The best Tavily alternatives for AI agents in 2026

Nebius acquired Tavily in 2026, reportedly for $275 million with a potential total of $400 million tied to performance targets, while retaining Tavily’s brand and integrating its team and capabilities into Nebius’s Token Factory platform; no API or pricing changes were announced. Tavily’s credit-based pricing ranges from roughly $5 to $8 per 1,000 basic searches and $10 to $16 for advanced searches, with 1,000 monthly free credits, making lower-cost alternatives notable for agent-search workloads. Parallel and Perplexity offer fast search tiers at $1 per 1,000 requests, while Parallel also combines search, extraction, and research tools and outperformed Tavily basic in an August 2026 benchmark. Exa provides embeddings-based search and research features, Brave supplies results from an independent web index, Linkup offers straightforward per-request billing and a sizable free allowance, and Firecrawl is positioned as the closest substitute for Tavily’s site mapping and crawling functions. Choosing a replacement depends on priorities such as low search cost, integrated extraction and research, independent indexing, simple billing, or full-site crawling, which can be paired with another search API.

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