Fastcrawl vs Tavily

Tavily is built for a specific job: giving AI agents search and extraction so they can do retrieval-augmented generation. It does that job well, and if your project is an agent that answers questions from web sources, Tavily deserves a serious look.

The overlap with Fastcrawl is real but partial. We both do search and extraction. The difference is that Tavily stops there, while Fastcrawl covers the full scraping pipeline — crawl, PDF parsing, screenshots and scheduled monitors — at a fraction of the entry cost.

Side by side

Where Fastcrawl wins

Entry price. Fastcrawl's Go plan is $5/mo for 5,000 credits. Tavily's cheapest paid tier is $30/mo for 4,000 credits — six times the cost for fewer credits. Our free tier is also twice as large (2,000 vs 1,000).

The complete pipeline. Tavily doesn't offer PDF parsing, screenshot capture, or scheduled monitors. If your project needs any of those, you're integrating a second provider. Fastcrawl includes all of them on one key, one credit each.

Flat, predictable pricing. One credit per call. Tavily varies by depth: search is 1 credit basic and 2 advanced, extraction is 1 credit per 5 URLs (2 advanced), and the research endpoint runs anywhere from 4 to 250 credits per request depending on the model. Predicting a monthly bill means modelling which depths each of your calls uses.

No rate limit on paid. Fastcrawl's Go plan has no concurrency cap and metered overage at $0.25 per 1,000 credits.

Where Tavily wins

Deep research. Tavily has a research endpoint that runs multi-step research workflows with citations. It's expensive (4–250 credits per request) but it's a capability we simply don't have — if your agent needs to answer open-ended questions rather than fetch known URLs, that's a real advantage.

Agent-first design. Tavily is purpose-built for RAG: its search results are shaped for LLM context, and the SDKs assume an agent caller. Fastcrawl is a general scraping API that agents use, not an agent product per se.

Cheap bulk extraction. At 5 URLs per credit on basic depth, Tavily's extraction is cost-effective for high-volume, shallow extraction jobs where you don't need rendering control.

Which should you pick?

Pick Tavily if your core workload is an agent answering questions from web search, you want the research endpoint, and you don't need PDF parsing or screenshots.

Pick Fastcrawl if you're building a scraping or monitoring pipeline — you need crawl, PDFs, screenshots or change detection — or you want predictable per-call pricing at a much lower entry cost.

They're not mutually exclusive. A common pattern is Tavily for the agent's search step and Fastcrawl for the scraping, rendering and monitoring steps.