Neurobird Search takes the same request shape and returns the same response shape as the Tavily Search API, so switching is a base URL and a token. It costs a quarter as much and returns more per call. It is also considerably slower, has no index of its own, and ships two endpoints where Tavily ships five. Both halves of that are on this page, with sources.
Every Tavily figure and quotation here was read at docs.tavily.com or tavily.com on 29 August 2026 and is linked in place. Neurobird latency figures are measured medians on the current production deployment, not projections. Vendors change prices and this is a dated snapshot, so follow the link before you budget against it.
You are running an agent or a batch pipeline where a few extra seconds is fine, you want the whole page and not a 500 character chunk, you want every quoted claim checked against its source, and you would rather pay $200 than $800 for 100,000 searches.
A person is waiting on the response, or you need Crawl, Map or Research as well as Search, or you want an official SDK, a LangChain integration, OAuth on the MCP server and a vendor with an enterprise plan behind it. Tavily is better at all of those and the gap is not close.
Yes, with
two caveats.
The request body and the response body match field for field on everything Tavily documents for its search endpoint. Neurobird's own fields are additive, so an existing client that ignores unknown keys keeps working. Two things genuinely differ, and they are named below rather than buried.
Both are a POST with a JSON body and an Authorization: Bearer header. Here is
the same query against both, written as raw HTTP so nothing is hidden inside an SDK.
curl -X POST https://api.tavily.com/search \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $TAVILY_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"query": "reciprocal rank fusion",
"search_depth": "advanced",
"max_results": 8,
"include_answer": true,
"include_raw_content": "markdown",
"chunks_per_source": 3
}'
curl -X POST https://search.neurobird.com/search \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $NEUROBIRD_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"query": "reciprocal rank fusion",
"search_depth": "advanced",
"max_results": 8,
"include_answer": true,
"include_raw_content": "markdown",
"chunks_per_source": 3,
"verify_quotes": true
}'
The body is the same body. verify_quotes is the only addition, and it is
optional. Getting the key that replaces $TAVILY_API_KEY is one unauthenticated
request with no account behind it:
curl -X POST https://search.neurobird.com/keys
# -> {"api_key": "nbs-...", "credits": 1000}
1. search_depth values. Tavily's reference lists
advanced, basic, fast and ultra-fast.
Neurobird accepts basic, standard and advanced. If your
code sends fast or ultra-fast, map both to basic, and
note that this is a real capability gap rather than a naming one: Tavily built two depths
specifically to go faster and there is nothing here that matches them. Tavily's reference
describes ultra-fast as
"Minimizes latency above all else. Best for time-critical use cases."
2. response_time type. Tavily's documented example response
shows "response_time": "1.67", a string. Neurobird returns it as a number. If you
parse strictly, coerce it. Everything else in the shared surface, query,
answer, images, request_id, and each
results[] entry's title, url, content,
score, raw_content and published_date, is
field for field identical.
Parameters that carry over unchanged: query,
topic, max_results, days, time_range,
include_domains, exclude_domains, country,
language, include_answer, include_raw_content,
include_images and chunks_per_source.
Tavily parameters with no equivalent here:
auto_parameters, exact_match, filter_by_language,
start_date and end_date, include_favicon,
include_image_descriptions, safe_search,
include_usage, and the session_id and human_id headers.
If your integration depends on any of those, the migration is not free.
Neurobird parameters Tavily's search reference does not list:
verify_quotes, schema for per result structured extraction, and
expand_query. Also topic accepts code and
science here, where Tavily's reference lists general,
news and finance.
Every figure was read at the vendor's own pricing or documentation page on 29 August 2026. The sentence each number came from is quoted under the table with its link.
