The short version
- Choose Tavily if your agent needs fresh results from across the web for each question, with snippets or page content it can cite.
- Choose SarvCrawl if your agent should answer from a known set of sites and documents, stored, chunked, embedded and searchable every time.
SarvCrawl and Tavily, side by side
| SarvCrawl | Tavily | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Crawl-to-knowledge-base API | Web search, extract, crawl and research API for agents |
| Best for | Content you want to search — web pages and documents together | Grounding agents in fresh results from the open web |
| Output | Markdown, HTML, JSON, links, images | Ranked results with snippets; page content as markdown or text; LLM answers |
| JavaScript rendering | Yes, where a page needs it | Not a documented focus |
| Documents | PDF, Office, EPUB, images and audio; OCR for scans | Not a documented focus |
| Chunking, embeddings, search | Built in (search on paid plans) | Searches the web; no index of your own content |
| Anti-bot and proxies | Not the focus | Not the focus |
| Pricing | 1 billion free tokens, no card; paid plans | 1,000 free credits a month; from $30/mo, or $0.008 per credit |
| Hosting and licence | Hosted, or self-host: Apache-2.0 with an AGPL-3.0 engine | Hosted; SDKs and MCP server are MIT; acquired by Nebius in 2026 |
| Integrations | REST, Node, Python, CLI, n8n, 21 MCP tools | Python and JS SDKs, MCP server, LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, n8n, Zapier |
Where they really differ
Tavily is search built for agents: one call returns ranked results with relevant content and, optionally, an answer, and its extract, crawl and map endpoints pull page content as markdown. For questions about the whole web — news, recent events, anything you can't predict — it is the right shape, and it plugs into most agent frameworks.
Each call starts again. Credits cover the request, and nothing is stored for you: there is no index of your own content to search the next time, and documents you hold privately are outside its reach.
SarvCrawl is the other half. You choose the sources — docs sites, help centres, PDFs, Office files — and they are crawled or uploaded once, chunked, embedded and kept fresh with monitors. Your agent searches that knowledge base by keyword or meaning instead of the open web. SarvCrawl's own web search scrapes results into a knowledge base too, but it is not a replacement for a dedicated search API.
Using both
A common agent setup: Tavily for open-web questions, and SarvCrawl as the searchable memory of your own docs and reference sites, both available as MCP servers.
SarvCrawl vs Tavily: questions
Is SarvCrawl a Tavily alternative?
For searching your own chosen sites and documents, yes. For fresh results from across the web, Tavily is the better tool, and the two work well together.
Can Tavily search my own documents?
No. It searches and extracts from the public web. SarvCrawl stores your documents and crawled pages in a knowledge base you can search, on paid plans.
How is Tavily priced?
In credits: 1,000 free a month, monthly plans from $30 for 4,000, or $0.008 per credit pay as you go. A basic search costs 1 credit.
Who owns Tavily?
Nebius announced its acquisition of Tavily in February 2026. The Tavily product and brand continue.