English, rank alternates, quote the electronics together with the mechanical parts and hand you one payment link to approve. For the manufacturing side of the same comparison, see Xometry vs Next Everything, and for boards, JLCPCB vs Next Everything.

Try it

Connect your assistant, get every part of your project priced in one quote, and approve the order yourself. Sign up free, then follow the docs.