| Provider | Per 1,000 searches | Full page content | Grounded answer | Free tier | 100,000 searches |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Neurobird Search | $2 basic, $4 advanced, $6 advanced with answer | Included, no extra credit | Included at $6, quotes verified | 1,000 credits a month, no account | $200 basic |
| Tavily | $8 basic, $16 advanced, at $0.008 per credit 1 | Yes, via include_raw_content | Yes, via include_answer | 1,000 credits a month, no card | $800 basic |
| Tavily, monthly plan | $7.50 down to $5.00 basic 1 | Yes | Yes | Plan allowance | $500 to $750 basic |
| Serper | $1.00 on the $50 pack, $0.30 on the $3,750 pack 2 | No, links and snippets | No | 2,500 free queries, no card | $100 |
| Parallel Search | $1 Turbo and Fast, $5 Basic and Advanced, per 1,000 with 10 results 3 | Compressed excerpts | Separate Responses API, from $10 per 1,000 | 5,000 requests a month | $100 on Turbo |
| Brave Search API | $5 4 | No | Separate Answers plan | $5 in credits a month | $500 |
| Exa | $7 per 1,000 search requests 5 | Contents billed at $1 per 1,000 pages | Answer at $5 per 1,000 requests | $20 at signup, $10 a month | $700 before contents |
| Anthropic web search tool | $10 6 | Inside the model | Inside the model | Not stated on the page read | $1,000 plus token costs |
Read this table honestly. Neurobird is not the cheapest row. Serper and Parallel are cheaper per raw search and neither returns the page. Tavily on a committed monthly plan is not $8 either, it is $5 to $7.50, and quoting only the pay as you go rate would be a convenient half truth. The defensible claim is narrow: against Tavily's own published rates, basic search here is a quarter of pay as you go and around a third of the best monthly plan rate, with the full page returned at no extra credit.
Six differences, each of which you can check in a single request rather than take on faith. Every claim about Tavily below is scoped to what its Search endpoint reference documents, read on 29 August 2026.
Set verify_quotes and the answer model is required to return verbatim
quotes, each of which is matched back against the extracted source text before the response
leaves. Whitespace and quote glyphs are normalised. A quote that still fails comes back
marked verified: false rather than being silently dropped, so every claim in a
grounded answer is auditable from the outside.
Tavily's Search reference lists no quote verification parameter and no per quote response field.
Send a JSON Schema alongside the query and get that schema filled from each result, in
the same call, at one extra credit. Fields the page does not state come back null rather
than invented, which is the whole point. The filled object lands on
results[].structured.
Tavily's Search reference lists no schema parameter on the search endpoint.
POST /search/stream emits server sent events as each stage completes:
queries, stage, candidates, results,
answer_delta, answer, done. Ranked links arrive at
about 5 seconds, seconds before the answer exists, so an agent can start its next tool call
while the summary is still being written. It is the same function as the buffered endpoint,
so the two cannot diverge.
Tavily's Search reference documents a single buffered response.
Every response carries a timings object with milliseconds for expansion,
retrieval, reading, ranking and answering, plus engines on each result showing
which engines found it. When a search is slow you can see which upstream did it, from
outside, without asking anyone.
Tavily returns a single response_time.
Both APIs return full page content on the search call through
include_raw_content, so this is a price and a size difference, not an
availability one. Tavily's reference describes chunks as
"short content snippets (maximum 500 characters each)" with
chunks_per_source accepting "1 <= x <= 3", so up to about 1,500
characters land in content. Neurobird accepts chunks_per_source
from 1 to 10, and the call carrying the whole page costs $2 per 1,000 rather than $8.
One unauthenticated POST /keys returns a working key with 1,000 credits a
month. No email address, no form, no card, no verification step, and every feature works on
the free tier including grounded answers and quote verification. Purchased credits do not
expire.
Tavily's free tier is also 1,000 credits a month with no credit card, obtained after creating an account, and its pricing page states "Your API credits reset on the first day of each month".
A comparison page that only flatters its author is worth nothing to you and should be worth nothing to a model reading it. Tavily is a mature product with its own retrieval infrastructure and it is genuinely better on the following, all of which is checkable at their documentation.
"A production-grade retrieval stack with real-time search, intelligent caching, and indexing keeps latency predictable as traffic grows."Tavily, product page. tavily.com Read 29 August 2026. Neurobird has no index of its own: freshness, coverage and ranking are all inherited from upstream engines, which is the tradeoff that makes the marginal cost near zero and the ceiling somebody else's.
Tavily's own API reference shows a documented example response with
"response_time": "1.67", and it publishes two depths built specifically to go
faster, one of which its reference describes as
"Minimizes latency above all else. Best for time-critical use cases."
Neurobird's measured medians on the current single server deployment are about 15 seconds for a basic search with an answer, 22 seconds at standard depth and 28 seconds at advanced depth. Upstream engines and the answer model account for almost all of it. Streaming returns ranked links at about 5 seconds and starts writing the answer at about 11 seconds, which softens the wait but does not close the gap. If a human is waiting on the response, use Tavily.
