Exa vs Tavily

Exa states plainly that it builds and runs its own search index. Its documentation says that as of August 2026 the index tracks 1.4 trillion URLs and serves 100 billion pages. Its crawler, ExaSearchBot, follows robots.txt and drops pages marked noindex after its next fetch. Those are Exa's own figures, and the crawler is specific enough to find in your server logs.

Tavily's documentation describes a different mechanism. Its about page says the Search API aggregates up to 20 sites per call and uses proprietary AI to score, filter and rank them. It does not say which index or engines supply those sites, and I could not find that stated anywhere in the pages I read.

Neither approach is wrong, and I would not infer quality from either. What differs is what you can tell somebody who asks where an answer came from. With Exa you can name the index and the crawler. With Tavily you can name the vendor and its ranking step, and nothing below that.

The consequence shows up in results. Because Exa ranks its own index with its own models, its results are meant to differ from a Google search. One r/Rag commenter reported it missing forum and Reddit pages that Google would surface. Test both against the queries your agent really sends, not against a benchmark either vendor published.

The two price lists look as though they measure the same thing, and they do not. Exa's $7 per 1,000 is a price per request that covers up to ten results with their text. Tavily's $0.008 is a price per credit, and a basic search costs one credit whether it returns five results or twenty.

That makes ten results the pivot. Below ten, Exa still charges the full $7, so a five-result call costs the same as a ten-result one. Above ten, Exa adds $1 per 1,000 for each extra result, and Tavily adds nothing until its ceiling of 20. At twenty results Exa costs $17 per 1,000 against Tavily's $8.

Plans move the line again. Tavily's Growth plan is $500 for 100,000 credits, which is $5 per 1,000 basic searches if you use them all. Exa has no monthly plan and publishes no self-serve discount, so its $7 holds until an Enterprise contract. At 100,000 ten-result searches a month, that is $700 against $500.

The catch is the word all. Tavily's plans only beat Exa's flat rate once they are mostly used: past about 95% of the credits on Bootstrap, 83% on Startup and 71% on Growth. Project, at $30 for 4,000 credits, never does, because $7.50 per 1,000 sits above Exa's rate even when full.

So an Exa pricing vs Tavily pricing decision is really a question about your own traffic. A steady, predictable volume at basic depth favours a Tavily plan. Uneven volume at ten results a call favours Exa's pay as you go. Anything that needs more than ten results favours Tavily, until it needs more than twenty.

Search is half the job for most pipelines. The other half is reading pages you already have, or every page on a site. Here the two products are shaped differently, not just priced differently.

Tavily sells that as three endpoints. Map follows links from a root URL and returns the site's URLs at one credit per ten. Extract reads up to 20 URLs a call at one credit per five pages. Crawl combines the two, up to five levels deep, so a 1,000-page site costs 300 credits, or $2.40 on pay as you go.

Tavily also states that failed extractions and failed map requests are not charged. That matters more than it sounds on a crawl of an old site, where some URLs are likely to time out or return errors.

Exa has no map endpoint. Its Contents endpoint reads up to 100 known URLs a request at $1 per 1,000 pages for each content type. It can also follow up to 100 subpages from each starting URL. With the URLs in hand, reading 1,000 pages costs $1.00. Finding them is your job, or a search's.

Freshness is more explicit on Exa. Contents takes a maxAgeHours value, running from always fetching live to cache only, with a timeout on the live fetch. Tavily's Extract offers a basic depth and an advanced one that retrieves tables and embedded content at double the credit, plus a timeout. Its reference lists no cache-age setting.

The two vendors publish limits in different units, which makes them easy to misread side by side. Exa counts queries per second across your whole team. Tavily counts requests per minute by key type. Converted to one unit, the gap runs in both directions depending on the plan.

On the free tiers Exa is far looser. Its free accounts get 10 search requests a second, which is 600 a minute. Tavily's free keys are development keys capped at 100 a minute, a sixth of that. For a prototype that fans out many parallel searches, the difference arrives on the first afternoon.

Paid, the order changes. A Tavily production key allows 1,000 requests a minute, about 16.7 a second, once a paid plan or pay as you go is enabled. Exa's pay-as-you-go default stays at 10 a second. It rises to 25 for 90 days after you buy $1,000 of credit within any 30-day window. Beyond that, both send you to sales.

The endpoint limits matter as much as the headline. Exa holds the deep search types to 5 a second and lets Contents run at 100. Tavily holds Crawl to 100 a minute and Research task creation to 20, on every key. Both document an HTTP 429 response with a Retry-After header where one is sent.

Both vendors now sell something bigger than a search: an agent that plans queries, reads sources and returns a cited answer. The prices look comparable at a glance. The real difference is when you find out what a run cost.

Exa sells two versions. Deep search types on the search endpoint cost $12 per 1,000 for deep-lite and deep, and $15 for deep-reasoning. The Agent endpoint, launched in June 2026, runs longer jobs. At a fixed effort it costs a set price per run: $0.012, $0.025, $0.10, $0.50 or $1.00. Choose the effort and you know the bill before the call.

Tavily Research bills a range instead. The mini model takes between 4 and 110 credits a request, and pro between 15 and 250. A pro run therefore lands somewhere from $0.12 to $2.00 on pay as you go. You learn the exact figure from usage reporting afterwards.

Exa's default, though, is not fixed. Agent runs default to auto effort, which meters compute at $0.10 a unit and search calls at $0.005 each. Each run is capped at $5 by default. So the predictable Exa price is one you have to select. Left on its default, Exa's worst case per run is higher than Tavily's $2.00 ceiling.

Nebius, the Amsterdam-based AI cloud company listed on Nasdaq, announced an agreement to acquire Tavily on 10 February 2026. It expected the deal to close within weeks. Its own blog of 20 May 2026 states that Nebius has acquired Tavily. Nebius did not disclose the price, so I do not state one.

Nebius said Tavily would keep its brand and that its founder and chief executive, Rotem Weiss, would continue to lead the product. Nebius positions Tavily beside its own inference service. Nothing on Tavily's pricing page or in its credit documentation, as read on 17 September 2026, refers to the acquisition.

Exa is independent and newly funded. Its own post of 20 May 2026 announced a $250 million Series C at a $2.2 billion valuation, led by a16z. That is capital for building an index, which is the expensive thing Exa does.

Exa's API surface has moved more in the last six months. It retired the /research endpoint in April 2026 in favour of the deep-reasoning search type. In July it began deprecating the pdf, github and tweet search categories. Tavily's changelog over the same months lists additions and no deprecations. Pin your SDK version on either, and read the changelog before upgrading.

Neither story is a reason to avoid either vendor, and an Exa vs Tavily comparison that called one of them safe would be overreaching. Both stories are reasons to keep retrieval behind an interface you could repoint, which is cheap on day one and expensive later.