What are the best Tavily alternatives in 2026?

Tavily alternatives in October 2026 include Exa, Parallel, Perplexity, Octen, Brave, Firecrawl and Linkup, or Grounder (grounder.net) if you want several providers behind one MCP address. Tavily costs $8 per 1,000 basic searches at pay-as-you-go; these alternatives list $1 to $7 per 1,000 for their main modes.

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

Why people look for Tavily alternatives now

• Ownership. Nebius announced on 10 February 2026 that it would acquire Tavily, and reports owning 100% since 19 February 2026. It said Tavily "will continue operating under its current brand" and mentioned no price or API change.
• Credits. Free is 1,000 credits a month. Pay as you go is $0.008 a credit: $8 per 1,000 basic searches, $16 per 1,000 advanced (2 credits). Project is $30 a month for 4,000 credits.
• Limits. 100 requests a minute on development keys, 1,000 on production keys.
• Query data. Tavily's privacy policy (24 November 2025) says it may use parts of query data to improve future responses unless a contract says otherwise, and gives no fixed retention period.
• Accuracy. AIMultiple's May 2026 test of 8 entries (Parallel appears twice) ranked Tavily fifth, behind Brave, Firecrawl, Exa and Parallel Pro, and called the gap to Brave meaningful. In Grounder's run below, five single providers beat Tavily on SimpleQA and three on SealQA.

Quick comparison

The alternatives

Exa

• What it is: own-index semantic search with page contents and an Answer API.
• Pricing: $7 per 1,000 for auto or fast, $4 for lite, up to 10 results; $1 per 1,000 for each result beyond 10.
• Strengths: Artificial Analysis index 80 (auto, dynamic highlights), level with Perplexity at the top on 19 October 2026.
• Limits: the most answer tokens of the 10 providers in Grounder's run (5.2k per SimpleQA question).
• Pick it when: you need semantic, people or company search.

Parallel

• What it is: agent-oriented search on its own index, plus an Extract API.
• Pricing: fast $1 per 1,000, basic and advanced $5. 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: Artificial Analysis index 75 for advanced. No self-serve zero data retention.
• Pick it when: you want Tavily-style excerpts for less.

Perplexity

• What it is: a Search API that returns ranked results and snippets, with no generated answer.
• Pricing: $5 per 1,000 requests, $1 for Fast Search. No free tier is published.
• Strengths: index 80 (medium). Tied for the top SimpleQA score (96.0%) in Grounder's run, at a 275 ms median search.
• Limits: Perplexity-User, its fetcher for pages a user asks for, "generally ignores robots.txt rules", per Perplexity.
• Pick it when: you want accuracy and low latency from raw results.

Octen

• What it is: real-time web search with highlights and optional full content. Public beta since 15 March 2026.
• Pricing: $1 per 1,000 calls, shown as "80% Off" a $5 list price with no end date. $5 free balance.
• Strengths: 96.0% on SimpleQA at a 276 ms median search in Grounder's run. Index 77.
• Limits: the promotional price may end. No crawler or retention policy on the pages checked. 4.7k answer tokens.
• Pick it when: you want a low list price and accept beta terms.

Brave

• What it is: a Search API on Brave's own index, with an LLM Context endpoint that returns extracted chunks.
• Pricing: $5 per 1,000 requests, with a $5 monthly credit if you attribute Brave.
• Strengths: the fewest answer tokens on SimpleQA in Grounder's run (1.1k) at a 591 ms median search. Index 75 (LLM Context).
• Limits: 84.4% on SimpleQA and 16.2% on SealQA in Grounder's run. MCP is local only. Brave's terms bar storing results without a storage-rights plan.
• Pick it when: you want speed and small contexts.

Firecrawl

• What it is: a web data API whose search returns 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. Scraping results adds 1 credit a page, from the same pool.
• Strengths: search and extraction from one vendor. 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: you rely on Tavily Extract, Crawl or Map.

Linkup

• What it is: search with flash, fast, standard and deep depths and answer output, plus Fetch and Research endpoints.
• Pricing: $5 per 1,000 for flash, fast and standard depths, $6 with an answer, $50 for deep. New accounts with a professional email get $20, topped up monthly.
• Strengths: sourced and structured answers from one call.
• Limits: 10 queries a second per organization. MCP takes a key only. Flash is alpha.
• Pick it when: you want answers, not only results, from the search call.

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. Tavily, Exa, Parallel, Perplexity, Octen, Brave and Firecrawl are among the ten.

It does not replace all of Tavily: there are no Extract, Crawl, Map or Research endpoints and no written answer (include_answer is ignored).

• Connect: add https://api.grounder.net/mcp to an MCP client and sign in with Google, GitHub or Apple. There is no key to copy.
• 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.
• Tavily format: POST https://api.grounder.net/compat/tavily/search takes Tavily's request shape (query, max_results, days, start_date, end_date, include_domains, exclude_domains, include_raw_content), ignores search_depth and topic, and accepts only search keys made before 13 October 2026.
• Your own Tavily key: an account can add its own key for Tavily 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. On SimpleQA the all-sources row is first; on SealQA it is second to Parallel and just ahead of Perplexity.

How we compared

We compared price, free tier, accuracy, latency, output type, extraction, ownership, data terms 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; its leaderboard of 19 October 2026 shows 12 of 27 products, not Tavily or Linkup, so we quote no score for either) and AIMultiple (100 queries, LLM judge, updated 14 May 2026). See also migrate from Tavily, Exa alternatives and best search API for AI agents.

FAQ

What is the cheapest alternative to Tavily?

Serper returns Google results as snippets for $0.30 to $1.00 per 1,000 searches, depending on the credit pack. Among AI-agent search APIs, Parallel fast, Perplexity Fast Search and Octen list $1 per 1,000, against $8 for a Tavily basic search.

Is there a free alternative to Tavily?

Tavily gives 1,000 credits a month. Exa gives $10 in credits each month, Firecrawl 1,000 credits (about 500 searches), Linkup $20 a month, Serper 2,500 queries and Octen a $5 balance. Grounder gives 1,000 free searches in total, up to 100 a day.

Did Nebius buy Tavily, and will prices change?

Nebius announced the agreement on 10 February 2026 and reports owning 100% of Tavily from 19 February 2026. It said Tavily would keep its brand, and we found no announced price change.

Which Tavily alternative has extract and crawl?

Firecrawl has scrape, crawl and map endpoints. Exa Contents costs $1 per 1,000 pages per content type, Parallel Extract $1 per 1,000 URLs, and Linkup has Fetch. Grounder has none of these.

Can I keep Tavily and add other providers?

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

Which Tavily alternative offers licensed content?

Grounder marks each result as licensed or not and can return licensed results only. You.com's docs describe licensed "knowledge" data in its search calls. See licensed content search API.

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.