Exa vs Tavily
Exa
Best for agent research $4/Tavily
Best search API for agents on a budget $0.008/Exa vs Tavily is the rare comparison where the rate cards barely matter: $0.007 a search against $0.008 a credit is a rounding error on any realistic volume. Three things do differ, and none of them is price. Beyond those it is the index, and no feature table will tell you whose index suits your questions, so run your twenty real prompts through each and let the results decide.
Where they actually differ
Every value comes from the same record that drives the Signal APIs listing, so this table cannot disagree with the cards. Accented tags are data one provider returns and the other does not.
| Compare | Exa | Tavily |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Web search built to be read by a model | Web search for agents, one credit a query |
| Entry price | $4/1k searches | $0.008/credit |
| Unit cost | $0.0070 per auto search | $0.0080 per credit |
| Billing model | Pay as you go Free tier | Pay as you go Subscription Free tier |
| Free tier | $10 of credits every month | Free plan, 1,000 API credits a month, no card. Free for students. |
| GTM motion covered | Signal Source Enrich | Source Signal |
| Data returned | FirmographicsIntent and newsWork emailMobile phone | FirmographicsIntent and news |
| MCP server | Yes https://mcp.exa.ai/mcp | Yes https://mcp.tavily.com/mcp/ |
| Interfaces | REST API MCP server n8n node | REST API MCP server n8n node |
| Auth | Bearer token, or OAuth through the MCP server | API key from the dashboard, as a development or a production key |
| Rate limits | 10 search QPS free, up to 25 on pay as you go. 50 agent concurrency on both. | Search 100/min on a dev key, 1,000 on production. Crawl 100, research 20. |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II | SOC 2 Type II |
| Best for | Best for agent research | Best search API for agents on a budget |
Pick each one when
Exa
- You want sustained concurrency: 50 agent requests at once.
- Contact data alongside search is useful, at $0.02 an email.
- You would rather choose the search depth than have it chosen.
Tavily
- 1,000 free credits a month is the allowance you need.
- Your traffic is bursty and a per-minute budget suits it.
- Crawl and extract in the same account matter to you.
Coverage claims are not comparable here, because these two do not index the same web. Take a hundred of the queries you would really run, send them through both free tiers, and count the answers you could put in front of a rep without editing them. That ratio, rather than the price per call, is what you are buying.
What each one costs, tier by tier
Both publish a full rate card, so this comparison runs on numbers rather than on adjectives. Exa lists 3 tiers and Tavily lists 4. Every figure is read off the vendor's own pricing page, and the pages they came from are listed at the foot of this one.
| The short version | Exa | Tavily |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan | Not published | Not published |
| Tiers published | 3 | 4 |
| Free tier | $10 of credits every month | Free plan, 1,000 API credits a month, no card. Free for students. |
| Unit cost at entry | $0.007 per auto search | $0.008 per credit |
The cheapest paid plan is rarely the plan you end up on, because what moves you up a tier is usually volume rather than a feature. The two rate cards below are what you are choosing between.
Exa
Exa publishes 3 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from Pay as you go to Custom.
Starter
- $10 of credits every month, plus a $10 onboarding bonus
- Access to every endpoint
- 10 search queries per second, 50 agent concurrency
- MCP server, Claude connector and ChatGPT plugin
Developer
- The per-1,000 rates in the table above
- Up to 25 search queries per second
- 50 agent concurrency
- SOC 2 Type II, card or bank payment
Enterprise
- Custom search QPS and agent concurrency
- For large-scale requirements
Tavily
Tavily publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from Slider to Custom.
Free
- No credit card required
- 1,000 basic searches, or 500 advanced
- Resets on the 1st, not on your billing date
- Free outright for students
Pay as you go
- No monthly floor
- A basic search is $0.008, an advanced one $0.016
- For flexible or spiky usage
Project
- Monthly plan sized on a slider on the pricing page
- Tavily does not publish a single number, so this directory does not either
- The lowest step shown carries 4,000 credits a month
Enterprise
- Custom API call volumes
- Enterprise-grade support and SLAs
- Enterprise-grade security and privacy
What Exa and Tavily cost at your volume
Put your own volume in. The model picks the cheapest published plan that covers it on each side, which is the question a rate card cannot answer and the one that decides the bill.
Exa
Publishes an entry price and no ladder above it, so the figure below is a floor rather than a forecast.
Tavily
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
Plans are read from each vendor's own pricing page and the model picks the cheapest one that covers you, so these are list prices before any discount you negotiate and before annual billing, which most of these vendors discount. Exa publishes an entry price with no ladder above it, so the figure shown is the floor rather than your bill.
