What are the best Brave Search API alternatives in 2026?

Brave Search API alternatives in October 2026 include Exa, Perplexity, Parallel, Tavily, Firecrawl, Mojeek and Kagi, or Grounder (grounder.net) to keep Brave and add other providers. Brave costs $5 per 1,000 requests with a $5 monthly credit, and its terms bar storing results without a storage-rights plan.

Last checked: 20 October 2026. Disclosure: Grounder publishes this page and sends searches to Brave, Exa, Perplexity, Parallel, Tavily and Firecrawl, among others; it does not send searches to Mojeek or Kagi.

Why people look for Brave Search API alternatives now

• Free credit. Brave's 12 February 2026 post set its plans as Search, Answers, Spellcheck and Autocomplete, each with $5 of free credit a month for projects that attribute the Brave Search API. A credit card is required at signup, and Brave charges only for credits you buy. The post does not mention the earlier Free plan; third-party reports call this the end of the free tier and disagree on the old allowance, so we quote none.
• Storing results. Brave's terms bar storing, caching or building a database of results beyond transient storage. They also bar using results to train, evaluate or benchmark AI models. Storage needs "a plan that includes storage rights", which Brave does not price publicly.
• Retention. Brave keeps API query logs up to 90 days (privacy notice, updated 25 August 2026). Zero data retention is for Enterprise customers.
• Rate limits. The Search plan allows 50 queries a second and the Answers plan 2.
• MCP. Brave's official MCP server is a local install; we found no Brave-hosted remote server.
• Accuracy. AIMultiple's May 2026 test ranked Brave first of 8 entries (Parallel appears twice). In Grounder's run below, Brave is fast and light on tokens but scores 84.4% on SimpleQA and 16.2% on SealQA.

Quick comparison

The alternatives

Exa

• What it is: an own-index semantic search API with page contents and an Answer API.
• Pricing: $7 per 1,000 for auto or fast, $4 for lite, 10 results included. $10 in free credits resets monthly.
• Strengths: Artificial Analysis index 80, against 75 for Brave LLM Context. Keyless remote MCP.
• Limits: the most answer tokens in Grounder's run (5.2k per SimpleQA question). Zero data retention is Enterprise-only.
• Pick it when: you want semantic search or contents in the same call.

Perplexity

• What it is: a Search API on its own index that returns ranked results and snippets, with no generated answer.
• Pricing: $5 per 1,000 requests, the same as Brave, or $1 for Fast Search. No free tier is published.
• Strengths: index 80. In Grounder's run it tied for the top SimpleQA score (96.0%), at a 275 ms median search against Brave's 591 ms.
• Limits: Perplexity-User, its fetcher for pages a user asks for, "generally ignores robots.txt rules", per Perplexity.
• Pick it when: you want Brave's price with higher benchmark accuracy.

Parallel

• What it is: an agent-oriented search API on its own index, with an Extract API.
• Pricing: fast $1 per 1,000, basic and advanced $5, with 10 results each. Extract is $1 per 1,000 URLs.
• Strengths: the top single-provider SealQA score in Grounder's run (44.9%) and 94.8% on SimpleQA.
• Limits: index 75 for advanced, level with Brave. No self-serve zero data retention.
• Pick it when: you want lower cost per search than Brave.

Tavily

• What it is: search with Extract, Crawl, Map and Research endpoints. Owned by Nebius.
• Pricing: $0.008 a credit at pay-as-you-go, so $8 per 1,000 basic searches. Free is 1,000 credits a month.
• Strengths: extraction beside search; remote MCP.
• Limits: 85.8% on SimpleQA and 24.1% on SealQA in Grounder's run. See Tavily alternatives.
• Pick it when: you need extraction as well as search.

Firecrawl

• What it is: a web data API whose search can return scraped content or excerpts, beside scrape, crawl and map.
• Pricing: 2 credits per 10 results. Free is 1,000 credits a month; Hobby is $16 for 5,000 and Standard $83 for 100,000, billed yearly.
• Strengths: page content in the search call. 88.2% on SimpleQA with 1.3k answer tokens.
• Limits: the slowest of the 12 products on Artificial Analysis's leaderboard (60.1 s a task, index 73).
• Pick it when: snippets are not enough.

Mojeek

• What it is: a search API on Mojeek's own index, crawled by MojeekBot, which respects the Robots Exclusion Protocol.
• Pricing: £2 per 1,000 requests on Startup (5 queries a second, 10 results) and £3 on Business (10 queries a second, 40 results). Enterprise is custom. Startup sign-up includes a free credit; a bank card is required.
• Strengths: the Business and Enterprise tiers carry storage rights. Results are URL, title and query-dependent snippets.
• Limits: no page content. Startup allows a one-hour cache and storage rights need Business. Daily limits are 100,000 queries on Startup and 400,000 on Business. No MCP server is listed on its API page. Not in the benchmark or Artificial Analysis.
• Pick it when: you need an independent index and storage rights.

