--- title: "5 Best Tavily Alternatives for AI Agents | Scrape.ly" description: "The 5 best Tavily alternatives for AI agents in 2026, compared on search and crawl prices and MCP setup, with a real search-and-read run and its cost." url: https://scrape.ly/blog/tavily-alternatives markdown: https://scrape.ly/blog/tavily-alternatives.md --- [AI agents](https://scrape.ly/blog/category/ai-agents.md) # 5 Best Tavily Alternatives for AI Agents in 2026 The 5 best Tavily alternatives for giving AI agents live web search, compared on what 1,000 searches and 1,000 crawled pages cost. Scrape.ly leads with Google results plus the top pages as Markdown for $3.99 per 1,000 searches, over MCP, with a real run from today. [Scrape.ly Team The team behind Scrape.ly](https://scrape.ly/blog/author/scrapely-team.md) - Published Oct 27, 2026 - Reading time 9 min read ![Pixel-art robot with an orange >\_ on its terminal head chooses a lit arcade cabinet bearing the Scrape.ly logo, hand on its side and the Scrape.ly mark in its thought bubble, while a dark cabinet with the Tavily arrows logo stands switched off](https://scrape.ly/media/tavily-alternatives.png?w=1080) The best Tavily alternatives in 2026 are Scrape.ly, Exa, Firecrawl, Brave Search API and SerpApi. Of these Tavily alternatives, Scrape.ly is the one we recommend for AI agents: its RAG Web Browser searches Google and returns the top pages as clean Markdown for $3.99 per 1,000 searches, and the same MCP server gives your agent 570+ other scrapers when a web page isn't enough. Tavily is built around search for agents: one API call, results with content, ready for a prompt. It's a good tool. Teams look elsewhere when the credit math starts to matter, or when the agent needs data a search index doesn't have, like Amazon prices, Google Maps listings or a whole documentation site. Below: how Tavily bills, what to look for, five alternatives with their published prices, a real search-and-read run from 27 October 2026 with its exact cost, and the MCP setup for Claude, Cursor and ChatGPT. Every competitor price was checked on the vendor's own page that day. ## Why teams look for Tavily alternatives Tavily bills in API credits. Per its [credits and pricing docs](https://docs.tavily.com/documentation/api-credits): - **Credits cost $0.005 to $0.008 each.** Free accounts get 1,000 credits a month. Monthly plans run from Project ($30 for 4,000 credits) to Growth ($500 for 100,000), and the on-demand rate is $0.008 per credit. - **Search depth doubles the price.** A basic search costs 1 credit and an advanced search 2. At the on-demand rate, 1,000 advanced searches cost $16. - **Crawling adds up.** A crawl costs mapping plus extraction: 10 pages with basic extraction cost 3 credits, so 1,000 pages cost 300 credits, $2.40 at the on-demand rate. Advanced extraction makes it 5 credits per 10 pages. - **Research is open-ended.** A research request costs 4 to 110 credits with the mini model and 15 to 250 with pro, decided per request. - **It's a web search API.** Search, extract, crawl, map and research cover reading the open web. When an agent needs structured data from a specific site, such as product rows, map listings or job posts, that's a different tool. ## What to look for in Tavily alternatives 1. **Search plus the pages, in one call.** An agent needs the text of the top results, not ten links it still has to fetch. 2. **Google's own results when rank matters.** For SEO checks, brand monitoring or "what does Google show for X", the agent should read the real results page. 3. **A flat price per search.** One price per results page, with the page content inside it, is easier to budget than credits that vary with depth. 4. **Crawling at a per-page price** for documentation and knowledge bases you index once and refresh. 5. **More than search.** Ready-made scrapers for the sites agents get asked about: Amazon, Google Maps, LinkedIn, YouTube. 6. **Spending limits built for agents:** a cap per run and an API key with a daily charge limit, so a looping agent can't run up a bill. ## Tavily alternatives compared | Tool | How it bills | 1,000 searches | 1,000 crawled pages | | ---------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **Scrape.ly** | Per Google results page, platform usage included; per page for crawls | $3.99 with the top pages as Markdown (RAG Web Browser) | $0.50 plus platform usage, about $0.60 in total (Website Content Crawler) | | Tavily (for reference) | Credits, $0.005 to $0.008 each | $5 to $8 basic, $10 to $16 advanced | 300 credits basic: $1.50 to $2.40 | | Exa | Per request, from a prepaid balance | $4 (lite) to $7 (auto), up to 10 results | No crawl endpoint on its price list; contents for known URLs $1 per 1,000 pages | | Firecrawl | Monthly credit plans | 2,000 