Tavily
Search API built for agent tool calls, with a news topic mode
Founded: Not disclosed | New York and Tel Aviv; part of Nebius | Team: Part of Nebius
Full article textWeb search indexLLM/agent tooling
What is Tavily?
Tavily, founded by CEO Rotem Weiss, is a search API designed to be called by LLM agents, and its topic=news mode limits results to recent coverage with extracted text ready for a prompt. It is the quickest way on this list to give a LangChain or LlamaIndex agent a news tool, since both frameworks ship Tavily integrations. Nebius, the Nasdaq-listed AI cloud company, agreed to buy Tavily in February 2026 (Bloomberg put the price at $275 million) and later said the deal had closed, keeping the brand and pricing. Credits cost about $0.008 each on pay-as-you-go, a basic search uses one and an advanced search two, and 1,000 credits a month are free. Because it is a search tool, there is no archive, source list or clustering to work with.
Typical uses: AI & LLM apps, Research & academia. What sets it apart: Built-in LangChain and LlamaIndex integrations that return prompt-ready text.
What does the Tavily API include?
REST APIJSONPython SDKNode.js SDKMCP server
| Capability |
|---|
| Full article text |
| Web search index |
| LLM/agent tooling |
Tavily pricing
Short answer: the pricing model is credits; free monthly allowance; pay-as-you-go. Entry price: $30/mo.
| Access model | What it means |
|---|---|
| Free tier | Permanent free allowance, usually with request, history or commercial-use limits |
| Monthly plans | Self-serve subscription with published quotas |
| Pay-as-you-go | Billed per request or credit, with no monthly minimum |
| Enterprise contract | Negotiated licence covering volume, rights and SLA |
API prices and quotas change often. Check Tavily's own pricing page before you commit, and confirm that your use is covered by the licence.
Tavily pros and cons
| Advantages | Things to consider |
|---|---|
| +Agent frameworks already support it, so setup is mostly an API key | -No archive, so historical questions go unanswered |
| +1,000 free credits a month cover a prototype | -No control over which sources are searched |
| +Extracted content arrives with results, with no separate scraper | -Roadmap may change under new ownership |
| +Nebius ownership adds funding and compute behind the service |
Tavily vs alternatives
How Tavily compares to the other top News APIs.
| API | Best for | Key difference | Rating | Compare |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NewsCatcher | Developers who want clean, deduplicated news without writing... | Summaries, story clusters, entities and geotags arrive in the response, so the processing code you would otherwise write is already done | 4.7 | Full comparison |
| NewsData.io | Developers who want a working news call within... | A free allowance that refills daily, with country and language filters on every plan | 4.6 | Full comparison |
| Perigon | Indie developers and startups wanting enriched data at... | Entity, topic and cluster data from the $25 plan up, with all tiers priced publicly | 4.5 | Full comparison |
| NewsAPI.ai (Event Registry) | Developers building multilingual event or research tools. | Event records that join coverage of one story across languages | 4.3 | Full comparison |
| GNews | Small commercial apps needing a cheap, simple news... | Commercial rights and full article content for under €50 a month | 4.3 | Full comparison |
| Webz.io | Data engineers backfilling years of news for datasets. | History back to 2008 and the widest claimed source count here | 4.2 | Full comparison |
| Exa | RAG and agent developers needing semantic news retrieval. | Search by meaning with page text returned in the same request | 4.2 | Full comparison |
| World News API | Location-aware apps on a small budget. | Latitude, longitude and radius filters from the $39 plan, plus a URL text extractor | 4.1 | Full comparison |
| NewsAPI.org | Learning projects and prototypes that follow existing tutorials. | The largest pile of tutorials, wrappers and answered questions of any news API | 4.0 | Full comparison |
| SerpApi Google News | Developers who need exactly what Google News ranks. | Google News rankings and story groupings as structured JSON | 4.0 | Full comparison |
| GDELT Project | Zero-budget data projects and research prototypes. | No key, no fee and global coverage refreshed every 15 minutes | 3.9 | Full comparison |
