Alternatives
Tavily alternatives
An LLM-shaped retrieval layer returning cleaned, ranked, cited chunks rather than raw SERPs. Acquired by Nebius in February 2026.
Verified 5 August 2026·Figures from vendors' own pages
Acquired by Nebius Group for $275M, February 2026Tavily at a glance
- Vendor
- Nebius Group
- Category
- Retrieval layers
- Own index
- No — No publicly documented independent web index
- Price per 1,000
- $8
- Free tier
- 1,000 credits per month, no card required
- MCP server
- Yes
- Graph traversal
- No
- Coverage transparency
- No
- Funding
- $25M
- Investors
- Insight Partners, Alpha Wave Global
Pricing detail. Credit-based at $0.008 per credit pay-as-you-go. A basic search is 1 credit (~$8 per 1,000), an advanced search 2 credits (~$16 per 1,000), and a deep research request 4 to 250 credits.
Why teams look for a Tavily alternative
The acquisition by Nebius in February 2026 is the proximate cause. Acquisition is not shutdown and the service continues, but an acquirer inherits the freedom to change pricing, terms and strategic direction, and a team whose retrieval is load-bearing is right to want a tested alternative before it needs one.
The structural reason is older. Tavily does not publish an independent web index, so its search depends on an upstream provider it does not control. That is a legitimate architecture and it is also exactly the dependency that removed the Bing Web Search API from under a great many products in 2025.
Where Tavily beats us
Tavily was early to the idea that an LLM wants cleaned, ranked, citation-carrying chunks rather than a result page, and the developer experience still reflects that head start — the integrations are mature and the output lands in a model-ready shape with very little work. If your priority is shipping a grounded assistant this week rather than controlling retrieval, that maturity is worth something real.
Every page in this section names this. A comparison that cannot say where the other product wins is an advertisement.
The alternatives
unlob
$0.40/1kWe own the index the answers come from rather than layering over an upstream provider, so there is nobody above us who can change terms. Like a retrieval layer we return model-ready passages with citations; unlike one, we can tell you why a URL is absent, because we hold the ledger that records it.
Linkup
A French grounding API returning structured, citation-carrying content for LLMs, with a sub-second "fast" tier and native parallel search.
Valyu
A London deep-search API spanning web plus licensed proprietary sources, with content attribution and pay-per-use monetisation for publishers.
DataForSEO
$0.60/1kIndustrial SERP infrastructure built for SEO tooling rather than agents. The cheapest per query in the field, with the lowest-level API to match.
Parallel Search
$1/1kA suite of web search, extraction and research APIs on a proprietary index, from the former Twitter CEO. The closest competitor to unlob by thesis.
Serper
$1/1kThe cheapest way to get raw Google results into an agent. Fast, minimal, and entirely dependent on Google continuing to be scrapeable.
Brave Search API
$5/1kA genuinely independent index of 40B+ pages, sold as a conventional search API with an LLM-context option. Long the default independent choice.
Free developer tier removed February 2026
Google Custom Search JSON API
$5/1kGoogle's own programmable search endpoint. Real Google results, a hard 10,000/day ceiling, and terms written for site search rather than agents.
Exa
$7/1kNeural, embeddings-first search over a proprietary index, sold alongside content extraction, answers and agentic research products.
Sources
- Tavily pricingread 5 August 2026
- Tavily raises $25Mread 5 August 2026
- Tavily company profileread 5 August 2026
Frequently asked questions
What is the best alternative to Tavily?
It depends what you are replacing. If you need an independent index at the lowest price, unlob is $0.40 per 1,000 queries against Tavily's $8. If you need the largest possible index, Tavily may still be the right tool — we say so on our comparison page rather than pretending otherwise.
Who owns Tavily now?
Acquired by Nebius Group for $275M, February 2026. The service continues to operate under its new owner.
Does Tavily own its own web index?
No — No publicly documented independent web index. That is a legitimate architecture, but it means the product depends on an upstream provider it does not control.
How much does Tavily cost?
Credit-based at $0.008 per credit pay-as-you-go. A basic search is 1 credit (~$8 per 1,000), an advanced search 2 credits (~$16 per 1,000), and a deep research request 4 to 250 credits.
Try the cheapest own-index alternative
10,000 free credits a month, no card. Test coverage and latency against your own queries before you commit to anything.