Pick Exa if
developers wiring retrieval into an agent who will pay per 1k requests.
Read the Exa pageExa vs Tavily
Our take
Pick Exa if developers wiring retrieval into an agent who will pay per 1k requests. Pick Tavily if agent builders who want hosted web search without running a crawler. Skip Exa if people who want a cited answer box without an API (Perplexity) or a scrape-to-markdown crawler (Firecrawl). Skip Tavily if teams that need a neural search index with contents in one call (Exa) or a scrape-to-markdown playground (Firecrawl).
Best for
Exa Ranked web results plus page contents in one request
Tavily One credit-metered call that returns LLM-ready results
Free plan
Exa $0 · $10 credits on signup; balance resets to $10 on the 1st of each month. No payment method required. First-team onboarding bonus +$10 one-time (docs)
Tavily $0 · 1,000 credits/month. No card
Lowest paid
Exa Agent (fixed effort) $0.012
Tavily Pay as you go $0.008
Next step up
Exa `/contents` $1
Tavily Project $30
Coding agent
Exa Search playground
Tavily Codex
Watch out
Exa Credits are prepaid dollars
Tavily Credits reset monthly
Last checked
Exa 2026-10-21 · exa.ai/docs/admin/pricing
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