Obsession vs Tavily: real-time web search beside what companies show only to customers
Tavily answers an agent’s question from the live public web in one call. Obsession answers it from what a company sent and showed its customers, kept for months.
Example: Northwind is an invented company
- Tavily’s column follows its own pages, read 11 November 2026. Not described means its pages don’t say.
In Obsession vs Tavily, Tavily gives AI agents real-time access to the public web and Obsession keeps what companies show only to signed-up customers. Tavily returns search results and clean page text in one call; Obsession returns the emails after a sign-up, member prices, trial limits and cancel offers, each dated with a screenshot. Many agent teams use both, Tavily to ground answers in public pages and Obsession for what a company sends its customers.
ComparedTavily and Obsession at a glanceGo straight to the comparisonOn this page
What Tavily and Obsession are
Tavily: real-time access to the public web
As of 11 November 2026, Tavily’s home page reads “Connect your AI agents to the web” and “One secure API for real-time web access”. Its endpoints are Search, Extract, Research, Crawl and Map, built to give a model clean, current context in one call. Its logo now reads “Tavily by Nebius”: Tavily’s own post of 10 February 2026 says it is joining Nebius and that “The API remains the same”.
Its search reference lets an agent choose between a cached copy and a live fetch (max_age_hours). Its pages don’t describe logging in to sites, keeping accounts open, or what companies send people who sign up.
Obsession: the web behind the login
Obsession collects what companies show only to customers, step by step: their screens, emails and texts, member prices, trial limits, quotes and cancel offers, each dated with a screenshot. Teams and AI agents look up any company through the API or MCP, and a company not yet covered is added on request. A company already covered returns its history in one call, and each new email, price or offer lands dated the day it arrives.
Tavily and Obsession at a glance
| Option | What it holds | How it’s read | Freshness and history | Price as listed | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TavilySearch, Extract, Research, Crawl, Map | The public web, as clean results for a model | API, SDKs and an MCP server | Cached or live, per request | Free: 1,000 credits a month$0.008 a credit as you goProject $30 a month | Grounding answers in fresh public pages |
| ObsessionOursSearch, Insights, Watch, API and MCP | Emails, member prices, trial limits, quotes, cancel offers | 5 verbs over MCP, the API and SDKs, or a table | Kept from the first sign-upEach fact dated with its screenshot | Early access, onboarding teams nowPriced per call or per company watched | What a company shows only to customers |
When to use Tavily, and when to use Obsession
- Use Tavily to ground a model in the public web: news, docs, public prices and research, fetched fresh at high volume. That is LLM grounding, and a web search API is built for it.
- Use Obsession when the question is about what a company does to its customers: what it emailed in the first week, what it charges a signed-in member, what its free plan allows and what it offers someone who tries to cancel. Those facts sit behind a login wall, so no search API holds them.
- Use both for an agent that researches named companies. Tavily supplies what the company publishes; Obsession supplies what it actually sends, with the date and the receipt.
Using Tavily and Obsession together
Tavily lists its MCP server in its docs, and Obsession’s install line is on the developer page, so one agent can call both. Asked how a competitor wins new customers, it can read the competitor’s landing pages with Tavily, then look up the welcome series, the code in the first email and the save offer in its cancel flow with Obsession, each fact dated with its screenshot or the raw email.
Every Obsession fact links its receipt, so a user can check it without trusting either tool. See one company’s whole record in the sample data, and the lines every Obsession agent keeps on the page for companies an agent visits.
For public web search, no: use Tavily or another search API. Obsession holds what companies show only to signed-up customers, so teams that need both use both.
Tavily’s own post of 10 February 2026 says Tavily is joining Nebius, and its logo reads Tavily by Nebius. The same post says the API and data policies remain the same.
Its search and extract pages don’t describe logging in to sites; the only authentication they describe is your API key. Obsession keeps accounts open at the companies you name and keeps what they show signed-up customers.
Tavily lists 1,000 free credits a month, $0.008 a credit as you go, a Project plan at $30 a month for 4,000 credits and custom Enterprise plans, read on 11 November 2026. Obsession is in early access and is priced per call or per company watched, never per token.
Sources
In the order the page cites them. Every page was read on 11 Nov 2026.