# Perplexity Search API vs Tavily API + MCP (slim)

> Tavily scores 77.1 (BB) to Perplexity Search's 70.2 (BB) for web search. Perplexity Search is cheaper for web search, $1 against $7.50 per 1,000 requests. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

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- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-07
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Tavily API + MCP scores 77.1 (BB) on agent readiness against Perplexity Search API's 70.2 (BB), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Both do web search. Perplexity Search API is cheaper for web search, $1 against $7.50 per 1,000 requests.

- Perplexity Search API: BB 70.2, rank #211 of 1510 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/perplexity-search-api.min.md
- Tavily API + MCP: BB 77.1, rank #36 of 1510 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/tavily-mcp.min.md
- Perplexity Search API, good for Agents on any model that need raw ranked sources with extracted text at a low per-request price, and teams that want cited answers from the same key through the Agent API. Also Cheaper for web search, $1 against $7.50 per 1,000 requests.
- Tavily API + MCP, good for An agent that needs search plus page text in one call and has no account yet. Ahead on Reliability, 90 against 80; Payments & pricing, 75 against 25. Also Free to start without a card; Open source.

| Category | Perplexity Search API | Tavily API + MCP |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 80 | 90 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 89 | 90 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 85 | 81 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 56 | 52 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 25 | 75 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 82 | 85 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 66 | 62 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Perplexity Search API | Tavily API + MCP |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | MCP server |
| Vendor | Perplexity | Tavily |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.perplexity.ai/mcp` | `https://mcp.tavily.com/mcp/?tavilyApiKey=<key>` |
| Transports | Streamable HTTP, stdio | stdio, Streamable HTTP, HTTP |
| Pricing | Pay per use | Freemium |
| Price for web search | $1 per 1,000 requests | $7.50 per 1,000 requests |
| x402 | no | payer tooling only |
| Licence | Proprietary service under the Perplexity API Terms of Service. The MCP server is MIT and the official SDKs Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Tools exposed | 4 | 5 |
| MCP registry | `ai.perplexity/mcp-server` | `io.github.tavily-ai/tavily-mcp` |
| Last release | 2026-10-23 | 2026-10-06 |
| Terms last updated | couldn't be read | 2026-05-04 |
| Privacy policy last updated | couldn't be read | 2025-11-24 |
| Customer content may train models | couldn't be read | yes |
| Terms restrict automated access | couldn't be read | yes |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | couldn't be read | yes |
| Terms or service can change without notice | couldn't be read | yes |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | couldn't be read | yes |
| Popularity | none | 2.4k stars, 452k npm/wk, 1.6M PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | none | 3.6/5 (8) |

Why the edge:
- Payments & pricing, Tavily API + MCP +50: Perplexity Search API 25 (No x402, MPP or L402 in the docs, pricing page, OpenAPI or llms.txt (0). $5 per 1,000 successful requests, $1 with Fast Search, published without a login, with failed and rate-limited requests not billed (20). Usage is prepaid with a card on the billing page, and no free allowance was found. The console playground needs no key but is a page for a person, not an API allowance (0). A person signs up in the console. The Stripe Projects route provisions a project, key and credits from a terminal, but needs a person's Stripe account with a payment method and a $10 minimum purchase (5 of 20, as on the Decisions API listing). 0 + 20 + 0 + 5 = 25.); Tavily API + MCP 75 (Official x402 at x402.tavily.com sells advanced search only, $0.01 in USDC on Base. An unpaid POST to /search returned 402 on 1 November with an x402 version 2 envelope offering the `exact` scheme on eip155:8453 for 10000 units (0.01 USDC), and a second `agent-pay` option on aws:base for 0.016, described as advanced mode. Extract, map, crawl and research aren't sold over x402 (15). Credit costs per endpoint and $0.008 a credit pay as you go, published without a login and unchanged on 1 November (20). 1,000 free credits a month, no card, re-read on 1 November (20). Keyless search and extract with the `X-Tavily-Access-Mode: keyless` header, plus the x402 route, so an agent needs no human signup (20).)
- Reliability, Tavily API + MCP +10: Perplexity Search API 80 (Graded on the hosted lines, for `POST /search` and the hosted MCP server. status.perplexity.com, on incident.io since 10 September 2026, has an API component with an RSS feed and a JSON summary. There is no separate Search component (20). In the 90 days from 8 August the feed lists 'Investigating API issue' on 13 August, resolved with no detail, a usage-based billing issue on 3 September, and on 9 October elevated errors on the website, app and Computer, where the API 'remained operational throughout'. Minor only, with the caveat that history before the migration may be incomplete (20). The Search API is limited to 50 query units a second with a burst of 50 on every tier, and the other APIs publish QPS and token limits per tier (15). 429 carries Retry-After and an `error.type`, the SDKs retry 429 and 5xx twice honouring Retry-After, the Search best-practices page shows backoff, and failed or rate-limited searches are not billed. Searches have no side effects (15). The FAQ says Perplexity does not guarantee uptime, failure frequency or recovery time, and the terms carry no SLA (0). No beta label on the Search API, launched on 25 September 2025 (10). 20 + 20 + 15 + 15 + 0 + 10 = 80.); Tavily API + MCP 90 (incident.io status page at status.tavily.com with separate API, MCP and website components (20). One incident in the 90 days from 3 August, website degraded performance on 17 September 2026, and none since per the status feed re-read on 1 November. The API and MCP showed 100% per the 1 October check (30). Published limits, re-read on 1 November, 100 requests a minute on development keys and 1,000 on production, crawl 100 and research 20 task creations on both (15). 429 carries `Retry-After` and the docs say to use that value and the status code rather than parse the message. Since October a 434 tells non-paying plans that live fetching with `max_age_hours` is refused under load, with the advice to retry or omit it (15). The pricing page lists 'Enterprise-grade support and SLAs' for the custom Enterprise plan but publishes no SLA terms, per the 17 October check, and none were found in the docs index or terms (0). GA (10).)