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Exa vs Tavily

Neural search over a proprietary index against an LLM-shaped retrieval layer, one of which was acquired in February 2026.

Verified 5 August 2026·Figures from vendors' own pages

We are not a participant in this comparison

Price

  • Exa$7
  • Tavily$8
Per 1,000 comparable web searches — about ten results, no extraction, no summarisation.
ProviderOwn index?$ / 1,000 queriesSource
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

$8Tavily pricing
Exa

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

$7Exa pricing
unlob — Build

$29 per month for 50,000 requests.

Yes

Our own crawl and index

$0.58This page
unlob — Scale

$199 per month for 500,000 requests.

Yes

Our own crawl and index

$0.40This page
Rates are the cheapest directly comparable web search call — roughly ten results, no extraction and no summarisation — because that is the only way a table across credit systems, token pricing and per-request pricing means anything. Where a vendor does not publish a flat per-1,000 rate they are omitted from this table and covered in full on the landscape page. Figures read from each vendor’s own pricing page on 5 August 2026.

Where each one wins

Neither product on this page is ours. This comparison exists because it is asked often and answered badly.

Exa

  • Exa: an index it controls, semantic retrieval quality, and Websets.
  • Tavily: search and extraction in one call, the strongest LangChain and LlamaIndex integrations.

Tavily

  • Tavily: search and extraction in one call, the strongest LangChain and LlamaIndex integrations.

The substantive differences

ExaTavily
Own indexExa: yes.Tavily: no public independent index.
PriceExa: $7 per 1,000 base search.Tavily: ~$8 basic, ~$16 advanced.
StatusExa: independent, $2.2B valuation.Tavily: acquired by Nebius, $275M.

Sources

Every figure on this page was read from the vendor's own pricing page or funding announcement on the date shown.

Frequently asked questions

Does Tavily own a web index?

No independent web index is publicly documented. Tavily operates as an AI-native retrieval layer over web search, adding cleaning, ranking and citations.

Check the claims yourself

The free tier is 10,000 requests a month with no card. That is enough to test coverage, latency and result quality against your own queries — which is a better comparison than this page.

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