Firecrawl Alternatives

Crawl4AI is the open-source crawler most Firecrawl users try first, and it is the closest match in spirit: give it a URL, get back clean markdown or structured data for an LLM. The library and its Docker server are free under Apache-2.0, a permissive license with none of the network clauses of Firecrawl's AGPL. Its GitHub repository counts 87.2k stars and ships version 0.9.5. You run it in your own Python process, with your settings and your proxies, so the bill is your server and your engineering time.

If you don't want to host it, Crawl4AI Cloud runs the same crawler for you. The free tier gives 1,000 credits a month, up to 10,000 plain pages. Starter costs $10 a month for 10,000 credits, Builder $99 for 125,000 and Scale $499 for 750,000, or $100, $990 and $4,990 a year. A plain page costs 0.1 credit, a page that needs a real browser 0.5, a hard anti-bot site 2, and failed calls are free.

Read that against Firecrawl Hobby: for $10 instead of $19, Starter covers 20,000 browser-rendered pages, four times Firecrawl Hobby's 5,000. On plain HTML pages it drops to $0.10 per 1,000. The catch is the hard sites: at 2 credits each, Starter handles 5,000 of them, the same count as Firecrawl Hobby for about half the price.

Apify is a cloud platform where scrapers, called Actors, run on demand or on a schedule. The one that replaces Firecrawl is Website Content Crawler: it crawls a site, removes navigation, headers, footers, ads and cookie warnings, and saves the content as plain text, Markdown or HTML for a RAG pipeline. Around it you get proxies, datasets, schedules and more than 100,000 other Actors in its store, many built for one specific site. If your pipeline runs in n8n, our Apify node guide for n8n covers the setup.

Pricing is a subscription that prepays usage. Free gives $5 to spend each month, Starter costs $19 a month, Scale $199 and Business $999, each with the same amount to spend, and a compute unit costs $0.2 on Starter and $0.16 on Scale. Paying annually saves 10%. Residential proxies cost $8 per GB on Starter.

The cost per page depends on the site, which is the main difference from Firecrawl's flat credit. Apify estimates Website Content Crawler at $0.5 to $5 per 1,000 pages with a headless browser, and $0.2 per 1,000 with the raw HTTP crawler. On easy sites that beats Firecrawl Hobby's $3.80; on heavy sites it can match or pass it. Our full Apify review scores it 4.2, and our Apify alternatives page covers the reverse move.

Bright Data is the infrastructure end of this list: proxy networks, an Unlocker API for CAPTCHAs and blocks, ready-made Scraper APIs and a Fetch API, formerly called Crawl API and still sold under that name, that takes any public URL and returns the page as Markdown, plain text, raw HTML and JSON-LD in a single record. That last product is the direct Firecrawl replacement: $1.5 per 1,000 records on pay as you go, down to $1 on the $1,999-a-month plan for 2.5 million records.

The Scraper APIs are advertised from $0.75 per 1,000 records, a discounted rate shown against a $1 list price, and the Fetch API's $1 tier drops to $0.75 with the 25% coupon displayed on its monthly plans; our Bright Data pricing guide walks through each grid. On the Web Scraper API page, pay as you go costs $1.5 per 1,000 records, the free tier gives 5,000 records a month without a card, and Scale costs $499 a month for 384,000 records. Its MCP server has a free tier of 5,000 requests a month, drawn from the same shared pool as the other APIs, which helps if your agent runs in Claude or Cursor.

Against Firecrawl, the price per page is lower than Hobby ($1.5 per 1,000 on pay as you go against $3.80) and you pay only for what you use, with no credits to lose at month end. What you get on top is the unblocking: this is the vendor to call when Firecrawl returns 403s. Our Bright Data review scores it 4.2, and the Apify vs Bright Data comparison covers the two together. For the wider field of scrapers, see our ranking of scraping tools, and our Bright Data alternatives if it is more platform than you need.

Jina AI Reader is the lightest option here. You convert a URL by prepending r.jina.ai to it, and you get back LLM-friendly text. Its sibling s.jina.ai searches the web and returns the top results in the same format. It reads PDFs natively, which saves a separate parser for document links. Jina is now run by Elastic, whose sales team handles volumes above self-serve top-ups.

Basic use is free without any key, at 20 requests per minute. A free API key raises that to 500 requests per minute, and every new key comes with 10M free tokens. After that, pricing is based on token usage: you top up a key and the output tokens of each response are counted.

Against Firecrawl, the billing logic is different. Firecrawl charges per page whatever its length; Jina charges for the tokens it returns, so long pages cost more and short ones less. Each call reads one URL: to cover a whole site, you write the link-following yourself. It is a reader, and for an agent that fetches a handful of pages per task, that is often all you need.

ScrapingBee is a classic scraping API: it handles headless browsers and rotates proxies for you, and it now returns any page as clean Markdown, with AI data extraction, screenshots and a JavaScript scenario to click and scroll before scraping. It also has an MCP server and an n8n node, so it drops into the same agent stacks as Firecrawl.

Hobby costs $19 a month for 75,000 API credits and 25 concurrent requests, Freelance $49 for 250,000, Startup $99 for 1,000,000 and Business $249 for 3,000,000. Requests start at 1 credit, a request with JavaScript rendering costs 5, and premium proxies cost 10 or 25 credits depending on JavaScript rendering. Credits are valid for one month and don't roll over.

That gives the comparison with Firecrawl Hobby, at the same $19: 75,000 credits make 15,000 JavaScript-rendered pages, three times Firecrawl's 5,000, or $1.27 per 1,000. With premium proxies and JavaScript, it drops to 3,000 pages, or $6.33 per 1,000. So it wins on ordinary sites and loses on hard ones. You can wire it in Make through our ScrapingBee integration guide.

Spider is a crawler written in Rust, open source under the MIT license, with a hosted API at spider.cloud that crawls, scrapes and searches, and streams whole sites back as markdown. It returns HTML, raw, plain text and several markdown formats, with JSON, JSONL, CSV or XML responses.

Its pricing is the most unusual here. Pay as you go has two line items per request: bandwidth at $1 per GB of content before transformation, and compute at $0.0001 per minute of CPU. Failed requests cost $0, and there are no multipliers for JavaScript rendering or proxies. You top up from $5, and the balance does not expire: nothing resets monthly. The Unlimited plan sells concurrency instead, from $40 a month for 2 requests in flight, with unlimited requests through them.

Against Firecrawl, that solves the two billing complaints at once: no monthly reset and no charge for failures. The trade is predictability. A per-GB price depends on page weight, so run a sample crawl and read your invoice before you commit a large budget.

Zyte sells Zyte API: one endpoint that picks the proxies, browser and unblocking each site needs. It also offers automatic extraction, AI-powered for products, articles and job postings, and non-AI for search results and Markdown, so you can ask for a page as markdown without writing parsers.

The price is set per site, in five tiers from simple to advanced. On pay as you go, HTTP responses cost $0.13 to $1.27 per 1,000, and browser-rendered responses $1.01 to $16.08 per 1,000. A monthly commitment of $100 to $500 brings a 25% to 52% discount, down to $0.06 per 1,000 for the simplest HTTP tier. New accounts get $5 of free credit. You are only charged for successful responses: rate-limiting and failures are free.

Against Firecrawl, that billing rule is the reason to switch: a blocked page never costs you. Watch the ceiling, though. Pay as you go has a $100 monthly spending limit, and when you reach it your account is suspended until the next billing month, so a crawl can stop mid-run unless you move to a commitment plan.