SearchHive vs Brave Search API — API Features Compared

Choosing between search APIs comes down to three things: cost per query, result quality, and feature depth. Brave Search API and SearchHive are both developer-first platforms, but they serve different needs and have very different pricing structures.

This comparison breaks down Brave Search API vs SearchHive across pricing, features, code examples, and real-world use cases -- so you can pick the right tool (or combination) for your project.

Key Takeaways

• Brave charges $5/1K searches + $4/1K answers with $5 free monthly credits (1,000 searches)
• SearchHive starts at $9/month for 5,000 credits across search, scrape, and deep research APIs
• Brave has its own web index (30B+ pages) while SearchHive aggregates from multiple sources
• SearchHive includes scraping and deep research -- Brave is search-only
• At scale, SearchHive is significantly cheaper for teams needing more than search results

Comparison Table

Feature-by-Feature Breakdown

Search Quality

Brave Search API delivers results from its own independent web index of over 30 billion pages, updated with 100M+ page updates daily. This means you're getting results that aren't dependent on Google or Bing.

SearchHive's SwiftSearch API aggregates results from multiple search sources, providing broader coverage. The trade-off is slightly less independence -- SearchHive pulls from established search indexes rather than maintaining its own.

Winner: Brave for index independence. Tie for practical result quality -- both deliver accurate, relevant results for most queries.

Search Endpoints

Brave offers specialized endpoints for different result types:

• Web search (standard results with metadata)
• Image search
• Video search
• News search
• Local search (places, businesses)
• AI-powered Answers (summarized responses with citations)
• LLM Context (optimized for AI application input)
• Query suggestions
• Spellcheck

SearchHive SwiftSearch focuses on web search with clean, structured output. For images, videos, and specialized content, you pair it with ScrapeForge to extract from specific pages.

Winner: Brave for endpoint variety. SearchHive for simplicity -- one search API that does the job well.

AI and LLM Integration

Brave has invested heavily in AI features:

• LLM Context endpoint: Returns results formatted for direct LLM input
• Answers endpoint: Summarized responses grounded in search results
• Extra snippets: Up to 5 additional content snippets per result
• Schema-enriched results: Formatted data for popular content types
• MCP Server: Official Model Context Protocol server for Claude integration

SearchHive integrates with AI workflows through clean markdown output from all three APIs. SwiftSearch results, ScrapeForge content, and DeepDive research all return structured markdown ready for LLM consumption.

Winner: Brave for native AI features. SearchHive for the combined search-scrape-research pipeline that feeds AI agents more complete data.

Rate Limits and Scale

Brave offers 50 QPS on the search endpoint and 2 QPS on the answers endpoint. This is generous for most use cases, though the answers endpoint throttle limits high-throughput AI applications.

SearchHive rate limits scale with your plan. Free tier has basic limits, Builder ($49/mo) gets higher limits, and Unicorn ($199/mo) gets the highest throughput.

Winner: Brave for published rate limits. SearchHive scales competitively on paid plans.

Pricing Deep Dive

Brave Search API

Brave uses a simple pay-as-you-go model:

• Search: $5 per 1,000 requests
• Answers: $4 per 1,000 requests + $5 per 1M input/output tokens
• Free credits: $5/month (auto-applied, enough for ~1,000 searches)

No monthly subscriptions -- pure consumption-based. This means your costs scale linearly with usage.

Monthly cost examples:

• 10K searches: $50
• 50K searches: $250
• 100K searches: $500
• 500K searches: $2,500

SearchHive

SearchHive uses a credit system where 1 credit = $0.0001:

• Free: 500 credits (one-time)
• Starter: $9/mo = 5,000 credits
• Builder: $49/mo = 100,000 credits
• Unicorn: $199/mo = 500,000 credits

Credits work across all three APIs -- search, scrape, and deep dive. A SwiftSearch query costs 1 credit. ScrapeForge costs vary by page complexity. DeepDive costs more for multi-page research.

Monthly cost examples (search only):

• 5K searches: $9 (Starter)
• 100K searches: $49 (Builder)
• 500K searches: $199 (Unicorn)

Cost Comparison

At low volumes (under 1K/month), Brave's free credits make it effectively free. But at any meaningful scale, SearchHive's subscription pricing crushes Brave's per-query pricing. And SearchHive includes scraping and research on the same credits.

Code Examples

Brave Search API

import requests

# Basic web search
response = requests.get(
    "https://api.search.brave.com/res/v1/web/search",
    headers={"X-Subscription-Token": "BRAVE_API_KEY"},
    params={
        "q": "best python web scraping libraries 2025",
        "count": 10,
        "country": "us",
        "search_lang": "en"
    }
)

data = response.json()
for result in data.get("web", {}).get("results", []):
    print(f"{result['title']}")
    print(f"  {result['url']}")
    print(f"  {result['description']}\n")

SearchHive SwiftSearch

import requests

# Basic web search
response = requests.get(
    "https://api.searchhive.dev/v1/search",
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"},
    params={
        "q": "best python web scraping libraries 2025",
        "limit": 10
    }
)

data = response.json()
for result in data.get("results", []):
    print(f"{result['title']}")
    print(f"  {result['url']}")
    print(f"  {result.get('snippet', '')}\n")

SearchHive: Full Pipeline (Search + Scrape + Research)

This is where SearchHive differentiates. One platform, three capabilities:

import requests

API_KEY = "YOUR_API_KEY"
headers = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {API_KEY}"}

# 1. Search for relevant sources
search_resp = requests.get(
    "https://api.searchhive.dev/v1/search",
    headers=headers,
    params={"q": "python web scraping tutorial 2025", "limit": 5}
)

# 2. Scrape top result for full content
top_url = search_resp.json()["results"][0]["url"]
scrape_resp = requests.post(
    "https://api.searchhive.dev/v1/scrape",
    headers=headers,
    json={"url": top_url, "format": "markdown"}
)

# 3. Deep dive into a comprehensive resource
deep_resp = requests.post(
    "https://api.searchhive.dev/v1/deepdive",
    headers=headers,
    json={
        "url": "https://docs.python-requests.org/",
        "format": "markdown",
        "depth": 2
    }
)

# Combine everything for your AI pipeline
combined = {
    "search_results": search_resp.json()["results"],
    "scraped_content": scrape_resp.json(),
    "deep_research": deep_resp.json()
}

With Brave, you'd need to add Firecrawl or ScrapingBee (separate subscription) to get scraping, and there's no equivalent to DeepDive.

Verdict

Choose Brave Search API if:

• You need an independent web index (not relying on Google/Bing)
• You want specialized endpoints (images, videos, local, news)
• Your usage is under 1,000 searches/month (free tier)
• AI Answer summaries with citations are a core requirement

Choose SearchHive if:

• You need more than search (scraping + research in one platform)
• Your usage exceeds 5,000 searches/month (massive cost savings)
• You're building AI agents that need search-scrape-research pipelines
• You want predictable monthly costs instead of pay-as-you-go

For most teams building production applications, SearchHive offers better value. The unified platform eliminates the need for separate search, scraping, and research tools -- and at scale, the cost savings are dramatic. 100K searches/month is $49 on SearchHive vs $500 on Brave.

Get Started

Both platforms offer free access to test:

• Brave Search API: $5 free credits/month, sign up at the API dashboard
• SearchHive: 500 free credits, no credit card required

If your project needs search plus scraping, start with SearchHive's free tier and test the full SwiftSearch + ScrapeForge + DeepDive pipeline. At $9/month for the Starter plan, it costs less than 2,000 Brave search queries and includes three APIs instead of one.