SerpApi vs VALUE SERP (2026): which should you pick?

Pick SerpApi if

• Fits if you need Google AI Overviews, AI Mode and other engines in one response format
• Works for low volumes that fit in 250 free searches or 1,000 paid ones a month

Look elsewhere if

• Pricey if you search in volume, at $25 per 1,000 on Starter where Serper charges $1
• Tight if you're on Free, with 250 searches a month and at most 50 an hour
• Skip it if you want the U.S. Legal Shield on a small plan, as it starts on Production at $150 a month
• Watch out: plans are month to month, and yearly billing is only set up by request
• Watch out: Ludicrous Speed costs twice the price, and refunds stop after 7 days or 20% of a plan's searches

Pick VALUE SERP if

• Fits if you only need Google and want to pay $25 at a time rather than monthly
• Works for scheduled ranking snapshots dropped into S3 or Google Cloud Storage

Look elsewhere if

• Skip it if you need Bing or other engines, which Traject Data sells as SerpWow
• Watch out: ScraperAPI bought Traject Data and says it is moving Traject's APIs onto its own infrastructure
• Tight if you go past a monthly plan, as extra requests cost from $1.60 per 1,000
• Not for you if you want a free plan that renews, as the 100 searches come once

SerpApi

• Plans are month to month; the FAQ says yearly billing can only be set up by request while an official yearly plan is in the works.
• The U.S. Legal Shield is not included on the Free, Starter or Developer plans.
• Bigger self-serve plans run from Searcher at $725 for 100,000 searches a month to Cloud plans of 1 million searches and up from $3,750.
• Refunds are offered within 7 days of subscribing, unless more than 20% of the plan's searches have been used.

VALUE SERP

• It covers Google only; Traject Data's SerpWow is the product for other search engines.
• Plans also come at 500,000 searches and from 2 million to 20 million a month, at $575 to $10,000 billed monthly.
• Searches beyond a plan's allowance are billed per 1,000 requests, from $1.60 on the smallest plan.
• Traject Data was acquired by ScraperAPI, which says it is moving Traject's APIs onto its own infrastructure.

SerpApi

Google and many other engines

Endpoints for Google Search, AI Mode, AI Overview, Maps, Shopping, Scholar, Trends, Flights and Hotels, plus Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, Naver, YouTube, Amazon, eBay and Walmart.

Full browser and CAPTCHA solving

Each request runs immediately in a full browser through a proxy near the chosen location, and results come back as JSON or Markdown.

Only successful searches counted

Cached, errored and failed searches do not count against the monthly allowance, and a response with 100 results counts as one search.

Ludicrous Speed

An option on every paid plan that sends parallel requests for faster responses, at twice the price; Ludicrous Speed Max is four times the price.

U.S. Legal Shield

From the Production plan up, SerpApi says it takes on liability for the lawful collection of public search data, with up to $2 million in coverage.

Teams and client libraries

Unlimited team members with admin, developer, billing and viewer roles, and libraries for Python, JavaScript, Ruby, Go, PHP, Java, Rust and .NET, plus an MCP server.

VALUE SERP

Google endpoints

Search, Google Maps places, Shopping, News, product details by product ID and place reviews.

Location and device targeting

A Locations API finds supported Google locations to add to requests, and results can be filtered to a device type.

Batches

Schedule up to 15,000 requests at a time to run monthly, weekly, daily, hourly or on demand, with results back in a few minutes.

Cloud destinations

Batch results can be sent to Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, Alibaba Cloud OSS or other S3-compatible storage.

Full-browser rendering

Pages are rendered in an in-memory browser, images on the page are extracted, and linked pages can be fetched in follow-up requests at no extra cost.

SerpApi

• Free$0

  250 searches a month with a throughput of 50 an hour.

• Starter$25

  per month for 1,000 searches, billed monthly

  Throughput of 200 successful searches an hour. No U.S. Legal Shield.

• Developer$75

  per month for 5,000 searches, billed monthly

  Throughput of 1,000 successful searches an hour. No U.S. Legal Shield.

• Production$150

  per month for 15,000 searches, billed monthly

  Throughput of 3,000 an hour, and the U.S. Legal Shield with up to $2 million in coverage.

• Big Data$275

  per month for 30,000 searches, billed monthly

  Throughput of 6,000 an hour, with the U.S. Legal Shield.

• EnterpriseCustom

  Custom volume and throughput, ZeroTrace mode, which stores no search data, and priority support. Sold through sales.

VALUE SERP

• Pay As You Go$25

  one-time top-up of 10,000 requests, used as you go

  $2.50 per 1,000 requests with no commitment, at up to 250 real-time requests a minute.

• 25,000 Searches$50

  per month for 25,000 searches, billed annually ($56 billed monthly)

  Extra requests at $1.60 per 1,000, up to 250 a minute and up to 10,000 batches.

• 50,000 Searches$94

  per month for 50,000 searches, billed annually ($105 billed monthly)

  Extra requests at $1.50 per 1,000, up to 250 a minute.

• 100,000 Searches$158

  per month for 100,000 searches, billed annually ($175 billed monthly)

  Extra requests at $1.35 per 1,000, up to 500 a minute.

• 200,000 Searches$216

  per month for 200,000 searches, billed annually ($240 billed monthly)

  Extra requests at $1.20 per 1,000, up to 1,000 a minute.

• 1,000,000 Searches$900

  per month for 1M searches, billed annually ($1,000 billed monthly)

  Extra requests at $1.00 per 1,000, up to 1,500 a minute. Larger plans run to 20 million searches.

SerpApi

• Education

  Special pricing for students and educators

  SerpApi's FAQ says universities, students and educators can email about their project and budget to arrange special pricing.

VALUE SERP

• Annual discount

  10% off with annual billing

  VALUE SERP's pricing page takes 10% off for annual billing: the 100,000-search plan is $158 a month billed annually against $175 billed monthly.