Use the Brave Search API for most RAG pipelines. In an open benchmark of 2,182 questions with one search each, the Brave Search API answered more multi-hop questions than Tavily, returned results faster, and cost the same or less per search at every volume. Pick Tavily when you want page text and a written answer in the same request, whereas the Brave Search API sells answers as a separate plan. Tavily also gives 1,000 free searches a month with no card on file.
Six web search APIs ran on three public question sets in November 2026, with one search and 10 results per question. One model answered from the results alone, and a second model graded each answer.
| Measure | Brave Search API | Tavily | Better |
|---|---|---|---|
| SimpleQA Verified, 1,000 short factual questions | 93.1% | 91.8% | Tie |
| FreshQA, 358 questions about recent events | 84.9% | 81.8% | Tie |
| FRAMES, 824 multi-hop questions | 53.9% | 48.4% | Brave |
| Median latency of one search | 1.21 s | 2.00 s | Brave |
| $ per 1,000 searches, 100,000 a month | $5.00 | $5.00 | Tie |
| $ per 1,000 correct SimpleQA answers | $5.37 | $5.45 | Brave |
A paired test counts, on the same questions, the ones that only one API got right.
| Dataset | Only Brave correct | Only Tavily correct | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| SimpleQA Verified | Not significant (p = 0.25) | Tie | |
| FreshQA | Not significant (p = 0.12) | Tie | |
| FRAMES | 147 | 102 | Brave (p = 0.0052) |
Multi-hop questions decide it. Each FRAMES question needs facts from two or more Wikipedia pages. Tavily replied "not found" on 295 of the 824 questions, Brave on 212 (search errors included). When each did answer, Tavily was right 75.4% of the time and Brave 73.5%. So the Brave Search API leads on coverage, while Tavily is slightly more accurate when it answers. For a RAG pipeline, each "not found" is a second search, a page fetch or a failed task.
Factual and recent-events questions are a tie. Brave is ahead by 1.3 and 3.1 points, and the paired tests find both gaps within chance. For single-fact lookups, choose on latency and price.
Brave. The search request alone, on SimpleQA Verified rows that ran with no other benchmark at the same time:
| Percentile | Brave Search API | Tavily |
|---|---|---|
| p50 | 1.21 s | 2.00 s |
| p90 | 1.38 s | 3.17 s |
| p99 | 1.61 s | 5.44 s |
Brave's slowest 1% of searches took 0.4 seconds more than its median. Tavily's took 3.4 seconds more. A chat app that retrieves before every answer feels that tail.
Both pricing pages were read on November 14, 2026. Brave sells prepaid credits at one rate. Tavily sells monthly plans, and a basic search costs 1 credit, so the price per search falls as the plan grows.
| Monthly volume | Brave Search API, Search plan | Tavily, basic search |
|---|---|---|
| Free each month | $5 of credit, about 1,000 searches | 1,000 credits, 1,000 searches |
| Pay as you go | $5.00 per 1,000 | $0.008 a credit, $8.00 per 1,000 |
| 4,000 searches | $5.00 per 1,000 | Project, $30 a month, $7.50 per 1,000 |
| 15,000 searches | $5.00 per 1,000 | Bootstrap, $100 a month, $6.67 per 1,000 |
| 38,000 searches | $5.00 per 1,000 | Startup, $220 a month, $5.79 per 1,000 |
| 100,000 searches | $5.00 per 1,000 | Growth, $500 a month, $5.00 per 1,000 |
Brave has had no free plan since February 2026. Each plan includes $5 of credit a month, and sign-up asks for a card; Tavily's free tier asks for none. Tavily's advanced search costs 2 credits, $16 per 1,000 on pay as you go; the benchmark used basic search.
Cost per correct answer is the price divided by accuracy:
| Plan | SimpleQA Verified | FRAMES |
|---|---|---|
| Brave, any volume | $5.37 | $9.28 |
| Tavily Growth, 100,000 a month | $5.45 | $10.33 |
| Tavily pay as you go | $8.71 | $16.53 |
At 100,000 searches a month the two are almost equal on factual questions. Below that volume, Brave costs less per search and per correct answer.
| Brave Search API | Tavily | |
|---|---|---|
| Index | Brave's own index, with no fallback to another engine | Tavily's retrieval layer |
| Each result | title ,url ,description , and up to 5extra_snippets |
title ,url ,content ,score |
| Page text in the same call | The LLM Context endpoint returns extracted page chunks, in the Search plan | include_raw_content returns page text as markdown or plain text |
| A written answer | A separate Answers plan, $4 per 1,000 plus tokens | include_answer on the same request |
The benchmark ran Brave with extra_snippets=true and Tavily with search_depth=basic, with no page-text or answer option. The reader read about the same number of tokens per factual question from each, and 21% to 31% more from Brave on the other two sets. Budget for that if you pay per input token.
In a separate test of 500 queries, Tavily returned about 80% of Google's top-10 domains, in its own order. Brave returned fewer of them, but kept Google's ranking best of the four APIs tested (rank correlation 0.55).
include_raw_content and include_answer.
When the pipeline answers multi-hop questions, or needs what Google itself shows. Brave and Tavily missed about half of the FRAMES questions from one search. The two Google SERP APIs in the same benchmark answered most of them: cloro 80.2% and SerpApi 77.4%. Both return Google's AI Overview with the organic results. The AI Overview does much of the work: with it removed from cloro's results, accuracy on 100 SimpleQA Verified questions fell from 99% to 86%.
In paired tests, cloro beat Brave 248 to 31 on FRAMES and 50 to 12 on SimpleQA Verified. On FreshQA, SerpApi (88.5%) and cloro (88.3%) were the top two, but the gap from cloro to Brave was not significant (p = 0.065). The Google results were also short: about 836 reader tokens per factual question, against about 3,250 from Brave or Tavily.
The cost is latency: 7.96 seconds at the median for cloro and 8.20 for SerpApi. A pipeline that must answer in under 3 seconds stays on Brave. A pipeline that runs in the background or in batches gets more answers per search.
cloro's Hobby plan is $100 a month for 250,000 credits, $0.40 per 1,000 credits. A Google search with the AI Overview costs 5 credits, $2.00 per 1,000, or 7 credits as a synchronous request, $2.80 per 1,000. On the benchmark basis of 100,000 searches a month (Starter, $250 for 650,000 credits), that is $1.92 per 1,000 searches and $1.98 per 1,000 correct SimpleQA answers.
This comparison is published by cloro, which sells one of the six APIs in the benchmark. The harness, the questions, the settings and all 13,092 graded answers are in the public benchmark repo. The reader was gpt-5.6-luna and the grader gpt-5.6-sol, with the unchanged OpenAI simple-evals grader prompt. The runs were on November 4 to 11, 2026. Latency is the search request alone, from one machine with 4 requests in parallel.
One search measures the search API alone. A pipeline that searches several times and opens pages can score higher with either API. Test on your own questions:
python3 benchmark.py --providers brave,tavily --n 100 --workers 4
The benchmark used list prices read on November 5, 2026. The Brave and Tavily pricing pages and the Tavily credits page were read again on November 14, 2026, with no change. The 500-query index test and the other vendor pairs are in the web search API comparison.