What a year costs at three volumes
The same plan-fit arithmetic as the model above, run out to a year, because an annual number is what a budget actually asks for. Every column moves with volume, because all of these meter usage rather than seats.
| A year at | Exa | Tavily |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $48 | $0 Free |
| 10,000 a month | $48 | Quoted |
| 50,000 a month | $48 | Quoted |
2 of the 2 providers here publish enough to be put in this table. These are list prices on the published plan that covers each volume, so they are the number before you negotiate and before annual billing, which most of these vendors discount by between a fifth and a half.
How this plays out once it is running
The free allowance is the first difference: Tavily gives 1,000 credits a month, Exa gives $10 of credits, and on an agent loop you will feel the first one sooner. The second is throughput. Exa does 10 searches a second free and up to 25 paid with 50 agent concurrency, Tavily does 100 a minute on a development key and 1,000 on production, so Tavily is the better shape for a burst and Exa for sustained concurrency.
The third is a billing detail rather than a limit. Tavily's automatic search depth will choose the more expensive option on your behalf, which is convenient until you are reconciling a bill. Both publish an MCP server and both have a free tier, so the bake-off costs nothing but an afternoon.
What each one is genuinely good at
Not a feature list. These are the things that make somebody keep paying after the novelty has worn off, which is a different question from what the marketing page leads with.
Exa
Concurrency that holds under an agent fan-out
Fifty agent requests at once on both the free and pay-as-you-go tiers, with 10 search queries a second free and up to 25 paid. Tavily's ceilings are per minute, 100 on a development key and 1,000 on production, so a workload that bursts hits a different kind of wall.
You choose the depth rather than having it chosen
Exa prices a search at one flat $0.007. Tavily charges 1 credit for a basic search and 2 for an advanced one, and its auto mode can pick the more expensive depth for you, which is the thing that turns a predicted bill into a surprise.
A research endpoint for questions a search cannot answer
Tiered from $0.012 to $1.00 a request, so a genuinely hard question has somewhere to go that is not twenty searches stitched together. Tavily's research endpoint exists and is capped at 20 requests a minute.
Tavily
A thousand free credits every month, reset on the 1st
No card, and the reset is on the calendar rather than on your billing date. Exa's free allowance is $10 of credits a month plus a $10 onboarding bonus, which is a similar amount of value in a less predictable shape. For a low-volume agent, Tavily's is the one you can plan around.
Crawl and extract in the same account
A pipeline that needs the page as well as the answer does not need a second vendor. Exa searches and enriches; it does not crawl, so pairing it with Firecrawl is the usual arrangement and that is one more key and one more bill.
Free for students, and a development key that is honest about being one
The two key types are separate, 100 requests a minute on development and 1,000 on production, so you cannot accidentally run a production workload on a key sized for testing.
Where each one falls down
Every provider on this site has a case it handles badly, and the people who find out are the ones who bought it for that case. These are the ones worth knowing before you sign rather than after.
Exa
Enrichment here is a side product
Contact data at $0.02 an email and $0.07 a phone number sits outside the search rate card. That is in line with Apollo's per-email rate and above most specialists in this directory, so it is a convenience rather than a reason to buy, and treating it as an enrichment provider is the most common Exa mistake.
The free allowance is a balance, not a quota
Ten dollars of credits a month means the number of searches you get depends on what you call. That is more flexible and harder to budget than a flat 1,000 credits, especially if a research call can cost a dollar on its own.
Tavily
Auto mode can pick the expensive depth
An advanced search costs 2 credits against a basic one's 1, and letting the service decide means your effective rate moves without your code changing. Pin the depth explicitly if the bill needs to be predictable.
Per-minute ceilings bind before the credits do
A hundred requests a minute on a development key, 1,000 on production, crawl at 100 and research at 20. For an agent issuing many searches in parallel those numbers arrive long before the monthly credit line does.
Using Exa and Tavily together
A two-way comparison assumes the answer is one of them. On this pairing it often is not, and the arrangement below is what teams actually end up running.
At $0.007 a search against $0.008 a credit these are close enough that running both for a while costs almost nothing and tells you more than any feature table. That is the actual recommendation on this pairing.
Take twenty real prompts from your own pipeline, run them through both, and compare the results rather than the rate cards. The index is the product here, and no published number describes whose index suits your questions. Both have free allowances large enough to do that properly, which is unusual and worth using.
