Crawl4AI vs Tavily
Both give AI agents web search and page content. Tavily charges 1 or 2 credits a search, at $0.005 to $0.008 a credit. Crawl4AI charges 1 credit ($0.001) a search, adds Google's own results page, full pages at any effort level and 93 recipes, and comes from the team that wrote the open-source crawler.
Crawl4AI vs Tavily: the short answer
Which one fits
Different tools fit different jobs. Here is when each one is the better choice.
TChoose Tavily if
- You want a research agent that searches many sources and writes a cited report in one call: , mini or pro.
- You want page text inside each search result in one call, at the .
- You want a filter in front of results that .
- You build in n8n, Zapier or Make and want a ready Tavily step.
Choose Crawl4AI if
- You build with AI agents: one message sets Crawl4AI up in Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, Gemini CLI or OpenCode, and 17 MCP tools let the agent search, read pages, run recipes, price a call first and manage its budget.
- You need Google's own results page as data, with ads, maps and the AI overview, for 1 credit. Tavily says it .
- You read full pages after you search: $0.10 per 1,000 plain pages, and hard sites with bot checks on the same key. Tavily's blog sends those to .
- You need named sites as rows: 93 recipes, a LinkedIn profile for 1 credit. Tavily's blog points to .
- You want money that stays yours: nothing for a failed call, 14-day refunds and extra credits that never expire.
- You need data in the EU, Singapore or the US, a team with an audit log from Builder, or a copy inside your network on the same Apache 2.0 engine.
For enterprise teams
The controls your security team asks for
Crawl4AI's Enterprise plan next to Tavily's. Tavily's side restates its own pages; click a line to see the quote.
| Control | Crawl4AI Enterprise | TTavily Enterprise |
|---|---|---|
| SSO (SAML, OIDC) | ✓ Yes | Not published |
| SCIM user sync | ✓ Yes | Not published |
| Teams, roles and audit log | ✓ From Builder ($99), no seat limit | |
| Zero data retention | ✓ Yes | |
| IP allowlist and key limits | ✓ Yes | Not published |
| Static exit IPs | ✓ Yes | Not published |
| Where data is processed | EU, Singapore or US, your choice | |
| Deployment | Cloud, dedicated fleet, inside your network, managed pipeline; one engine | |
| DPA and invoice billing | ✓ Every Enterprise plan | |
| Refunds | 14 days, if no credits were used | |
| Status page | Hourly uptime per service, public | |
| Uptime and response SLA | Typical: 99.9% a month; service down: first answer within 1 hour, 24/7; part broken: 4 business hours; a question: 1 business day; 5% of the month's fee back if missed, 10% under 99% | |
| Support | A named engineer | |
| Security assurance | Controls monitored every day in Drata, with the evidence kept; dependencies watched for known vulnerabilities; SOC 2 audit by Sensiba under way, report target January 2027. Security pack on request: policies, audit status, DPA, questionnaire answers. |
Bring your current invoice
Send us your last scraping bill, from Tavily or anyone else. We price the same workload on Crawl4AI and walk you through it on a 30-minute call.
Same job, two calls
6 jobs an agent does every day. The call on each side, and the price of 1,000 of them at list. The label marks the side that costs less for that job.
curl "https://api.crawl4ai.com/search?q=best+crm" \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY"
1 credit a search. $0.79 per 1,000 on Builder.
curl -X POST https://api.tavily.com/search \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
-d '{"query":"best crm"}', 2 for advanced ($10.00–$16.00). With auto_parameters, Tavily .
curl "https://api.crawl4ai.com/serp?q=best+crm&country=us" \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY"
1 credit per Google page: organic ranks, ads, local pack and AI overview.
# No Tavily endpoint returns # Google's results page.
By Tavily's own page: .
curl "https://api.crawl4ai.com/search?q=latest+ai+news" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY"
curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/scrape/batch \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
-d '{"urls":["<url1>","…","<url5>"],"format":"md"}'/search 1 credit, then 5 plain pages at 0.1 credit each. $3.50 if all 5 need a real browser.
curl -X POST https://api.tavily.com/search \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
-d '{"query":"latest ai news",
"max_results":5,
"include_raw_content":"markdown"}'One call, 1 credit. Page text comes from .
curl "https://api.crawl4ai.com/search?q=nvidia+earnings&rich=1" \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY"
1 credit. rich=1 adds news, an entity card and videos; /serp adds Google's top stories.
curl -X POST https://api.tavily.com/search \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
-d '{"query":"nvidia earnings",
"topic":"news"}'The news topic is a search: , 2 for advanced.
curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/scrape \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
-d '{"url":"https://example.com","format":"md"}'0.1 credit; a page that needs a real browser 0.5. A failed call costs nothing.
curl -X POST https://api.tavily.com/extract \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
-d '{"urls":["https://example.com"]}', 2 for advanced ($2.00–$3.20). A failed URL is on both.
curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/recipes/linkedin-profile \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
-d '{"profile":"satyanadella"}'A recipe: 2 units × 0.5 credit. The same named columns every time; one of 93.
# No Tavily endpoint returns # a profile as fixed columns.
No named-site scrapers. Tavily's blog sends this job to .