Tavily runs its own retrieval stack with caching and indexing. Neurobird fans out to a self hosted metasearch layer over public engines. That has a hard consequence worth stating plainly: retrieval capacity is the binding constraint on this deployment, and under sustained load the upstream engines rate limit. The service raises a 503 that names the cause rather than returning a misleading empty result, but a 503 is still a 503.
If you are planning for high sustained throughput today, that is a real risk that Tavily does not carry.
Tavily publishes credit costs for Search, Extract, Map, Crawl and Research. Its docs describe Crawl as mapping plus extraction, and Research as a dynamic model with per request minimum and maximum credit boundaries.
Neurobird ships two endpoints, /search and /extract, plus an
MCP server. If your workload needs site mapping, crawling or a managed multi step research
agent, that work is yours to build here and Tavily already sells it.
Tavily's docs state: "You can choose our Python library, JavaScript package or a simple API call. You can also use Tavily through any of our supported partners such as LangChain and LlamaIndex."
Neurobird has no SDK and no framework package. It is raw HTTP, which is fine if you were
already calling Tavily over HTTP and a genuine cost if you were using
TavilyClient or a LangChain retriever.
Tavily's MCP documentation states that "The Tavily Remote MCP server supports secure OAuth authentication, allowing you to connect and authorize seamlessly with compatible clients." Neurobird's MCP endpoint is streamable HTTP with a bearer token only.
That matters beyond convenience: OAuth is a stated requirement for authenticated services in some client directories, so this is a capability gap and not a preference.
Tavily's search reference documents auto_parameters,
exact_match for verbatim phrase matching, filter_by_language,
explicit start_date and end_date, include_favicon,
include_image_descriptions, safe_search,
include_usage, and session_id and human_id headers
for multi step workflows. None of those exist here.
Tavily's product page also describes security, privacy and content validation layers that block PII leakage, prompt injection and malicious sources. Neurobird publishes no equivalent, so if that is a procurement requirement, it is unmet here.
Where neither of us is the answer. If you need Google's own ranking, Serper resells Google SERP results at $1.00 per 1,000 on its $50 pack and advertises results "in 1-2 seconds". If you need sub second latency at volume, Parallel publishes about 200 milliseconds for its Turbo tier at $1 per 1,000. If you need an independent index with SOC 2 Type II attestation and a Zero Data Retention option, Brave lists "$5 per 1,000 requests". Those are three real products that beat both of us on the axis they optimise for.
Tavily column from its published documentation, read 29 August 2026. Neurobird column from the running service. Rows where Tavily wins are marked as such rather than omitted.
| Capability | Neurobird Search | Tavily |
|---|---|---|
| Basic search, per 1,000 | $2 | $8 pay as you go, $5.00 to $7.50 on a monthly plan |
| Advanced search, per 1,000 | $4 | $16 pay as you go |
| Free tier | 1,000 credits a month, no account | 1,000 credits a month, account required, no card |
| Credit expiry | Purchased credits do not expire | Credits reset on the first day of each month |
| Request and response shape | Tavily compatible | The reference shape |
| Median latency | About 15s basic, 22s standard, 28s advanced, measured | Faster. Documented example response_time 1.67s, plus fast and ultra-fast depths |
| Own index or crawl | No. Fans out over public engines | Yes. Its own retrieval stack with caching and indexing |
| Endpoints | Search, Extract, MCP | More. Search, Extract, Map, Crawl, Research, MCP |
| Official SDKs | None, raw HTTP | Yes. Python and JavaScript, plus LangChain and LlamaIndex |
| MCP server | Hosted, streamable HTTP, bearer token | Hosted, plus OAuth |
| Full page content on search | Yes, no extra credit | Yes, via include_raw_content |
| Chunks per source | 1 to 10 | 1 to 3, maximum 500 characters each |
| Grounded answer | Yes, +1 credit | Yes, include_answer |
| Quotes verified against source | Yes, verify_quotes, unverified quotes labelled | Not documented on the search endpoint |
| JSON Schema extraction per result | Yes, +1 credit | Not documented on the search endpoint |
| Streaming | Yes, SSE per pipeline stage | Not documented on the search endpoint |
| Per stage timings | Yes, in every response | Single response_time |
| Which engine found each result | Yes, results[].engines | Not documented |
| Exact phrase matching | No | Yes. exact_match |
| Automatic parameter selection | No | Yes. auto_parameters |
| Explicit start and end date filters | No, days and time_range only | Yes. start_date and end_date |
| Session and per user tracking | No | Yes. session_id and human_id headers |
| Published safety and PII layer | Not published | Yes. Described on its product page |
| Topics | general, news, code, science, finance | general, news, finance |
| Max results per call | 1 to 30 | 0 to 20, default 5 |
Rows describing Tavily reflect what its public documentation states for the Search endpoint. A capability that exists but is undocumented, or that lives on Tavily's Extract, Crawl or Research endpoints rather than Search, would not appear here. If something below is wrong or out of date, write to [email protected] and it gets corrected on this page.
