The best Tavily alternatives for AI agent web search

Your agent calls Tavily a few times per task. Each call turns a question into about ten URLs, a few lines of text from each, and, if you ask, the whole page as markdown. The bill is one credit a search, and in February the company agreed to be bought by Nebius, an AI cloud provider.

So you're wondering two things: whether $8 per 1,000 is a fair price for what your agent actually reads, and what you'd move to. I sent the same 20 questions through Tavily's free plan and through AnyAPI's Google search, web scrape, and Perplexity endpoints, and priced Exa, Brave, and Firecrawl from their own pages.

Whether you should leave comes down to one thing: does your agent read the pages, or just the snippets?

The best Tavily alternatives

• AnyAPI for links and snippets at the lowest price
• Brave Search API for results from an independent index
• Exa for search by meaning, with page text included
• Firecrawl for search and scraping from one balance

What makes a good Tavily alternative?

A good Tavily alternative returns text your agent can answer from, for less per 1,000 searches, without making it wait much longer.

I'm assuming you're building an agent or a RAG pipeline (one that looks things up before it answers) and search is a tool it calls on its own. The model reads what comes back, so the text matters more than the ranking. With that in mind, here's what I compared on:

• Price per 1,000 searches: the cheapest self-serve rate for one search that returns about ten results.
• Page text: whether you can get the whole page back, and what that adds to the bill.
• Did the answer come back: for each question, whether the answer appeared anywhere in the text the API returned.
• Speed: seconds per call, because an agent waits on every search it makes.
• Free tier: what you get before you pay.

The best Tavily alternatives at a glance

On September 30, 2026, 1,000 searches of about ten results cost $8.00 on Tavily's pay as you go rate, $7.60 on Firecrawl's Hobby plan, $7.00 on Exa's default search, and $5.00 on Brave. AnyAPI's Google search is $0.40 per 1,000. With the text of all ten pages, Tavily stays at $8.00, Exa at $7.00, and Firecrawl comes to $45.60.

Speed is where Tavily earns part of its price. In the same 20-question run, Tavily answered at a median of 3.6 seconds, less than half the 7.9 seconds Google results took through AnyAPI.

Best Tavily alternative for links and snippets at the lowest price

AnyAPI

AnyAPI pros:

• Google's snippets held the answer to all 20 questions, the same score as Tavily's snippets
• You pay for page text only on the pages your agent opens
• One key covers Google results, page scraping, and answer engines like Perplexity

AnyAPI cons:

• Twice as slow as Tavily at the median, and 19 to 29 seconds on the five calls where the first source didn't answer
• Reading a page is a second call, so an agent that reads everything makes eleven calls where Tavily makes one
• web.scrape refused Reddit and Facebook links and points you to their own endpoints instead

Most agent searches are lookups: a port number, a rate limit, who runs a company. For those, the answer is usually in the snippet, and a snippet is what Google already gives you. In this test the titles and snippets from AnyAPI's google.search carried the answer to every one of the 20 questions, including the one about who bought Tavily. Tavily's snippets did no better, at about 16 times the price.

Here's the call:

curl -sS -X POST https://api.getanyapi.com/v1/run/google.search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ANYAPI_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query":"What is the default port for PostgreSQL?"}'

And the first of the ten results that came back, with what the call was billed:

{
  "costUsd": 0.0004,
  "output": {
    "data": {
      "query": "What is the default port for PostgreSQL?",
      "results": [
        {
          "position": 1,
          "title": "PostgreSQL :: Fedora Docs Staging",
          "link": "https://docs.stg.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/postgresql/",
          "snippet": "Firewall. PostgreSQL operates on port 5432 (or whatever else you set in your postgresql.conf ). In firewalld, to make the change persist after reboot: $ sudo ... Read more"
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

When the snippet isn't enough, send the link you want to web.scrape and you get the page as markdown:

curl -sS -X POST https://api.getanyapi.com/v1/run/web.scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ANYAPI_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://docs.stg.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/postgresql/","formats":["markdown"]}'

I scraped the top three Google links for each question, 60 pages. 56 came back with text, at a median of 6 seconds a page. Two were Reddit and Facebook links, which web.scrape turns away without charging, one timed out, and one hit a rate limit.

Search plus three pages comes to about a third of Tavily's bill. Read all ten results and it's about the same. That's the whole case: the saving is in the pages your agent skips.

Leave out onlyMainContent unless you need it. In this test, asking for main content only was billed at $1.00 to $1.25 per 1,000 pages, while the default request was billed at $0.70 per 1,000 on four of five pages.

