Comparison
Tavily vs Linkup
Two grounding APIs for LLMs, one now owned by Nebius and one independently funded. Neither owns the index its answers are drawn from.
Verified 7 October 2026·Figures from vendors' own pages
We are not a participant in this comparisonPrice
- Tavily$8
- Linkup$5
| Provider | Own index? | $ / 1,000 searches | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
TavilyAcquired Priced: basic search, pay as you go. 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 research request 4 to 250 credits. Fast and ultra-fast searches are also 1 credit; monthly plans bring the effective rate down to $5 per 1,000 at 100,000 credits ($500 a month). | No No publicly documented independent web index | $8 | Tavily pricing |
Priced: standard-depth search. $5 per 1,000 standard-depth searches returning results ($0.005 a call); $6 per 1,000 with a sourced answer, and $50 per 1,000 at deep depth. | Partial Own retrieval layer over partner and web sources | $5 | Linkup pricing |
$29 per month for 50,000 credits, and a search is one credit. | Yes Our own crawl and index | $0.58 | This page |
$199 per month for 500,000 credits, and a search is one credit. | Yes Our own crawl and index | $0.40 | This page |
Where each one wins
Neither product on this page is ours. This comparison exists because it is asked often and answered badly.
Tavily
- Tavily: ecosystem maturity, LangChain and LlamaIndex integrations, deep research requests.
- Linkup: native parallel search, a sub-second tier, European base, and reported accuracy benchmarks.
Linkup
- Linkup: native parallel search, a sub-second tier, European base, and reported accuracy benchmarks.
The substantive differences
| Tavily | Linkup | |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership | Tavily: Nebius Group, since February 2026. | Linkup: independent. |
| Pricing | Tavily: credits at $0.008 pay-as-you-go. | Linkup: per plan and search depth. |
| Distinct feature | Tavily: search plus extraction in one call. | Linkup: native parallel search. |
Sources
Every figure on this page was read from the vendor's own pricing page or funding announcement on the date shown.
- Tavily: Tavily pricingread 7 October 2026
- Tavily: Tavily API creditsread 7 October 2026
- Tavily: Nebius announces agreement to acquire Tavily (10 February 2026)read 7 October 2026
- Tavily: Tavily raises $25Mread 5 August 2026
- Tavily: Tavily company profileread 5 August 2026
- Linkup: Linkup pricingread 7 October 2026
- Linkup: Linkup pricing documentationread 7 October 2026
- Linkup: Linkup raises $10M seedread 5 August 2026
Frequently asked questions
Are Tavily and Linkup direct competitors?
Yes — both sell LLM-oriented grounding over web content, both target agent developers, and both compete on retrieval quality rather than index ownership.
Check the claims yourself
The free tier is 10,000 credits 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.