credits, plus 1 credit per page you scrape from the results | 1,000 credits | | Brave Search API | Per request | $5 | No crawl product listed | | SerpApi | Monthly plan with a fixed number of searches | $25 (Starter, 1,000 searches a month) | No crawl product listed | Tavily's ranges run from its Growth plan rate ($0.005 per credit) to its on-demand rate ($0.008). Sources for every competitor cell are linked in each section below. ## 1. Scrape.ly: search, read and scrape over one MCP server Scrape.ly is a web data platform with a [Store](https://scrape.ly/store.md) of 570+ ready-made scrapers called Actors, a cloud runtime, an API and a hosted MCP server. For the jobs agents use Tavily for, three Actors cover the ground: | Tavily job | Scrape.ly Actor | Price | | ----------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Search and read the top pages | [RAG Web Browser](https://scrape.ly/store/querystone/rag-web-browser.md) | $3.99 per 1,000 Google results pages, the pages found by the search included | | Search results with positions | [Google Search Scraper](https://scrape.ly/store/querystone/google-search-scraper.md) | $3.30 per 1,000 results pages | | Crawl a site | [Website Content Crawler](https://scrape.ly/store/querystone/website-content-crawler.md) | $0.50 per 1,000 pages plus platform usage | **RAG Web Browser** takes a Google query, or a single URL, and returns each top result as Markdown, text or HTML. Links in the Markdown are absolute, navigation and cookie banners are removed, and each page carries its title, description, language, canonical URL, Open Graph tags and JSON-LD when the page has them. One results-page event covers the pages fetched from it, and a run that fails and writes nothing isn't charged. **Google Search Scraper** returns Google's results page as JSON: organic results with positions, People Also Ask and related searches, for any country and language. Use it when the agent needs to know who ranks, not just what the pages say. **Website Content Crawler** follows a site's links from your start URLs and saves clean Markdown per page, with page limits, depth and URL patterns to stop a runaway crawl. Beyond those three, the same MCP server reaches every Actor in the Store, so "compare these three products on Amazon" or "find coffee shops in Portland with their ratings" go to scrapers built for those sites. Spending stays bounded: every run can carry a maximum charge, and a scoped API key can have a daily charge limit. Agents without an account can pay per call in USDC over [x402](https://scrape.ly/blog/x402-for-ai-agents.md), and when an agent needs a real browser rather than a search API, [Browserbase alternatives](https://scrape.ly/blog/browserbase-alternatives.md) compares the hosted options. **Best for:** agent builders who want Google search with full page content at a flat price, crawling for RAG, and site-specific scrapers behind one MCP connection. The [agents page](https://scrape.ly/agents.md) has the full picture. ### A real run: search and read, 27 October 2026 We ran the RAG Web Browser through the MCP server with the query "model context protocol specification", 3 results, Markdown output: ```json { "query": "model context protocol specification", "maxResults": 3, "outputFormats": ["markdown"], "scrapingTool": "raw-http", "proxyConfiguration": { "useScrapelyProxy": true } } ``` It finished in 7 seconds with three pages: | Position | Page | Markdown characters | | -------- | --------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------- | | 1 | Introducing the Model Context Protocol (anthropic.com) | 5,428 | | 2 | Specification, Model Context Protocol (modelcontextprotocol.io) | 6,420 | | 3 | modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol (github.com) | 13,474 | That's about 25,000 characters of clean Markdown, each page with its URL and metadata, ready to put in a prompt. The log: ```plaintext 20261027T16:08:55.374Z [scrapely.actor] INFO Searching Google in fast search mode; a page switches to browser mode only if fast search mode fails 20261027T16:08:56.475Z [scrapely.actor] INFO Search page start=0 in fast search mode: 9 results 20261027T16:08:58.178Z [scrapely.actor] INFO Clean pages 3 of 3 via fast search mode 20261027T16:08:58.178Z [scrapely.actor] INFO Timing: python 1.2s, imports 0.3s, start 0.3s, search 1.1s, 9 page requests, median 1.0s, max 1.1s, hedged 0 (won 0), total 3.1s ``` The run was charged one results-page event: $0.00399 at list price. Our account paid $0.003192 because its plan has a 20% Store discount. Compute and proxy traffic were included in that price. ## 2. Exa [Exa](https://exa.ai/pricing) runs its own search index, built for semantic queries. It bills per request from a prepaid balance, with no subscription: search costs $4 per 1,000 