SearchHive vs SerpApi — API Features Compared

If you're evaluating search APIs for your application, SerpApi and SearchHive are two of the most capable options. Both provide real-time search engine results as structured free JSON formatter, but they take fundamentally different approaches to pricing, features, and developer experience. This comparison breaks down exactly where each API excels and which one makes more sense for your stack.

Key Takeaways

• SearchHive costs 3-10x less per search at equivalent volumes ($9/5K vs SerpApi's $75/5K)
• SerpApi has broader engine coverage with dedicated APIs for Google, Bing, YouTube, Walmart, and 30+ engines
• SearchHive bundles scraping and deep analysis with search -- SerpApi is search-only
• SerpApi's cheapest paid plan is $25/month for 1,000 searches; SearchHive starts at $9/month for 5,000
• Both offer free tiers -- SearchHive gives 500 credits, SerpApi gives 250 searches/month

Comparison Table

Search Engine Coverage

SerpApi's biggest advantage is the breadth of its search engine support. It provides dedicated, structured APIs for:

• Google (Search, Images, News, Shopping, Maps, Jobs, Scholar, Trends)
• Bing (Search, Images, News)
• YouTube (Search, Video details)
• Amazon (Search, Product, Reviews)
• Walmart, eBay, Home Depot (Product search)
• Google Maps (Local businesses, Places)
• Baidu, Yahoo, Yandex, DuckDuckGo

Each engine has its own endpoint with specialized response schemas. If your application needs results from multiple engines, SerpApi is the more mature choice.

SearchHive focuses on web search (Google, Bing) with deep, high-quality results. For most applications that primarily need web search, SearchHive covers the requirement.

Where SearchHive Wins

Cost Efficiency

This is SearchHive's clearest advantage. At every comparable volume tier, SearchHive costs significantly less:

• 5,000 searches: SearchHive $9 vs SerpApi $75 (8.3x cheaper)
• 100,000 searches: SearchHive $49 vs SerpApi $725 (14.8x cheaper)
• 500,000 searches: SearchHive $199 vs SerpApi $2,750 (13.8x cheaper)

For bootstrapped startups and cost-conscious teams, this difference is substantial. A project spending $2,750/month on SerpApi could switch to SearchHive for $199/month and reallocate $2,551 to other priorities.

Integrated Scraping

SerpApi returns search results -- titles, URLs, snippets. If you need the actual content of those pages, you need a separate scraping API. That's an additional cost and integration headache.

SearchHive bundles web scraping directly into the platform. Search for sources, then scrape them -- all with one API key and one billing dashboard:

import requests

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

# Step 1: Search for sources
search_resp = requests.get(
    "https://api.searchhive.dev/v1/search",
    headers=HEADERS,
    params={"q": "best mechanical keyboards 2025", "limit": 5}
)

# Step 2: Scrape the top results
for result in search_resp.json()["results"]:
    scrape_resp = requests.post(
        "https://api.searchhive.dev/v1/scrape",
        headers=HEADERS,
        json={"url": result["url"], "format": "markdown", "only_text": True}
    )
    print(f"--- {result['title']} ---")
    print(scrape_resp.json()["content"][:300])

With SerpApi, the same workflow requires a separate scraping service (ScraperAPI, Firecrawl, etc.) with its own API key, pricing, and rate limits.

AI-Powered Deep Analysis

SearchHive's DeepDive API provides AI-powered content analysis -- summarization, key point extraction, sentiment analysis -- as part of the platform. This eliminates the need for a separate LLM call to process search results:

response = requests.post(
    "https://api.searchhive.dev/v1/deepdive",
    headers=HEADERS,
    json={
        "url": "https://example.com/long-article",
        "analysis": "summarize key points",
        "max_tokens": 500
    }
)
print(response.json()["summary"])

Where SerpApi Wins

Specialized Engine APIs

If you need structured data from specific platforms -- Google Shopping, Google Maps, YouTube, Amazon -- SerpApi's dedicated endpoints save significant development time. Each engine API returns perfectly structured data with no parsing needed.

Legal Shield

SerpApi offers a U.S. Legal Shield on Production plans and above ($150/month+). This provides indemnification coverage for legal claims related to web scraping. For enterprise customers in risk-sensitive industries, this is a meaningful differentiator.

Throughput at Scale

SerpApi's enterprise tiers offer throughput up to 110,000 requests/hour with priority queuing. If you're processing millions of searches per day, SerpApi's infrastructure is built for that scale.

Code Examples

SearchHive: Basic Web Search

import requests

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

for result in response.json()["results"]:
    print(f"{result['title']}")
    print(f"  {result['url']}")
    print(f"  {result.get('snippet', '')[:100]}")
    print()

SerpApi: Basic Google Search

from serpapi import GoogleSearch

search = GoogleSearch({
    "q": "python web scraping libraries",
    "api_key": "YOUR_SERPAPI_KEY",
    "num": 10
})

for result in search.get_dict().get("organic_results", []):
    print(f"{result['title']}")
    print(f"  {result['link']}")
    print(f"  {result.get('snippet', '')[:100]}")
    print()

SearchHive: Search + Scrape + Analyze

import requests

HEADERS = {"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"}

# One workflow: search, scrape, analyze
query = "best NLP datasets 2025"

# Search
search = requests.get(
    "https://api.searchhive.dev/v1/search",
    headers=HEADERS,
    params={"q": query, "limit": 3}
).json()

# Scrape and summarize top results
for r in search["results"][:3]:
    content = requests.post(
        "https://api.searchhive.dev/v1/scrape",
        headers=HEADERS,
        json={"url": r["url"], "format": "markdown", "only_text": True}
    ).json()["content"]

    analysis = requests.post(
        "https://api.searchhive.dev/v1/deepdive",
        headers=HEADERS,
        json={"text": content[:3000], "analysis": "extract key findings", "max_tokens": 200}
    ).json()

    print(f"Source: {r['title']}")
    print(f"Summary: {analysis.get('summary', 'N/A')[:200]}")
    print()

This three-step workflow -- search, scrape, analyze -- requires three separate services if you're using SerpApi (SerpApi + a scraper + an LLM API). With SearchHive, it's one platform.

Verdict

Choose SerpApi if: You need structured data from multiple search engines (Google Maps, YouTube, Amazon, etc.), you're an enterprise customer that needs legal indemnification, or you need extreme throughput (100K+ requests/hour).

Choose SearchHive if: You primarily need web search, you want to scrape the pages you find, you need AI-powered content analysis, or you want to dramatically reduce your API costs. SearchHive delivers 10x more searches per dollar and eliminates the need for a separate scraping service.

For most developers building search-powered applications, SearchHive offers the better value. The integrated scraping and analysis capabilities mean you're buying a platform, not just an API. Start with the free tier and see for yourself.

See also: /compare/serpapi, /blog/best-serpapi-alternatives-for-developers-in-2026