The 3 Best Exa Alternatives in 2026

Tavily returns search results already shaped for a model: ranked sources with relevant content, and optionally a short answer, so an agent can ground a response without a separate scraping step. Alongside search it offers Extract (clean content from given URLs), Map and Crawl (walk a site) and a Research endpoint. It is the default web-search tool in many agent frameworks, which is a big part of why it is so widely used. Nebius announced an agreement to acquire Tavily in February 2026, and the product is now branded Tavily by Nebius. Billing is in credits. A basic search is 1 credit and an advanced search 2; extraction is 1 credit per 5 URLs (2 for advanced). The free Researcher plan includes 1,000 credits a month with no card. Pay as you go is $0.008 per credit, Project plans start at $30 a month for 4,000 credits, and Enterprise is custom. Credits reset monthly, and requests stop when they run out. As of October 2026.

• Built-in integrations with most agent frameworks
• Search, extract, map and crawl in one API
• Free 1,000 credits every month

Brave Search runs its own index rather than reselling Google or Bing, which makes it one of the few independent sources of general web results available by API. The Search plan returns standard results with extra snippets, schema-enriched data and Goggles (custom re-ranking rules). The Answers plan returns AI-written answers with citations and streaming, through an OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Storing results or using them to train models needs a plan with storage rights. Billing is prepaid with no subscription, and a card is required. Search is $5 per 1,000 requests at up to 50 queries per second; Answers is $4 per 1,000 requests plus $5 per million input and output tokens. Each plan comes with $5 of free credit every month, applied automatically. Enterprise adds zero data retention and custom agreements. As of October 2026.

• Independent index, not a Google or Bing reseller
• Flat, predictable price per request
• High rate limit on the Search plan

Perplexity sells two ways in. The Search API returns ranked web results as JSON, with up to five queries in one request counted as a single billable request. The Agent API, which replaced Sonar Chat Completions, runs a model of your choice (Perplexity's own Sonar or models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI and others) with a web_search tool and returns a cited answer, so you can skip writing the retrieval loop yourself. Sonar Chat Completions support ended on 27 September 2026; synchronous requests are being reformulated as Agent API calls. The Search API is $5 per 1,000 requests, or $1 per 1,000 with Fast Search. In the Agent API, web_search costs $2.50 per 1,000 calls ($1 with Fast Search) and fetch_url $0.50 per 1,000, plus each model's token rates. Billing is prepaid credit; failed and rate-limited requests are not billed. As of October 2026.

• Up to five queries per billed request
• Cited answers without building the loop
• Cheap Fast Search tier