If you'd rather get a written answer with sources than a list of links, perplexity.search returns one, with a median of seven citations. It answered 19 of 20. On the question about Tavily's buyer it didn't search at all: "I don't have the necessary current information loaded here to answer definitively." It also took 14 seconds at the median, which is slow for a tool call inside a loop.

AnyAPI pricing: $0.40 per 1,000 searches ($0.0004 each), $0.70 per 1,000 pages, $2.00 per 1,000 answers; prepaid wallet, no plan, free credit at signup

Best Tavily alternative for results from an independent index

Brave Search API

Brave Search API pros:

• Results from Brave's own index of more than 40 billion pages, which it crawls itself
• $5 per 1,000 requests with $5 of free credit every month, which covers 1,000 searches
• 50 requests per second on the search plan

Brave Search API cons:

• Snippets, with no whole-page option on the pricing page
• Not tested here, so I can't tell you its speed or how often the answer came back

Brave is the option if you care where the results come from. Its search engine runs on an index it crawls itself, and the search plan includes what Brave calls "additional LLM context optimized for AI". I didn't test what that returns, so if your agent needs whole pages, plan on a scraper beside it.

At $5 per 1,000 it sits between Google results and Tavily. If your agent reads snippets and you'd rather not depend on Google's ranking, it's the pick. It also sells cited answers at $4 per 1,000 plus $5 per million input and output tokens, but that plan is capped at 2 requests per second.

Brave Search API pricing: $5.00 per 1,000 search requests, prepaid, $5 of free credit a month; Answers $4.00 per 1,000 plus $5.00 per million tokens each way

Best Tavily alternative for search by meaning, with page text included

Exa

Exa pros:

• Its own search engine built on embedding models it trains, so it can match what a page is about, not only its words
• Four search types, from $4 per 1,000 (instant) to $15 (deep reasoning)
• $10 of free credit a month plus a $10 signup bonus, no payment method needed

Exa cons:

• AI page summaries are $1 per 1,000 pages on top, and so is each result past ten
• Not tested here; I couldn't get past its signup check from the test browser

Exa's embedding search is for queries where you describe the thing rather than name it. If your agent's searches look like that, test Exa on your own questions, because none of the other options here works the same way.

For plain lookups it's priced close to Tavily. Its default auto search is $7 per 1,000 for up to ten results, and since March 2026 that includes the text of all ten, so $7 per 1,000 searches with page text, a dollar under what Tavily charges for the same thing.

Exa pricing: $4.00 (instant), $7.00 (fast and auto), $12.00 (deep), $15.00 (deep reasoning) per 1,000 searches with up to 10 results, $1.00 per 1,000 each extra result; text of the first 10 results included; contents for other URLs $1.00 per 1,000 pages per content type; $10 free credit a month

Best Tavily alternative for search and scraping from one balance

Firecrawl

Firecrawl pros:

• Search, scrape, and crawl draw on one credit balance, with one key
• Can scrape every search result in the same call
• 1,000 free credits a month, no card, and its docs say search works without a key to start

Firecrawl cons:

• The dearest route to page text: 12 credits for a search plus ten pages
• Its docs say results come from "our upstream search provider", so it isn't an index of its own
• Hobby, Standard, and Growth credits don't roll over

Firecrawl is a scraping API first. If your agent already scrapes pages through it, adding search there keeps one bill and one key. That's the reason to pick it.

Search costs 2 credits per 10 results, and each page scraped from the results is 1 more. On the $19 Hobby plan (5,000 credits) a bare search is about $7.60 per 1,000, close to Tavily. A search that also scrapes ten pages is 12 credits, about $45.60 per 1,000 searches, several times what Tavily charges for page text. If you're comparing Firecrawl with other scrapers rather than with Tavily, the Firecrawl alternatives page does that.

Firecrawl pricing: 2 credits per 10 search results, 1 credit per scraped page; free 1,000 credits a month; Hobby $19 a month for 5,000 credits, pay as you go in $5 steps on paid plans

Which Tavily alternative should you use?

The right Tavily alternative depends on whether your agent reads whole pages or only the snippets.

• Your agent reads snippets and rarely opens a page: AnyAPI's Google search, and scrape the one page you need.
• Your agent reads most of the pages it finds, or waits on every search: stay on Tavily with include_raw_content.
• You want results that don't come from Google: Brave Search API.
• Your queries describe things rather than name them: Exa.
• You already scrape with Firecrawl and want one bill: Firecrawl's search.
• Under 1,000 searches a month: Tavily's free plan or Brave's free credit, both of which cover it.

If Google results are the part you need, the cheapest SERP API comparison prices seven vendors at three monthly volumes. The Google Search API page and the web scrape page have the live request format and the current price of each source.

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