requests on the lite type and $7 on auto and fast, each including up to 10 results, with $1 per 1,000 for every result above 10. Contents for known URLs cost $1 per 1,000 pages per content type, and Deep Search $12 to $15 per 1,000 requests. It has a hosted MCP server. **Best for:** finding pages by meaning rather than keywords, such as "companies like this one" or research-paper discovery. For Google's own results with the pages attached at one flat price, use the RAG Web Browser. ## 3. Firecrawl [Firecrawl](https://www.firecrawl.dev/pricing) turns web pages into Markdown and JSON through scrape, crawl, map, search, interact and agent endpoints. Search costs 2 credits per 10 results, and scraping the results costs 1 credit per page on top. Plans run from Free (1,000 credits a month) through Hobby ($19 for 5,000) and Standard ($99 for 100,000) to Scale ($749 for 1,000,000), and credits on Hobby, Standard and Growth don't roll over. **Best for:** teams that want one Markdown API with fixed endpoints. A search plus 5 scraped pages costs 7 credits, so Hobby's 5,000 credits cover about 700 such searches a month. See [Firecrawl alternatives](https://scrape.ly/blog/firecrawl-alternatives.md) for the full comparison. ## 4. Brave Search API [Brave Search API](https://brave.com/search/api/) serves results from Brave's own independent index. Search costs $5 per 1,000 requests and returns results with extra snippets and LLM context. An Answers endpoint costs $4 per 1,000 requests plus $5 per million input and output tokens. **Best for:** teams that want an independent index rather than Google's results. When the question is what Google shows, Brave's index answers a different one. ## 5. SerpApi [SerpApi](https://serpapi.com/pricing) returns parsed search engine results pages on monthly plans: Free (250 searches a month), Starter at $25 for 1,000, Developer at $75 for 5,000 and Production at $150 for 15,000. Only successful searches count. **Best for:** teams with a steady monthly volume of results-page lookups. At 1,000 searches a month, Scrape.ly's Google Search Scraper costs $3.30 against SerpApi's $25; our [SerpApi pricing breakdown](https://scrape.ly/blog/serpapi-pricing.md) has the details. ## How to switch from Tavily to Scrape.ly **1. Map the calls.** Tavily search with raw content becomes the RAG Web Browser with `query` and `maxResults`. Tavily extract becomes the RAG Web Browser with a URL as the `query`. Tavily crawl becomes the Website Content Crawler with `startUrls` and `maxCrawlPages`. **2. Give your agent the MCP server.** In Claude Code: ```shell claude mcp add --transport http scrapely https://mcp.scrape.ly ``` Then run `/mcp` to sign in. To keep the tool list short, load only the Actors that replace Tavily: ```json { "mcpServers": { "scrapely": { "url": "https://mcp.scrape.ly?actors=querystone/rag-web-browser,querystone/google-search-scraper,querystone/website-content-crawler" } } } ``` That's the `~/.cursor/mcp.json` entry for Cursor. Claude Desktop, ChatGPT, VS Code and Windsurf connect to the same URL over streamable HTTP; the [MCP docs](https://scrape.ly/docs/mcp.md) cover each one. Then ask: "Use scrapely to search Google for 'model context protocol specification' with querystone/rag-web-browser, 3 results, and summarize each page." **3. Call it from code.** Our run took 7 seconds, so the synchronous endpoint fits: ```shell curl -X POST "https://api.scrape.ly/v2/actors/querystone~rag-web-browser/run-sync-get-dataset-items" -H "Authorization: Bearer $SCRAPELY_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"query": "model context protocol specification", "maxResults": 3, "outputFormats": ["markdown"]}' ``` Or with the Python client (`pip install scrapely-client-python`): ```python import os from scrapely_client import ScrapelyClient client = ScrapelyClient(os.environ["SCRAPELY_TOKEN"], api_url="https://api.scrape.ly") run = client.actor("querystone/rag-web-browser").call( run_input={"query": "model context protocol specification", "maxResults": 3, "outputFormats": ["markdown"]} ) for page in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items(): print(page["metadata"]["url"], len(page.get("markdown") or "")) ``` To feed whole sites to a RAG pipeline, see [website to Markdown for LLMs](https://scrape.ly/blog/website-to-markdown-for-llms.md). **4. Set the guardrails.