Tavily vs Firecrawl
Compare Tavily and Firecrawl on pricing, free tier, open source, API, self-host, verdict and momentum.
Both are data tools. Tavily is freemium (free tier (1k calls/mo); paid from $30/mo) with an API, a free tier; Firecrawl is freemium (open source self-host free; cloud 1,000 credits/mo free, then Hobby/Standard/Growth paid) with open source, an API, self-hostable and a free tier. The catalog stamp is ship for Tavily and ship for Firecrawl, last verified 2026-09-01 and 2026-08-19 respectively.
Auto-paired from catalog data — the verdicts are hand-set, the pairing is algorithmic.
Tavily
Search API optimized for LLM agents with structured, sourced answers.
Firecrawl
Turn entire websites into clean, LLM-ready markdown or structured data.
| field | Tavily | Firecrawl |
|---|---|---|
| pricing | freemium · free tier (1k calls/mo); paid from $30/mo | freemium · open source self-host free; cloud 1,000 credits/mo free, then Hobby/Standard/Growth paid |
| free tier | yes | yes |
| open source | no | yes |
| api | yes | yes |
| self-host | no | yes |
| verdict | ship | ship |
| momentum | blueshift | blueshift |
| last verified | 2026-09-01 | 2026-08-19 |
| key limitation | Free tier has tight rate limits. | Large sites require careful rate limiting and caching. |
The call
Pick Tavily for retrieval for LLM agents that must return sources.
Pick Firecrawl if open source matters.
Tavily sources
Firecrawl sources
Open live compare →Tavily pageFirecrawl pageTavily.jsonFirecrawl.json