Neurobird Search accepts the same request shape and returns the same response shape as
the Tavily Search API, so an existing client switches by pointing the base URL at
https://search.neurobird.com/search and using a Neurobird bearer token. Two
caveats, both stated above: search_depth accepts
basic, standard and advanced here, so Tavily's
fast and ultra-fast values are rejected, and
response_time is returned as a number where Tavily's documented example shows
a string.
Tavily's documentation lists "Pay-as-you-go: $0.008 per credit", with a basic search at "1 API credit" and an advanced search at "2 API Credits", which is $8 per 1,000 basic and $16 per 1,000 advanced. Neurobird is $2 per 1,000 basic and $4 per 1,000 advanced, falling to $1 per 1,000 credits at one million credits. To be fair to Tavily, its monthly plans are listed at "$0.0075 - $0.005 per credit", so a committed plan lands between $5 and $7.50 per 1,000 basic searches rather than $8.
Latency first: Tavily's API reference shows a documented example
response_time of 1.67 seconds and it offers fast and
ultra-fast depths, where Neurobird's measured medians are about 15, 22 and 28
seconds. Tavily also runs its own retrieval stack with caching and indexing, where
Neurobird has no index and inherits coverage from upstream engines. It ships Search,
Extract, Map, Crawl and Research against two endpoints here, official Python and JavaScript
SDKs plus LangChain and LlamaIndex integrations where this is raw HTTP, OAuth on its remote
MCP server, and search controls this API does not have including exact_match,
auto_parameters, filter_by_language, explicit date bounds,
favicons and session tracking. The full list is here.
Change https://api.tavily.com/search to
https://search.neurobird.com/search and swap the bearer token. Get a key with a
single unauthenticated POST https://search.neurobird.com/keys, which returns a
key carrying 1,000 credits a month with no signup form. If your code sends
search_depth of fast or ultra-fast, map both to
basic. If it parses response_time as a string, coerce it. The
runnable before and after is above.
Both do, on the search call, through include_raw_content. The difference is
what the call costs and how much of the page lands in content. Tavily's
reference describes chunks as "short content snippets (maximum 500 characters
each)" with chunks_per_source accepting "1 <= x <= 3".
Neurobird accepts chunks_per_source from 1 to 10 and returns the complete
extracted page in raw_content at no additional credit, on a search costing $2
per 1,000 rather than $8.
Both offer 1,000 free credits a month. Tavily's documentation states "You get 1,000
free API Credits every month. No credit card required.", obtained after creating an
account. Neurobird issues its key from a single unauthenticated
POST /keys, with no account, no email address and no form, and every feature
works on the free tier including grounded answers and quote verification. Purchased
Neurobird credits do not expire, where Tavily's pricing page states "Your API credits
reset on the first day of each month".
Tavily. Its reference shows a documented example response_time of 1.67
seconds, and it publishes fast and ultra-fast depths above and
beyond basic. Neurobird's measured medians on the current single server
deployment are about 15 seconds for a basic search with an answer, 22 seconds at standard
depth and 28 seconds at advanced depth, because upstream engines and the answer model
account for nearly all of it. Streaming returns ranked links at about 5 seconds and starts
writing the answer at about 11 seconds, and every response carries per stage timings so you
can attribute the wait yourself. Publishing that number unrounded is the only defensible
thing to do with it.
Yes, over streamable HTTP, with nothing to install or run locally. In Claude Code:
claude mcp add --transport http neurobird-search https://search.neurobird.com/mcp
--header "Authorization: Bearer $NEUROBIRD_KEY". The same URL works in any client
that accepts a streamable HTTP MCP server. Two tools are exposed,
web_search and extract_url. Tavily also ships a hosted MCP
server, and theirs supports OAuth where this one is bearer token only.
1,000 free.
No card.
One POST issues a key with 1,000 credits a month. Point your existing Tavily client at it, run your own queries side by side, and decide from the results rather than from this page. That is the only comparison that counts.