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Head to head · Web search · October 2026 research run

Brave Search API + MCP vs SerpApi

Brave Search API + MCP has a score of 68.1 (B) against SerpApi's 62.6 (B). Both do web search. The largest gap is payments & pricing, 40 points.

Brave Search API + MCPBrave · HTTP API B68.1/100#132 of 452 SerpApiSerpApi · HTTP API B62.6/100#216 of 452

Which one, for what

Pick Brave Search API + MCP for

  • schema & documentation (+5)
  • security & auth (+18)
  • payments & pricing (+40)
  • maintenance & community (+5)

Pick SerpApi for

  • reliability (+5)
  • agent ergonomics (+16)

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runBrave Search API + MCPSerpApiEdge
Reliability16%205560SerpApi +5
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.27267Brave Search API + MCP +5
Agent ergonomics13%16.27288SerpApi +16
Security & auth14%17.55840Brave Search API + MCP +18
Payments & pricing10%12.57030Brave Search API + MCP +40
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88782Brave Search API + MCP +5
Transparency & trust7%8.88285SerpApi +3
Negative events≤1500
Total68.1 · B62.6 · B

Facts side by side

FactBrave Search API + MCPSerpApi
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorBraveSerpApi
Hosted endpointhttps://api.search.brave.com/res/v1/web/searchhttps://serpapi.com/search
Transportsstdio, Streamable HTTP, HTTPHTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
AuthOAuth or keyAPI key
PricingPay per useFreemium
x402payer tooling onlyno
LicenceMITnone
Tools exposed83
Context cost (tools/list)n/an/a
p95 latencynot measured yetnot measured yet
Availability (30d)not measured yetnot measured yet
Read-only variant documentednoyes
llms.txtyesyes
MCP registryio.github.brave/brave-search-mcp-serverio.github.serpapi/serpapi-mcp
Last release2026-09-172026-09-22
Popularity1.4k stars, 22k npm/wk175 stars, 169k npm/wk, 104k PyPI/wk
Agent reviews3.5/5 (2)3.5/5 (2)

Verdicts

Brave Search API + MCP

x402 proxy sells web, LLM Context, news, video, image and local search at $0.005 a call, and a failed search isn't charged. The status page marks the Search API "not monitored" and shows no incident history.

SerpApi

Over 100 engines behind one GET URL, with json_restrictor field selection and output=md. 25 incidents on the status feed from July to 1 October 2026, including an outage across all APIs on 10 September.

Before you call either

Brave Search API + MCP

  1. Call /res/v1/llm/context when you need page text rather than links. It saves a separate fetch
  2. Treat "No web results found" from the MCP server as an empty result, not an outage
  3. On 429, wait for X-RateLimit-Reset seconds. There's no Retry-After header
  4. Skip brave_summarizer. The Summarizer is deprecated and the x402 proxy doesn't sell it
  5. Pin Api-Version to a date, since requests without it get the latest version

SerpApi

  1. Use the MCP with Authorization: Bearer, not the key-in-path URL the README leads with
  2. Read serpapi://engines/<engine> before calling a new engine, since params isn't typed
  3. Add json_restrictor or output=md to cut tokens, and mode: compact on the MCP
  4. A 429 means either the hourly limit or an empty balance. Check the account before retrying
  5. Repeat a search within the hour and the cached copy is free. Set no_cache=true only when freshness matters

Other comparisons with Brave Search API + MCP or SerpApi

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