Kagi

• What it is: a pay-as-you-go API to Kagi's results, with lenses and per-request ranking rules, plus Extract. Public preview since 21 May 2026.
• Pricing: $12 per 1,000 searches and $4 per 1,000 pages extracted. Trial terms are not published.
• Strengths: domain rules (block, lower, raise, pin) per request. Official hosted MCP at https://mcp.kagi.com/mcp.
• Limits: its terms bar storing results beyond transient caching. MCP takes a key, not OAuth.
• Pick it when: you want control over ranking and not storage.

Where Grounder fits

Grounder (grounder.net) is a web search API and MCP server for AI agents. One search goes across 10 web search providers, results are deduplicated, and each result is marked with the provider that found it and whether it is licensed. Brave is one of the ten, with Exa, Perplexity, Parallel, Tavily and Firecrawl.

It does not replace everything Brave sells: Grounder states no equivalent of Goggles, extra_snippets, LLM Context or Answers, and writes no answer.

• Connect: add https://api.grounder.net/mcp to an MCP client and sign in with Google, GitHub or Apple.
• Free tier: your first 1,000 searches are free, up to 100 a day, no card needed, at 120 requests a minute per key. Need more? Write to support@grounder.net.
• Brave format: GET https://api.grounder.net/compat/brave/res/v1/web/search takes Brave's request shape with the X-Subscription-Token header. It honors q, count, freshness (pd, pw, pm, py), search_lang and site: operators, ignores country, offset and safesearch, and returns web results only. It accepts search keys made before 13 October 2026.
• Your own Brave key: an account can add its own key for Brave and eight other providers; that provider then bills the account.
• Licensed sources only: on by default for signed-up accounts. A search then returns only licensed results, so it can return fewer than you ask for. Turn it off on the account page (Routing, Licensing: Any source) or per search with routing_settings.licensed_only set to false.
• Data: search records are kept indefinitely, and opting out of routing statistics deletes nothing. No model is trained on your data. See privacy.

Benchmark table as of 20 October 2026; the run was 8 to 13 October 2026. Tokens and latency are for SimpleQA.

Grounder optimized answers only from licensed sources, so it gets fewer answers right than the all-sources row, which searches every source. Grounder ran this benchmark itself, and its routing was tuned on these same searches. Of the providers shown, Brave scores lowest on both benchmarks; the full tables are on the benchmarks page. On SimpleQA the all-sources row is first; on SealQA Parallel (44.9%) is ahead of it (36.1%).

How we compared

We compared price, free tier, storage and retention terms, rate limits, index ownership, output type, accuracy, latency and MCP support, from each vendor's own pages (below). Figures marked derived are computed from credit prices.

The benchmark uses 887 questions: 671 from SimpleQA and 216 from SealQA Seal-Hard. From 8 to 13 October 2026 each question was searched once on every provider's default search, taking its top 10 results within 60 seconds. Z.ai's GLM-5.3-Flash, at high reasoning effort, answered from those results alone, and OpenAI's SimpleQA grader graded each answer. Grounder optimized is each question routed as Grounder routes it on 19 October 2026. It searches as every account does by default, with licensed sources only; Grounder optimized, all sources is the same routing with nothing filtered out.

Two outside views: Artificial Analysis (same answer model for every provider; 19 October 2026) and AIMultiple (100 queries, LLM judge, updated 14 May 2026), which called the top four, Brave included, statistically close. See also migrate from Brave Search API and best search API for AI agents.

FAQ

Did Brave remove its free Search API plan?

Brave's pricing page now lists $5 of free credit a month on each plan, given if you attribute Brave. Brave's post does not mention an earlier Free plan, and third-party reports describe the change as the end of the free tier.

What is the cheapest alternative to the Brave Search API?

Parallel fast and Perplexity Fast Search list $1 per 1,000 searches, against $5 for Brave. Mojeek lists £2 per 1,000 on Startup.

Which alternative lets me store or cache results?

Brave needs a storage-rights plan. Mojeek lists storage rights on Business and Enterprise, and Kagi's terms bar storing results. We did not compare the storage terms of Exa, Parallel, Perplexity, Tavily or Firecrawl, so read each vendor's terms.

Which Brave alternatives run their own index?

Mojeek, Exa, Parallel and Perplexity each describe an index of their own. Mojeek says it uses no third parties to provide results.

Does Brave have a remote MCP server?

Brave's official server runs locally through npx or Docker. Exa, Parallel, Perplexity, Tavily, Firecrawl and Kagi run remote servers, and so does Grounder at https://api.grounder.net/mcp.

Can I keep Brave and add other providers?

Yes, through Grounder: Brave is one of its 10 providers, and an account can add its own Brave key. The Brave-format endpoint needs a search key made before 13 October 2026; new accounts connect over MCP.

Next step

Your first 1,000 searches are free, up to 100 a day; connect at https://api.grounder.net/mcp or read the docs.