** Create a scoped API key for the agent under **Settings → API & Integrations → API keys** with `actors:run` and `runs:read` and a daily charge limit, and pass `maxTotalChargeUsd` on runs you start yourself. ## FAQ ### What is the best Tavily alternative? Scrape.ly. Its RAG Web Browser returns Google's top results as clean Markdown for $3.99 per 1,000 searches, and the same MCP server gives agents a crawler and 570+ site-specific scrapers. Our three-page run cost $0.00399 at list price. ### How much does Tavily cost? Tavily gives 1,000 free credits a month. Paid plans run from $30 for 4,000 credits to $500 for 100,000, and the on-demand rate is $0.008 per credit. A basic search costs 1 credit and an advanced search 2, as of 27 October 2026. ### Is there a Tavily MCP server? Yes. Tavily hosts one at `mcp.tavily.com` with search, extract, crawl, map and research tools. Scrape.ly's hosted server at `https://mcp.scrape.ly` covers search, extraction and crawling through its Actors, and adds every scraper in the Store. Our list of [web search MCP servers](https://scrape.ly/blog/web-search-mcp-server.md) compares the options. ### Are there free Tavily alternatives? Scrape.ly's Free plan gives you $5 of credit every month without a card. At $3.99 per 1,000, that's about 1,250 searches with their pages read, against Tavily's 1,000 free basic searches. ### Which Tavily alternatives work best for RAG? For one-off questions, the RAG Web Browser: search plus page content in one call. For a knowledge base, crawl the sources once with the Website Content Crawler at $0.50 per 1,000 pages plus usage and refresh on a schedule. Our guide to [website to Markdown for LLMs](https://scrape.ly/blog/website-to-markdown-for-llms.md) walks through it. Scrape.ly Store Search Google, get the pages as Markdown Give your agent live web search with the top pages as clean Markdown: $3.99 per 1,000 searches, platform usage included. Start on $5 of free monthly credit. [Try it free](https://scrape.ly/store/querystone/rag-web-browser.md) [Browse the Store](https://scrape.ly/store.md) About the author [Scrape.ly Team](https://scrape.ly/blog/author/scrapely-team.md) The team behind Scrape.ly Scrape.ly is the web data platform from TeraShift GmbH in Switzerland, powered by Evomi: ready-made scrapers in the Scrape.ly Store, a cloud runtime, an API with JavaScript and Python SDKs, proxies, a hosted anti-bot browser and an MCP server for AI agents. - [Website](https://scrape.ly/index.md) Keep reading ## More in AI agents - [![Pixel-art robot with an orange >\_ on its terminal head walks up to a lit arcade cabinet bearing the Scrape.ly logo and rests its hand on it, thinking of the Scrape.ly mark, while a dark cabinet with the orange Browserbase B logo stands switched off](https://scrape.ly/media/browserbase-alternatives.png?w=750)](https://scrape.ly/blog/browserbase-alternatives.md) ### [4 Best Browserbase Alternatives in 2026 for Scraping and Agents](https://scrape.ly/blog/browserbase-alternatives.md) [The 4 best Browserbase alternatives for 2026, compared on anti-bot features, CAPTCHA solving, proxy billing and free tiers. Scrape.ly leads with a hosted anti-bot Chromium your existing Playwright and Puppeteer code uses unchanged, next to 570+ ready-made scrapers.](https://scrape.ly/blog/browserbase-alternatives.md) - [![Pixel-art robot with an orange >\_ on its terminal head pulls a card with curly braces out of a monitor showing the purple ScrapeGraphAI spider logo and a graph of nodes that runs from a small web page to curly braces, and drops it into a crate](https://scrape.ly/media/scrapegraphai-guide.png?w=750)](https://scrape.ly/blog/scrapegraphai-guide.md) ### [ScrapeGraphAI Tutorial: How It Works, a Tested Setup and a Hosted Alternative](https://scrape.ly/blog/scrapegraphai-guide.md) [ScrapeGraphAI turns a prompt and a URL into JSON by sending the page to an LLM. We installed version 2.3.1, traced a SmartScraperGraph run node by node, priced its hosted API, and show the Scrape.ly route that returns structured data without paying for LLM tokens on every page.](https://scrape.ly/blog/scrapegraphai-guide.md) - [![Pixel-art robot with an orange >\_ on its terminal head carries a cable from a search results page headed by the Google G logo into a server rack labelled MCP](https://scrape.ly/media/web-search-mcp-server.png?w=750)](https://scrape.ly/blog/web-search-mcp-server.md) ### [6 Best Web Search MCP Servers for AI Agents in 2026](https://scrape.ly/blog/web-search-mcp-server.md) [The 6 best web search MCP servers for Claude, Cursor and ChatGPT, compared on where results come from, price per 1,000 searches, sign-in and spending control. With a real Google search run through MCP and the truth about Google Search MCP servers.](https://scrape.ly/blog/web-search-mcp-server.md) ## The internet is full of data. Start owning yours. Scrape.ly gives you the infrastructure, the tooling, and the team to extract, process, and operationalize web data at any scale. Setup takes minutes. [Get Started Free](https://my.scrape.ly/register) [Chat with Support](mailto:hello@scrape.ly?subject=Question%20about%20Scrape.ly\&body=Hi%2C%20I%20have%20a%20question%20about%20Scrape.ly.) No credit card. No setup calls.