If you end up keeping both, split by job rather than by cost: Exa for the agent fan-out where concurrency matters, Tavily where crawl and extract belong in the same account. Paying two bills to hedge on index quality is the version of this that wastes money.
Exa or Tavily, for you
Two questions, answered from the same records as the rest of this page. Nothing is sent anywhere and there is no result to email yourself.
Each answer leans one way. The recommendation appears here once you have picked at least two.
A tool like this can only weigh what is on the page. It does not know your segment, and the one test that does is the bake-off further down: real rows, cheapest entry on each side, spend divided by survivors.
Where an answer leans on a certification or an integration, it means that vendor publishes it on the pages this directory read, which is not the same as the other one lacking it. The sources are listed at the foot of the page.
Where the data comes from, and what you may do with it
The question that arrives late and expensively is not how good the data is, it is who is allowed to hold it. These are the fields each one returns, the coverage it claims and the compliance it publishes.
| Provider | Fields returned | Coverage | Compliance | Redistribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Exa | Firmographics, Intent and news, Work email, Mobile phone | Global | SOC 2 Type II | Not stated |
| Tavily | Firmographics, Intent and news | Global | SOC 2 Type II | Not stated |
None of these states a redistribution position on its pricing or docs pages. Internally that never matters. Put the rows in something your customers can see and it becomes the question your legal team asks first.
Two practical notes that apply to every provider on this page. A compliance badge describes the vendor, not your use of it, so a GDPR DPA does not give you a lawful basis for the outreach you send. And every one of these vendors runs its own opt-out, which means a person who asks you to delete their record has to be removed from your copy as well as from theirs.
Moving between Exa and Tavily
Most readers of this page are already on one of these two. A swap is four hours of code and a month of watching, and the order below is the one that catches the expensive mistakes while they are still free.
Measure the thing you are about to lose
Run 500 rows you already have through Exa and record the match rate, the fields that came back populated and the cost. Without that number a migration cannot be judged, because every provider looks cheaper per unit than the one you are paying for today.
Check the fields, not the field count
Tavily does not return Work email and Mobile phone, which Exa does. If anything downstream reads work email, that is a change to your pipeline and not just to your vendor.
Rewrite the auth and the limits, in that order
Exa authenticates with bearer token, or OAuth through the MCP server. Tavily uses API key from the dashboard, as a development or a production key.
The limits are the part that bites later. Exa rate: 10 search QPS free, up to 25 on pay as you go. 50 agent concurrency on both.
Tavily rate: Search 100/min on a dev key, 1,000 on production. Crawl 100, research 20. A loop tuned to the first will either crawl or get throttled on the second.
Run both for one billing cycle
Keep the old key live and route a slice of real traffic to the new one. A month is the shortest honest test, because credit expiry, rollover and the overage rate only show up at renewal and those are where the surprises live.
Cancel on the renewal date, not before
Credits on most of these plans do not survive a downgrade. Check what happens to the balance you have already paid for, and time the switch so you are not buying the same records twice.
The step people skip is the first one, and it is the only one that cannot be done after the fact. Once the old key is off you have nothing to compare the new match rate against, so a provider that is quietly worse on your segment looks like a provider that is fine.
What practitioners say about Exa
The one part of this page that is not a vendor claim. Quotes are transcribed as written, linked to the thread, and nothing here is the only source for a figure in the tables above.
Developers who evaluate it call it infrastructure, not a search box
I've evaluated both for safety-related AI work, and Exa was much more obviously built to be infrastructure: programmatic retrieval, extraction, structured results, semantic search, throughput controls, enterprise privacy, all that boring backend stuff. Kagi was much more consumer-facing, and its API offering is newer.
r/firefox · August 2026 · 14 points
Somebody who evaluated Exa against a consumer search product for real work, and the list they reach for is the list this page is built on: retrieval you call programmatically, extraction, structured results and throughput you can control. It is the clearest outside statement of what Exa is for, which is a retrieval layer underneath something else rather than a search engine a person looks at.
The thread is about why Mozilla picked Exa and the commenter calls their own answer speculation, so the part worth keeping is the evaluation rather than the conclusion about who won it.
The unit that decides a search API is requests per job, not price per request
services like SerpAPI and Tavily are too costly to be true, and has a tight upper limit of about 5k-15k requests per month. Assuming 1 request per session, it would mean we only can use the web search tool for about 15k times in a month. That simply isn't enough for an agentic system which might need to make several calls to do a single job.
r/LLMDevs · May 2025 · 4 points
A plan sized on sessions is sized on the wrong unit, because an agent makes several calls to answer one question. That is the argument for reading the research endpoint tiers on this page alongside the per-search rate: one question answered thoroughly can cost a hundred times what one search does, and the bill is set by the loop rather than by the rate card.
