Exa vs Tavily: which search API for your agent

Exa and Tavily are both web search APIs built for programs rather than people, and the practical difference is what you get back and how you pay. Exa is a neural search engine that returns up to 100 results per request with full page text inline, priced per request from $4 to $12 per 1,000. Tavily is a credit-based search, extract and crawl product with a free tier, a 20-result cap, and a pay-as-you-go rate that works out to $8 per 1,000 basic searches. Pick Exa when you want deep semantic retrieval and whole pages in one call; pick Tavily when you want search plus extraction plus crawl from one vendor, or your volume fits its free or monthly plans.

This page compares the two as of October 2026 using each vendor's public pricing. Exa is also available through Mux as exa/auto and three other tiers at the same list price; Tavily is not, so the Tavily figures are what you would pay Tavily directly.

The short version#

Sources: exa.ai/pricing, tavily.com/pricing, Tavily API credits and the Tavily search reference.

How each one prices a search#

Exa's price is per request. As of October 2026 its pricing page lists lite at $4 per 1,000 requests, auto at $7, and deep at $12, each including 10 results, with $1 per 1,000 for results beyond the tenth. Contents such as page text, highlights and summaries are billed at $1 per 1,000 pages per content type when you call Exa directly. Through Mux the four tiers are exa/instant at $4, exa/fast and exa/auto at $7, and exa/deep at $12, with the same extra-result rate, and content: "full" does not add a charge. The full math, including what 25 and 100 results cost, is in Exa pricing explained.

Tavily's price is in credits. Its pricing page lists a free Researcher plan with 1,000 credits per month, pay-as-you-go at $0.008 per credit, a Project plan at $30 per month for 4,000 credits, and custom enterprise terms. A basic, fast or ultra-fast search costs 1 credit and an advanced search costs 2, so pay-as-you-go is $8 per 1,000 basic searches or $16 per 1,000 advanced. Monthly plans bring the per-credit rate down, so a team doing a steady volume should price its plan rather than the pay-as-you-go rate.

Two things decide which is cheaper for you. At low volume Tavily's free 1,000 credits per month beat anything Exa offers except its own $10 monthly free credit, which covers up to 2,500 lite searches. At higher volume Exa's auto at $7 per 1,000 undercuts Tavily's pay-as-you-go basic rate, and lite or exa/instant at $4 is about half of it. Whether Tavily's monthly plans close that gap depends on your tier, so check the page.

Result count and page text#

Exa returns up to 100 results per request. Tavily's max_results tops out at 20. For agents that cast a wide net and rank locally, or for building a candidate list of sources, that is a real difference. Note that on Exa the extra results add up: 100 results on exa/auto cost $0.097 rather than $0.007, so wide queries are not free on either side.

Both can hand you page text. Exa does it inline. Through Mux, content: "full" on any Exa model fills results[].content with the full page at no extra charge; direct from Exa, text is a contents item billed per page. Tavily has include_raw_content on the search call, which returns page content as markdown or text and may add latency, and a separate extract endpoint billed at 1 credit per 5 successful URLs for basic extraction. If you often want text for a handful of results rather than all of them, Tavily's extract is the cheaper shape. If you want text for every result on every search, Exa's inline model is simpler.

Filters and query style#

Tavily exposes more knobs. Its search takes topic (general, news or finance), time_range shorthands like week and month, explicit start_date and end_date, up to 300 include domains and 150 exclude domains, a country bias, and an include_answer flag that returns a short LLM-written answer alongside results. Exa's filters cover published dates, include and exclude domains, a category such as research papers or news, and text-must-include and text-must-exclude constraints, plus userLocation and moderation. Through Mux the Exa options arrive as published_after, published_before, include_domains, exclude_domains and a small set of provider_options.

Exa's index is neural, which matters for the kind of query an agent writes. A long natural-language question such as "startups building solid-state battery electrolytes that raised in 2026" works well on Exa and is the use case it was designed for. Tavily handles natural-language queries too, but the distinctive features on its side are the vertical topics and the one-call answer, not semantic retrieval over a very large result set.

Extract, crawl and research#

This is where Tavily is the broader product. Alongside search it offers extract (page text for a list of URLs), map (discover the pages of a site), crawl (map plus extract) and a research endpoint that runs a multi-step investigation for 4 to 250 credits per request depending on the model. An agent that needs to walk a documentation site or pull clean text from a known list of URLs can do that from one vendor with one bill.

Exa sells a contents endpoint and other products directly, but through Mux you get search only. If crawl is part of the job, that pushes you toward Tavily, or toward Exa direct, rather than a router. The same caveat applies to every Mux article, including the broader Tavily alternatives roundup.

Latency#

Neither vendor publishes measured latency on its pricing page. Tavily describes ultra-fast as minimizing latency above all else, fast as prioritizing lower latency, and advanced as highest relevance with increased latency, and returns a response_time field on each call. Through Mux the typical figures seen for Exa are about 300 ms for exa/instant, 500 ms for exa/fast, 1 s for exa/auto and 5 s for exa/deep, and every response carries usage.latency_ms. Measure both on your own queries before you commit; the shape of the request, especially page text, moves latency more than the vendor does.

When Tavily is the better choice#

• You need extract, map or crawl as well as search and want one vendor for all of it.
• Your volume fits inside 1,000 free credits a month, or a monthly plan that prices below $7 per 1,000 for your tier.
• You want vertical topics (news, finance), a 300-domain allow-list, or a one-call include_answer summary.
• You already have Tavily wired into your framework and the switching cost is real.

When Exa is the better choice#

• You want semantic search over a large neural index, with natural-language queries as the norm.
• You need more than 20 results per request, up to 100.
• You want full page text inline for every result in a single call.
• You want to run Exa alongside other providers with fallback. Through Mux you can put exa/auto behind parallel/fast in one models list and pay only for the model that answered; see search fallbacks for AI agents.

Trying Exa with one request#

Through Mux, an Exa search with full page text looks like this. Swap model for any other Mux model id and the response shape does not change.

FAQ#

Is Exa or Tavily cheaper per search?#

At list prices as of October 2026, Exa's auto at $7 per 1,000 requests and lite at $4 are below Tavily's pay-as-you-go rate of $8 per 1,000 basic searches. Tavily's free tier of 1,000 credits a month and its monthly plans change that at low volume, so compare against the plan you would actually buy on tavily.com/pricing.

Which returns full page content?#

Both. Exa returns it inline, and through Mux content: "full" on an Exa model costs nothing extra. Tavily returns it with include_raw_content on the search call or through its extract endpoint at 1 credit per 5 URLs for basic extraction.

Can I use Tavily through Mux?#

No. Mux routes to Exa, Parallel, Keenable and DeepSeek. If Tavily is the right fit, go to Tavily directly. The buyer's guide to web search APIs for AI agents covers how to evaluate the wider field.

Does Exa or Tavily have a free tier?#

Both. Exa gives new signups $10 in credit that resets monthly, enough for up to 2,500 lite searches. Tavily's Researcher plan includes 1,000 credits per month with no card. Mux has no free tier; credits are prepaid from $5.

To run an Exa search next to Parallel and Keenable with one key, start at the quickstart.