The 3 Best Tavily Alternatives in 2026

Exa runs its own web index and ranks results by meaning rather than keywords, so a query can describe the kind of page wanted ("startups building browser agents that raised a seed round") instead of guessing the words on it. One request can return the result list and the page contents, cleaned as text, highlights or an AI summary, which saves a separate scraping step. Beyond plain search it sells Deep Search, an Answer endpoint, Monitors that re-run a query on a schedule, and an Agent API that runs multi-step research. Pricing is pay as you go with no subscription. Search is $7 per 1,000 requests for the auto and fast types ($4 for lite), with up to 10 results; contents cost $1 per 1,000 pages per content type. Deep Search is $12 per 1,000. Every account gets $10 of free credit at signup and a balance that resets to $10 on the first of each month. Enterprise adds custom indexes, up to 1,000 results per search and SLAs. As of October 2026.

• Own index, ranked by meaning
• Search and page contents in one call
• Monthly free credit that resets

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