TL;DR
- Exa runs its own neural (embedding) index. Tavily aggregates results and cleans them for LLMs.
- Price per 1,000: Exa $4 lite / $7 auto plus $1 per 1,000 pages of content. Tavily $5–8 basic, content included.
- Pick Exa for semantic discovery and "find pages like this". Pick Tavily for drop-in agent framework support.
- If price matters more than either: Keirolabs does search with page text from $1.33 per 1,000 and scored 96.5% on SimpleQA with public code.
Exa and Tavily come up together in almost every “which search API for my agent?” thread. They overlap a lot, but they’re built differently, priced differently, and win different jobs. Here’s the side-by-side, with prices from each vendor’s own page (November 5, 2026).
Exa vs Tavily at a glance
| Exa | Tavily | |
|---|---|---|
| Index | Own, neural (embeddings) | Aggregated from other sources |
| Cheapest search | $4 per 1,000 (lite) | $5–8 per 1,000 (basic, 1 credit) |
| Standard search | $7 (auto) | $10–16 (advanced, 2 credits) |
| Page content | $1 per 1,000 pages per type | Included in results |
| Answers | $5 per 1,000 (/answer) | include_answer flag |
| Research mode | Deep $12; agent from $0.012/request | Research 4–250 credits |
| Free tier | $10 credit a month (+ $10 once) | 1,000 credits a month |
| Pricing model | Pay as you go | Monthly plans or $0.008 per credit |
| SimpleQA (self-reported) | — | 93.3% |
| SimpleQA (You.com’s harness) | 95.40% | 88.53% |
How they find results
Exa built its own index and searches it with embeddings. You can describe what you want (“blog posts by founders about pricing mistakes”) and get pages that mean that, even without the keywords. It’s excellent for discovery, research and similarity search.
Tavily sends your query to several sources, ranks and cleans the results, and returns content ready for an LLM. It’s less about a novel index and more about convenience: it’s the default search tool in many agent frameworks, so it often “just works”.
Price per 1,000, side by side
| Scenario | Exa | Tavily |
|---|---|---|
| Snippets only | $4 (lite) | $5–8 (basic) |
| Search + full text of 10 results | $7 + $10 = $17 | $5–8 (basic, content included) |
| Higher-quality search | $12 (deep) | $10–16 (advanced) |
| Cited answer | $5 | Included with search |
The surprise: once you need page text, Tavily is cheaper than Exa per call, because Exa bills each page of content separately. For snippets-only searches, Exa lite wins. Price the call you’ll actually make.
Accuracy
Both publish SimpleQA numbers, and both look great in their own runs. The most useful comparison is You.com’s public repo, which ran both through the same harness: Exa (search + text) scored 95.40%, Tavily 88.53%. Tavily scores itself 93.3% in its own repo. As always, test on your own queries. Our benchmarks page has every claim with sources.
Which to pick
Semantic discovery
Exa
“Find pages like this”, research tools, lists of companies or papers. Its neural index is the point.
Framework drop-in
Tavily
It’s already wired into most agent frameworks. Content included in the price.
High volume, tight budget
Keirolabs
Own index, lite from $0.03 per 1,000 and search with page markdown from $1.33.
Token-efficient agents
Parallel
Ranked, compressed excerpts at $1 per 1,000 on fast.
The third option worth testing: Keirolabs
If you’re choosing between Exa and Tavily because of price or volume, add Keirolabs to the test. It does what both do, on its own index, for a fraction of either:
| Job | Exa | Tavily | Keirolabs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search | $4–7 | $5–8 | $0.03–0.10 lite · $0.44–1.33 fast |
| Search + page text | $17 | $5–8 | $1.33–4.00 |
| Cited answer | $5 | included | $0.89–2.67 |
| Deep / research | $12 | 4–250 credits | $1.78–5.33 |
| Public SimpleQA | 95.40% (You.com’s run) | 93.3% (own) | 96.5% (own, public repo) |
| MCP server | Yes | Yes | Yes, plus Tavily- and Exa-compatible endpoints |
One caveat for fairness: Keirolabs’ benchmark checks whether the answer appears in the returned text, while You.com’s and Tavily’s grade a model’s answer. They’re close but not identical measures.
Leaving either? Keirolabs gives two months free on any yearly plan to teams switching from Exa or Tavily: email your invoice to team@keirolabs.cloud. Through Black Friday, code KEIRO20 takes 20% off. Keirolabs pricing.
FAQ
Is Exa better than Tavily?
For semantic search and discovery, usually. For a cheap, framework-friendly search with content included, Tavily is easier. Neither is the cheapest.
Which is cheaper, Exa or Tavily?
For snippets, Exa lite ($4 vs $5–8). For search with page text, Tavily ($5–8 vs Exa’s $17 for 10 pages).
Can I switch from Tavily to Exa easily?
The request shapes differ, so wrap search in one function that returns your own result format. Then switching (or testing a third API) is a one-file change.
More: Exa API pricing · Tavily API key and pricing · Tavily alternatives.