Exa vs. Tavily
Last updated February 12, 2026
Tavily, acquired by Nebius in February 2026, offers a search API that performs well on basic queries. Exa is faster, more accurate on hard queries, and has dedicated people, company, and code search.
Accuracy
| Service | Accuracy |
|---|---|
| Exa | 81% |
| Tavily | 71% |
WebWalker multi-hop web retrieval benchmark, independently evaluated.
Latency
| Service | Latency |
|---|---|
| Exa | 1.4s |
| Tavily | 4.5s |
p95 response time on WebWalker queries, independently measured.
Result Categories
| Service | Categories |
|---|---|
| Exa | 7 |
| Tavily | 3 |
Specialized search indexes for different content types.
Customizability
| Service | Domains (Include/Exclude) |
|---|---|
| Exa | 1,200 |
| Tavily | 300 |
Maximum domains in include/exclude filter per query.
Benchmark Results
Search accuracy p95 latency
| Benchmark | Exa | Tavily |
|---|---|---|
| WebWalker | 81% | 71% |
| MKQA | 71.6% | 67.4% |
Key Differentiators
Exa scores 10 points higher on complex retrieval in independent enterprise testing.
Most search APIs handle simple factual lookups. The queries that break things are multi-hop: 'What was the revenue impact of this acquisition?' requires finding the announcement, then the earnings report, then extracting the figure. If the search API can't follow that chain, the agent silently fails.
p95 latency under 1.7 seconds, with an instant mode under 200ms.
An agent that chains 50 searches per workflow loses minutes to a slow API. For voice and real-time AI, anything over 500ms breaks the interaction. Exa's p95 ranged from 1.4s to 1.7s across three benchmarks.
Search 1B+ people and companies by role, location, and industry.
Exa indexes over 1 billion LinkedIn profiles with 50M+ updates per week, plus a dedicated company search index built on proprietary embeddings.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Exa | Tavily |
|---|---|---|
| Search modes | Instant, fast, auto, deep | Basic, fast, advanced, ultra-fast |
| Neural/semantic search | Yes | No |
| Max results per query | 100+ | 20 |
| Category filters | Yes | General, news, finance |
| People search | 1B+ indexed profiles | No |
| Company search | Yes | No |
| Code search | Yes | No |
Example Code for Exa People Search
from exa_py import Exa
exa = Exa(api_key="your-api-key")
results = exa.search(
"VP of Engineering at Series B healthcare companies",
category="people",
num_results=10,
contents={
"highlights": {"query": "engineering leadership experience", "num_sentences": 3}
}
)
FAQ
Is Exa more accurate than Tavily? On WebWalker (complex multi-hop retrieval), Exa scored 81% vs Tavily's 71% in an independent Fortune 100 enterprise evaluation.
Is Exa faster than Tavily? In the enterprise evaluation, Exa's p95 latency was 1.4-1.7s vs Tavily's 3.8-4.5s.