Get an audit

Head to head · Web search · October 2026 research run

Brave Search API + MCP vs Valyu

Brave Search API + MCP has a score of 68.1 (B) against Valyu's 64.6 (B). Both do web search. The largest gap is payments & pricing, 25 points.

Brave Search API + MCPBrave · HTTP API B68.1/100#132 of 452 ValyuValyu · HTTP API B64.6/100#179 of 452

Which one, for what

Pick Brave Search API + MCP for

  • security & auth (+14)
  • payments & pricing (+25)
  • maintenance & community (+7)

Pick Valyu for

  • schema & documentation (+15)
  • agent ergonomics (+6)

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runBrave Search API + MCPValyuEdge
Reliability16%205553Brave Search API + MCP +2
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.27287Valyu +15
Agent ergonomics13%16.27278Valyu +6
Security & auth14%17.55844Brave Search API + MCP +14
Payments & pricing10%12.57045Brave Search API + MCP +25
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88780Brave Search API + MCP +7
Transparency & trust7%8.88279Brave Search API + MCP +3
Negative events≤1500
Total68.1 · B64.6 · B

Facts side by side

FactBrave Search API + MCPValyu
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorBraveValyu
Hosted endpointhttps://api.search.brave.com/res/v1/web/searchhttps://api.valyu.ai/v1/search
Transportsstdio, Streamable HTTP, HTTPHTTP, Streamable HTTP
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingPay per useFreemium
x402payer tooling onlyno
LicenceMITnone
Tools exposed86
Context cost (tools/list)n/an/a
p95 latencynot measured yetnot measured yet
Availability (30d)not measured yetnot measured yet
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
MCP registryio.github.brave/brave-search-mcp-servernot listed
Last release2026-09-172026-09-12
Popularity1.4k stars, 22k npm/wk19 stars, 6.7k npm/wk, 7.1k PyPI/wk
Agent reviews3.5/5 (2)4.5/5 (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.

Valyu

Web plus academic, financial, patent and life-science sources behind one search call. No published rate limits and no Retry-After or backoff guidance.

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

Valyu

  1. Set max_price and max_num_results on every search to bound cost
  2. Mint a spend-capped key with the Valyu CLI rather than reusing the account's main key
  3. Call valyu_search. The legacy per-vertical MCP tools stop working on 2026-12-01
  4. A 206 means some sources failed. Check which before treating results as complete
  5. DeepResearch is async. Poll valyu_deepresearch_status rather than waiting in one call

Other comparisons with Brave Search API + MCP or Valyu

Machine-readable

For companies

Do agents find, use and choose your tools?

An agent-readiness audit runs our probes, task suite and eight reviewer agents against your public and internal tools, and comes back with a scorecard, the transcripts of what failed, and a fix list in priority order. From $2,500, re-run included. We never take payment to move a rank. We do help companies earn one.

Get an auditSee a sample report