Crawl4AI vs Tavily, side by side
Each Tavily cell restates Tavily's own pages, read on 12 Nov 2026. Click it to see the quote and the page. "Not published" means those pages say nothing about it, not that it is missing.
| Crawl4AI Cloud | TTavily | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | ||
| How you pay | Credits in every plan: Free, Starter $10, Builder $99, Scale $499 | |
| 1,000 searches | $1.00, Google results page included (/serp) | |
| 1,000 plain / browser / hard pages | $0.10 / $0.50 / $2.00 | |
| Failed calls | Free, blocked pages included | |
| A page already cached | Half price | |
| Unused credits | Extra credits never expire | |
| Refunds | 14 days, if no credits were used | |
| What you get back | ||
| Formats | Markdown, HTML, links, media, metadata, tables; engine and cache on every answer | |
| Google results as data | /serp: organic ranks, ads, local pack, AI overview | |
| Whole site | /site deep crawl (500 pages a call); /scan up to 50,000 URLs | |
| Named sites | 93 recipes; a LinkedIn profile 1 credit | |
| JSON by your schema | /extract on any page; median 1.87 credits | |
| Documents | PDF, Word and Excel; a PDF costs one page | Not published |
| Change monitoring | Watch (beta) | |
| Hard sites | ||
| Bot checks and CAPTCHA pages | Gets past them on hard sites; a page we cannot get costs nothing | |
| Proxies | standard, or extra with rented residential addresses (4x); country choice | |
| Agents | ||
| MCP | Hosted, no install; key or OAuth; 17 tools | |
| Setup | One message sets it up in 7 coding agents | |
| Agent budget | Estimate, balance, spend cap and top-up as tools; cost on every answer | |
| Open source | ||
| License | Apache 2.0, 87,236 GitHub stars | |
| Self-host | The same engine as the Cloud | Not published |
Crawl4AI's prices come from its live price list, GET /v1/prices. Prices change; check each product's own pricing page before you decide.
The trade-off
What each one does better
TWhere Tavily does best
- Research reports. A research agent that reads many sources and writes a cited answer, mini or pro.
- Page text in the search call. Search results can carry the page text for the same credit.
- A safety filter. Results pass a filter for prompt injection, PII and bad sources.
- No-code connectors. Ready steps in n8n, Zapier and Make.
Where Crawl4AI is the better choice
- Pay for the work, not the attempt. 1 credit a search, 0.1 credit a plain page, nothing for a failed or blocked call.
- More of the web on one key. Google's own results page, hard sites with bot checks, and 93 recipes for named sites such as LinkedIn.
- Made for agents. One message sets it up; 17 MCP tools cover search, pages, recipes, jobs, cost estimates and the budget.
- Built for enterprise. Three regions, teams and an audit log from Builder, SSO and SCIM, and 14-day refunds.
Switch in one prompt
Move your Tavily calls in minutes
Paste this into Claude Code, Cursor or Codex in your project. It finds your Tavily calls and moves them to Crawl4AI, one endpoint at a time, and keeps both working until you check the results.
| Tavily | Crawl4AI | |
| /search | → | GET /search |
| /search + include_raw_content | → | GET /search + POST /scrape/batch |
| /search topic: news | → | GET /search?rich=1 · /serp |
| /extract | → | POST /scrape · /scrape/batch |
| /crawl | → | POST /site |
| /map | → | POST /scan |
| /research + output_schema | → | POST /extract |
| tavily-monitor skill | → | Watch |
From both products' docs, 12 Nov 2026.
Using both
Not either-or. Both speak MCP, so one agent can hold both. A team could keep Tavily for cited research reports and use Crawl4AI for search at $1.00 per 1,000, Google results, full pages from hard sites, recipes and EU data.
research reports · safety filter
Google · hard sites · recipes · EU data
Frequently asked questions
How much does Tavily cost?
A basic Tavily search costs 1 credit and an advanced search 2. Plans are Project $30 (4,000 credits), Bootstrap $100 (15,000), Startup $220 (38,000) and Growth $500 (100,000) a month, and pay as you go is $0.008 a credit, so 1,000 searches cost $5.00 to $16.00. Extract costs 1 credit per 5 URLs, $1.00 to $1.60 per 1,000 pages. Crawl4AI charges $1.00 per 1,000 searches and $0.10 per 1,000 plain pages.
Does Tavily charge for failed requests?
Tavily says , and the same for a failed map; for search it publishes nothing. Crawl4AI charges nothing for a failed call, a blocked page included, and every answer says which effort level the page needed.
Does Tavily give refunds?
Tavily's terms say . On Crawl4AI, a first plan payment or an extra-credit purchase is refundable within 14 days if none of its credits were used.
Does Tavily have EU data residency?
Tavily's EU endpoint is for selected customer evaluations and ; even there, . Crawl4AI runs in the EU, Singapore and the US, and keeps account, usage and billing data in the EU.
Does Tavily return Google search results?
No, by its own words: . Crawl4AI /serp returns Google's own results page as data, with ads, maps and the AI overview, for 1 credit a page.
Can Tavily scrape sites with bot checks?
Tavily publishes no proxy or anti-bot feature, and its own blog says for those pages. Crawl4AI gets past bot checks and CAPTCHA pages on hard sites, and a page it cannot get costs nothing.
Is Crawl4AI only a self-hosted crawler?
No. A blog post on Tavily's site recommends and says its ; that is out of date. Crawl4AI Cloud is a managed API in three regions with a public price list (Free, Starter $10, Builder $99, Scale $499), search, Google results, real browsers and proxies included, and a hosted MCP server. The open-source engine has 87,236 GitHub stars (GitHub, 2026-11-12).
Sources and method
- Tavily credits and pricing ↗
- Tavily pricing page ↗
- Tavily search API reference ↗
- Tavily EU endpoint ↗
- Tavily terms ↗
- Tavily enterprise ↗
- Tavily vs SerpApi page ↗
- Tavily blog: Firecrawl alternatives (names Crawl4AI) ↗
- Crawl4AI prices ↗
- Crawl4AI legal ↗
We read these pages on 12 Nov 2026. Crawl4AI's facts come from its live price list, docs and terms. Something wrong or out of date? Write to hello@crawl4ai.com and we fix it.