Brave Search API vs Serper

• Runs on Brave's own independent index, so there is no hidden fallback to Google or Bing for long-tail queries.
• LLM Context endpoint returns ranked, token-budgeted passages instead of raw links, which cuts prompt size.
• Prepaid credits with no subscription or minimums make costs easy to cap.
• Goggles let you re-rank or restrict results to trusted domain sets.
• SOC 2 Type II attested, with Zero Data Retention options for compliance-sensitive teams.
• Official MCP server makes it simple to plug into Claude and other agent clients.

• A credit card is required even to use the free monthly credits.
• Storing or reusing results (for example to fine-tune a model) needs a plan that grants storage rights.
• Headline benchmark wins are vendor-reported or run by Brave, so verify on your own queries.
• No no-code interface; it is built for developers working through the API.
• Answers endpoint is limited to 2 queries per second on the standard plan.

• Google-quality results (organic, knowledge graph, answer box, PAA) through a simple JSON API.
• Among the cheapest per-query pricing in the category, from $0.30 per 1,000 queries at volume.
• 2,500 free queries with no credit card make evaluation risk-free.
• Covers Search, Images, News, Maps, Places, Videos, Shopping, Scholar, Patents and Autocomplete.
• Ships as a ready-made tool in LangChain, so wiring it into an agent takes minutes.

• Returns snippets and links only; you still need a scraper or extraction API for full page content.
• Not an agent-native or semantic index, so results are not pre-chunked or token-optimised for LLMs.
• Depends on Google results, which makes it a wrapper rather than an independent search index.
• The homepage does not publish rate limits, credit expiry or company details such as HQ and founding year.