| Brave Search API | Developers replacing Bing News Search with an independent... | Results from its own crawler, independent of Google and Bing | 3.9 | Full comparison |
| Serper Google News | Agent prototypes needing cheap Google News lookups. | About $1 per 1,000 Google queries on the entry pack, by third-party figures | 3.9 | Full comparison |
| Marketaux | Fintech developers needing ticker-tagged news cheaply. | Entity-level sentiment on every article, free plan included | 3.9 | Full comparison |
| Alpha Vantage News & Sentiment | Hobby quants wanting news sentiment beside price data. | Ticker and topic sentiment scores from the same key as market data | 3.8 | Full comparison |
| Massive (ex-Polygon.io) News | Trading-app developers already using Polygon or Massive data. | Per-ticker sentiment with a written reason, included in stock data plans | 3.8 | Full comparison |
| Mediastack | Low-traffic sites needing a cheap commercial headline feed. | Commercial use and historical news from $24.99 a month | 3.8 | Full comparison |
| Guardian Open Platform | Students and researchers needing free full-text articles. | Free full article bodies from a major newspaper, with editorial tags | 3.8 | Full comparison |
| Diffbot | Developers collecting news from a fixed list of... | Parser-free extraction from any article URL, linked to a Knowledge Graph | 3.7 | Full comparison |
| Finnhub | Personal fintech projects needing news and prices from... | A 60-calls-a-minute free key covering company news and market data | 3.7 | Full comparison |
| DataForSEO Google News | High-volume Google News rank tracking on a budget. | About $0.60 per 1,000 Google News result pages in the Standard queue | 3.7 | Full comparison |
| TheNewsAPI | Personal dashboards needing a cheap general feed. | Possibly the lowest paid entry price here, if third-party pricing is current | 3.6 | Full comparison |
| NYT Developer APIs | Students and historians working with Times metadata. | Searchable headlines and abstracts for every Times issue since 1851 | 3.5 | Full comparison |
| Benzinga | Trading platforms needing a licensed market newswire. | Original market headlines with ratings and earnings events in one feed | 3.5 | Full comparison |
| Quantexa News API (Aylien) | Teams maintaining an existing Aylien integration. | Aylien's fine-grained entity and category tagging | 3.4 | Full comparison |
| APITube | Developers comparing coverage in a side-by-side trial. | Sentiment and entity filters offered on lower tiers | 3.4 | Full comparison |
| Currents API | Coursework and hackathons needing a free feed. | A free tier that tutorials and roundups often recommend | 3.3 | Full comparison |
Tavily FAQ
What is Tavily?
Search API built for agent tool calls, with a news topic mode
How much does Tavily charge?
Pricing model: credits; free monthly allowance; pay-as-you-go. The cheapest paid access listed is $30/mo. Free access: yes, with limits.
Which formats and SDKs does Tavily support?
Tavily offers REST API, JSON, Python SDK, Node.js SDK, MCP server.
Is Tavily right for enterprise?
Yes, Tavily sells enterprise contracts. Main caveat: No archive, so historical questions go unanswered.
What are the best Tavily alternatives?
The best alternatives to Tavily depend on your use case. Top options are:
- NewsCatcher: summaries, story clusters, entities and geotags arrive in the response, so the processing code you would otherwise write is already done
- NewsData.io: a free allowance that refills daily, with country and language filters on every plan
- Perigon: entity, topic and cluster data from the $25 plan up, with all tiers priced publicly
Compare Tavily with other News APIs
Tavily vs NewsCatcher Tavily vs NewsData.io Tavily vs Perigon Tavily vs NewsAPI.ai (Event Registry) Tavily vs GNews Tavily vs Webz.io Tavily vs Exa Tavily vs World News API Tavily vs NewsAPI.org Tavily vs SerpApi Google News Tavily vs GDELT Project Tavily vs Brave Search API Tavily vs Serper Google News Tavily vs Marketaux Tavily vs Alpha Vantage News & Sentiment Tavily vs Massive (ex-Polygon.io) News Tavily vs Mediastack Tavily vs Guardian Open Platform Tavily vs Diffbot Tavily vs Finnhub Tavily vs DataForSEO Google News Tavily vs TheNewsAPI Tavily vs NYT Developer APIs Tavily vs Benzinga Tavily vs Quantexa News API (Aylien) Tavily vs APITube Tavily vs Currents API
Verify all details directly with Tavily before making a decision.