The monthly ceilings quoted here are this commenter's reading of two other vendors in 2025 and not anything this site verified. Take the shape of the complaint; the limits above are Exa's own, read from its rate card on 8 October 2026.
14 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page.
What practitioners say about Tavily
The one part of this page that is not a vendor claim. Quotes are transcribed as written, linked to the thread, and nothing here is the only source for a figure in the tables above.
A dedicated search API beats a model's built-in web tool on content and reach
I wouldn't go with GPT 5 + web unless you don't mind about cost / quality / flexibility and just care about having 1 single tool. GPT 5 is more expensive, they don't return search results + context alone, plus you have access to less content because OpenAI is often blocked by robots.txt I feel smaller providers like Tavily or Linkup give you more flexibility and better results.
r/aiagents · September 2025 · 2 points
The case for buying search separately rather than using whatever your model ships with, from somebody who tried both. The three things they name are the three this page is about: what a call costs, whether the page content comes back alongside the results, and how much of the web the provider is allowed to read at all. A model vendor blocked by robots.txt on a domain you need is not a problem you can prompt your way out of.
They go on to prefer Linkup, which this directory does not carry, so read it as a case for the category rather than for Tavily specifically. Their closing point is worth keeping either way: a narrow search API does what you asked, which is a liability with a vague query and the entire point with a precise one.
14 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page.
Where each one sits in a working pipeline
Neither of these is bought in isolation. These are the worked stacks on this site that use one or both, with the cost run end to end.
The wider field for both
A two-way comparison assumes the answer is one of these two. Often it is not, and the reason you are comparing them at all points somewhere else entirely: Exa alternatives and Tavily alternatives both start from the reason people leave.
Exa alternatives
3Search designed to be read by a model. The reasons to leave are price per search and the shape of the index.
See the alternatives →Tavily alternatives
3A thousand free credits a month and a cent a query. The limits are per-minute, and auto mode can pick the more expensive search for you.
See the alternatives →Everything in Signal
9The full category these two sit in, filtered by data returned, billing model and entry price.
Browse the category →Related comparisons
The 26 providers behind every pairing here are in the main listing.
Pairings that share a side with this one: Exa vs TheirStack. Every comparison in the directory is on the compare hub.
Exa vs TheirStack
Live web research against structured hiring and technology signal.
Compare them →Apollo API vs Clay
One key for the whole motion against a router sitting in front of 150 vendors.
Compare them →Apollo API vs People Data Labs
A go-to-market license at two cents a credit against a license written for redistribution.
Compare them →Comparison pages end at the rate card. Your list does not.
We run the bake-off on your actual data, pick the provider order, and build the pipeline behind it: waterfall routing, credit ceilings and the write-back that puts a verified contact in front of a rep the same day.
Worked with 300+ companies. A senior operator runs your account.
Exa and Tavily, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is Exa or Tavily cheaper?
On the entry plan it is Tavily, $0.008/credit against Exa at $4/1k searches. Per unit it is $0.007 per auto search against $0.008 per credit, which is the figure that decides it at volume.
Can I try Exa and Tavily for free?
Exa: $10 of credits every month. Tavily: Free plan, 1,000 API credits a month, no card. Free for students.
What are the rate limits on Exa and Tavily?
Exa: 10 search QPS free, up to 25 on pay as you go. 50 agent concurrency on both. Tavily: Search 100/min on a dev key, 1,000 on production. Crawl 100, research 20.
Do Exa and Tavily both have MCP servers?
Both do. Exa: https://mcp.exa.ai/mcp. Tavily: https://mcp.tavily.com/mcp/.
Which is better, Exa or Tavily?
Exa vs Tavily is the rare comparison where the rate cards barely matter: $0.007 a search against $0.008 a credit is a rounding error on any realistic volume. Three things do differ, and none of them is price.
Can you use Exa and Tavily together?
At $0.007 a search against $0.008 a credit these are close enough that running both for a while costs almost nothing and tells you more than any feature table. That is the actual recommendation on this pairing.
Can I migrate from Exa to Tavily without losing data?
Not without losing a field. Tavily does not return work email and mobile phone, which Exa does, so anything downstream that reads it has to change. Either way, measure your match rate on 500 rows before you switch, because that number is the one you cannot recover afterwards.