Closest to Tavily
Firecrawl is a web data API that searches, scrapes, and interacts with live pages and returns Markdown or structured JSON, with JavaScript rendering and PDF parsing. Its hosted version adds proprietary infrastructure.
Alternatives / Tavily
4 open-source alternatives
4 Best Open Source Tavily Alternatives in 2026
Looking for an open source Tavily alternative? We compared 4 open source web data tools for AI agents by license, search, scraping, and maintenance. Firecrawl and Crawl4AI scrape pages into LLM-ready text, while OpenSERP and Swirl handle search results and enterprise search.
Written by Maxime DERAME
Last updated:
How we chose these Tavily alternatives
We looked for open-source tools that give AI agents web search and page content like Tavily. We verified each project's license, recent activity, stars, and self-hosting in its repository. See our methodology for the full criteria.
Crawling and search
Crawl4AI is an Apache-2.0 crawler and scraper that produces clean Markdown for LLMs, with CSS, XPath, and LLM-based extraction. OpenSERP is a self-hosted API that returns structured search results from six engines through one endpoint.
Enterprise search
Swirl is an AI search and RAG platform that connects to 100+ tools without data migration. It is aimed at enterprises and can be deployed on-premises or air-gapped.
Important: licenses
Firecrawl is AGPL-3.0, so using it in a networked service has copyleft obligations. OpenSERP's multi-engine endpoints are part of its paid cloud, and scraping search engines can break or violate their terms.
License details
Firecrawl is AGPL-3.0. Crawl4AI and Swirl are Apache-2.0. OpenSERP is MIT.
Maintenance status
All four had commits within days or weeks of this update. Firecrawl has over 180,000 stars.
Why look for a Tavily alternative?
Tavily is a proprietary search API priced by credits, with your agent's queries sent to its servers. Open-source tools can be self-hosted so queries stay on your infrastructure, but you provide proxies, browsers, and search sources yourself.
firecrawl.dev
Firecrawl converts JavaScript-heavy web content into clean Markdown or structured data for AI systems, with search, scrape, crawl, and browser interaction such as click, scroll, and type. It handles PDFs and DOCX files, offers an MCP server, and has SDKs for Python, Node.js, Go, Rust, Java, and Elixir. The code is AGPL-3.0, and the hosted cloud includes additional features that the open-source version lacks.
192.1K10.2KAGPL-3.0Self-hosted
Pricing: Free to self-host; hosted free tier of 1,000 pages per month and paid plans.
- Search, scrape, crawl, and interaction in one API
- Many SDKs and MCP support
- Very large community
- AGPL-3.0 license
- The hosted cloud has features missing from the open-source version
crawl4ai.com
Crawl4AI is an open-source web crawler and scraper that produces clean, structured output for LLMs, RAG pipelines, and agents. It offers Markdown generation, CSS, XPath, and LLM-based extraction, adaptive crawling, chunking, and browser control with hooks, proxies, and stealth modes, through a Python async API or Docker.
85.7K8.9KApache-2.0Self-hosted
Pricing: Free and open source, with no forced API keys.
- Apache-2.0 license
- Clean Markdown, adaptive crawling, and flexible extraction
- Python library and Docker deployment
- Python-centric
- You run browsers and proxies yourself
swirlaiconnect.com
Swirl is an Apache-2.0 search and RAG tool that queries your company apps in place instead of copying data into an index, supporting over 100 sources and on-premises deployment. It is a federated search layer, not a search engine.
3K289Apache-2.0Self-hosted
Pricing: Free open-source edition; enterprise plans are paid.
- No data migration needed
- Many connectors
- On-premises deployment
- Federated search depends on each source's speed
- Smaller community
openserp.org
OpenSERP is an MIT self-hosted REST API that returns structured search results from Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia through one endpoint, including features such as answer boxes. Multi-engine endpoints are part of the paid managed cloud.
1.5K172MITSelf-hosted
Pricing: Free to self-host; managed cloud has pay-as-you-go pricing.
- Same JSON structure for every engine
- No API keys to self-host
- JSON, Markdown, and plain text output
- Scraping can break when search pages change
- Multi-engine endpoints are in the paid cloud
Compare Tavily alternatives
| Alternative | Type | License | Self-hosted | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Firecrawl | Web data API | AGPL-3.0 | Yes | Closest replacement |
| Crawl4AI | Crawler | Apache-2.0 | Yes | RAG pipelines |
| Swirl | Enterprise search | Apache-2.0 | Yes | Company knowledge |
| OpenSERP | SERP API | MIT | Yes | Search results |
Which one should you choose?
Want search plus full-page content
Firecrawl returns search results with full-page Markdown and handles JavaScript rendering.
Want a free crawler for RAG
Crawl4AI produces clean Markdown with no forced API keys, deployed with pip or Docker.
Want raw search engine results
OpenSERP returns structured results from six engines and is free to self-host.