Pick Crawl4AI if
rAG and agent authors who want Markdown out and will stay on Cloud or Docker.
Read the Crawl4AI pageCrawl4AI vs Tavily
Our take
Pick Crawl4AI if rAG and agent authors who want Markdown out and will stay on Cloud or Docker. Pick Tavily if agent builders who want hosted web search without running a crawler. Skip Crawl4AI if teams that need a stealth CDP grid (Steel) or neural web ranking (Exa). Skip Tavily if teams that need a neural search index with contents in one call (Exa) or a scrape-to-markdown playground (Firecrawl).
Crawl4AI
open-source crawler plus a hosted scrape
Best for
Crawl4AI URL → clean Markdown for an agent
Tavily One credit-metered call that returns LLM-ready results
Free plan
Crawl4AI $0 · apache-2.0. You run the browsers
Tavily $0 · 1,000 credits/month. No card
Lowest paid
Crawl4AI Builder $99/mo
Tavily Pay as you go $0.008
Next step up
Crawl4AI Scale $499/mo
Tavily Project $30
Coding agent
Crawl4AI
Tavily Codex
Runs where
Crawl4AI Local or hosted
Tavily
Watch out
Crawl4AI Free is 10 requests/minute and 2 at a time
Tavily Credits reset monthly
Last checked
Crawl4AI 2026-10-22 · docs.crawl4ai.com
Tavily 2026-10-21 · tavily.com/pricing
Which one, then?
Pick Tavily if
agent builders who want hosted web search without running a crawler.
Read the Tavily page