Comparisons
We sell one of the products discussed here, so read accordingly. Every page names at least one scenario where the competitor is the better choice, because a comparison that cannot do that is not worth reading.
Verified 5 August 2026·All figures from primary sources
| Provider | Own index? | $ / 1,000 queries | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
Approximately $25 per 1,000 searches on the Starter plan; the rate falls on higher-volume plans. | No Scrapes Google, Bing, Baidu and others | $25 | SerpApi pricing |
$14 per 1,000 search queries on Gemini 3.x after 5,000 free prompts per month. Gemini 2.5 models use the older scheme at $35 per 1,000. One prompt can trigger several billed queries. | Yes Google's index | $14 | Gemini API pricing |
A per-request search fee of roughly $5 to $14 per 1,000 on top of token charges ($1/$1 per million on Sonar, $3/$15 on Sonar Pro). Pro Search mode runs $14 to $22 per 1,000. | Yes Perplexity index | $14 | Perplexity API pricing |
TavilyAcquired 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. | No No publicly documented independent web index | $8 | Tavily pricing |
Base search is $7 per 1,000 requests. Results beyond the first 10 add $1 per 1,000, contents add $1 per 1,000 pages, and AI summaries another $1 per 1,000 — so a realistic RAG call costs more than the headline. | Yes Proprietary AI-native semantic index | $7 | Exa pricing |
Search is $5 per 1,000 requests. The Answers plan is $4 per 1,000 plus $5 per million tokens. | Yes 40B+ pages, no Google or Bing dependency | $5 | Brave Search API pricing |
$5 per 1,000 queries after the free allowance, capped at 10,000 queries per day. | Yes Google's index, via Programmable Search Engine | $5 | Custom Search JSON API pricing |
The Turbo search processor is $1 per 1,000; Basic and Advanced are both $5 per 1,000. The Task API, which is what most agent workloads actually use, runs $5 to $2,400 per 1,000 depending on processor. | Yes Proprietary web index and retrieval infrastructure | $1 | Parallel pricing |
$1 per 1,000 on the Starter plan, falling to about $0.30 per 1,000 at high volume. | No Google SERP wrapper | $1 | Serper pricing |
Roughly $0.60 to $1 per 1,000 SERPs depending on endpoint, priority and volume. | No SERP data collection at scale | $0.60 | DataForSEO pricing |
$29 per month for 50,000 requests. | Yes Our own crawl and index | $0.58 | This page |
$199 per month for 500,000 requests. | Yes Our own crawl and index | $0.40 | This page |
unlob compared with
unlob vs Parallel Search
$1/1kTwo own-index, agent-first search APIs with the same founding thesis. Parallel has $230M and 100,000 developers; unlob is a quarter of the price and traverses a coverage graph.
unlob vs Exa
$7/1kExa is the best-funded neural search API in the category at a $2.2B valuation. unlob is 17.5× cheaper and adds graph traversal and coverage auditing.
unlob vs the Brave Search API
$5/1kBrave runs a genuinely independent index of 40B+ pages. It ended its free tier in February 2026 and costs 12.5× more per query.
Free developer tier removed February 2026
unlob vs Tavily
$8/1kTavily pioneered LLM-shaped search responses and was acquired by Nebius for $275M in February 2026. It does not own an index; unlob does, at a twentieth of the price.
Acquired by Nebius Group for $275M, February 2026
unlob vs Grounding with Google Search
$14/1kGoogle’s first-party grounding gives Gemini the best index in the world at $14 per 1,000 search queries — 35× unlob, and only usable from Gemini.
unlob vs Perplexity Sonar
$14/1kSonar returns a synthesised answer with citations. unlob returns results you control, at a fraction of the per-request search fee.
unlob vs Serper
$1/1kSerper is the cheapest way to get raw Google results into an agent. It is also a Google SERP wrapper, with everything that implies.
unlob vs SerpAPI
$25/1kSerpAPI is the mature multi-engine SERP API. At roughly $25 per 1,000 it is 62× unlob, and it is a scraping product rather than an index.
unlob vs Firecrawl
Firecrawl turns URLs into clean markdown. unlob finds the URLs. They are complements more often than alternatives.
unlob vs Linkup
Linkup is a well-regarded grounding API with a sub-second tier and native parallel search. unlob owns its index and publishes a flat rate.
unlob vs Valyu
Valyu spans web plus licensed proprietary corpora with publisher attribution. unlob is open-web only, at a published flat rate.
unlob vs Diffbot
Diffbot runs one of the few independent commercial crawls and a structured Knowledge Graph of entities. unlob indexes passages and exposes a coverage graph over them.
unlob vs Bright Data
Bright Data is proxy and unblocking infrastructure at industrial scale. unlob is a search index. Different layers of the stack.
unlob vs DataForSEO
$0.60/1kDataForSEO is the cheapest SERP data in the market at roughly $0.60–1 per 1,000. It is built for SEO tooling, not for agents.
unlob vs Google Custom Search JSON API
$5/1kGoogle’s Programmable Search gives you real Google results at $5 per 1,000, with a hard 10,000-per-day ceiling and terms written for site search.
unlob vs Grounding with Bing Search
Microsoft’s designated successor to the retired Bing Search API, available only inside Azure AI Foundry. A platform commitment, not an API swap.
unlob vs the OpenAI web search tool
OpenAI’s built-in search tool needs no integration if you are already on the Responses API — and gives you no control over retrieval.
unlob vs Jina Reader
Jina Reader converts a URL to markdown with a URL prefix. unlob finds which URLs matter and returns their text.
unlob vs Mojeek
Mojeek has crawled and indexed the web independently since 2004. unlob is a newer index built specifically for agent retrieval.
Comparisons we are not part of
These questions get asked constantly and answered badly, usually by one of the participants. We have no stake in the outcome of any of them.
Exa vs Parallel Search
The two best-funded own-index search APIs, compared on price, product surface and funding — with sources.
Exa vs Tavily
Neural search over a proprietary index against an LLM-shaped retrieval layer, one of which was acquired in February 2026.
Brave Search API vs Exa
Two independent indexes with different design targets: a conventional web search API against a neural one built for AI.
Tavily vs Linkup
Two grounding APIs for LLMs, one now owned by Nebius and one independently funded.
Serper vs SerpAPI
Two Google SERP APIs, twenty-five times apart on price.
Or skip the reading
10,000 free requests a month, no card. Run your own queries against both and decide from results rather than tables.