8 best Firecrawl alternatives in 2026 (pricing, benchmarks)

Firecrawl is the default answer when someone asks for a URL-to-markdown API. It has the most GitHub stars in the category, an MCP server, and SDKs in nine languages. It is also a subscription with credits that expire, a plan list with a big gap between $16 and $83, and an AGPL core. Those three things send a steady stream of teams looking for something else.

This guide covers eight Firecrawl alternatives with pricing read from each vendor’s page on September 2, 2026. We build Spider Cloud, so Spider is on the list and comes first. We have tried to hold it to the same standard as the others, including a section on where it falls short. Every number we cite for our own product is our own measurement, not an independent one, and we say so where it appears.

Key takeaways

Firecrawl’s pricing problem is the shape of the plan steps, not the top rate. Hobby buys 5,000 credits for $16 on yearly billing, and the next step is Standard at $83 for 100,000, so a 10,000-page workload either overpays for Standard or buys overage packs on Hobby. Spider Cloud bills bandwidth and compute with no monthly floor, which we estimate at $8 to $15 per 100,000 pages in smart mode; that is our own figure from our pricing guide. Crawl4AI is the strongest self-hosted option and costs nothing in license fees, but you supply the machines and the proxies. Scrapfly, ScrapingBee, Zyte and Bright Data are scraping APIs first and markdown converters second, so they win when the blocker is bot protection rather than output format. Jina Reader is the cheapest hosted converter on paper and the thinnest on features, with no crawl endpoint and no MCP server. On the one benchmark we ran across three of these tools, Spider finished 1,000 URLs at 99.9% success against Firecrawl’s 95.3% and Crawl4AI’s 89.7%, and that benchmark is ours.

What Firecrawl is and why teams look elsewhere

Firecrawl is a hosted API that takes a URL and returns markdown, HTML, JSON or a screenshot. It has scrape, crawl, map, search, extract and agent endpoints, a job-based async crawl with webhooks, and an MCP server so agents can call it as a tool. The core is TypeScript under AGPL-3.0, with the SDKs under MIT. The repository had 175.6k stars when we checked on September 2, 2026.

The reasons people search for a Firecrawl alternative cluster into four groups, and all four come from Firecrawl’s own pricing page and docs.

Credits expire. Firecrawl’s billing docs say plan credits do not roll over by default. Annual Scale plans carry unused credits for one month and annual Enterprise for two. On Hobby, Standard and Growth, whatever you do not use by the end of the cycle is gone. A team that crawls 60,000 pages one month and 110,000 the next pays for Standard both months and buys overage in the second.

The plan floors sit in awkward places. Free covers 1,000 credits a month. Hobby covers 5,000 at $16 a month billed yearly. Standard jumps to 100,000 at $83. There is nothing in between. A 20,000-page workload is either $83 on Standard or Hobby plus fifteen $5 overage packs, and the overage rate on Hobby is $0.005 a credit against $0.001 on Scale.

Multipliers apply to the useful output. A basic scrape is one credit. The JSON format, which is the LLM extraction most RAG teams actually want, adds four credits per page, so structured output costs five times a markdown page. PDF parsing adds one credit per PDF page. The prompt injection check, PII redaction and the question and highlights formats each add four. Stealth proxy requests were repriced to one credit, which is a real improvement over the five that older third-party posts still quote.

The license is AGPL-3.0. That is fine for internal tooling. If you embed the crawler inside a product you distribute or run as a service, AGPL’s network clause can force you to open your own source. Self-hosting also drops features: the self-host guide lists the anti-bot engine, screenshots and actions, the Agent, browser interaction and the specialized formats as hosted-only.

None of these are hidden. They are just the parts of the offer that stop working for some teams as volume grows or the legal review starts.

Comparison table

Prices are month-to-month list prices read on September 2, 2026 unless the vendor only printed yearly rates, in which case we say so. “Cost at 100K pages” is the cheapest plan whose included units cover 100,000 basic page fetches in a month, with no JavaScript rendering or residential proxy multipliers. The Spider figure is our own estimate from our pricing guide.

The Spider row is a range because usage billing depends on page weight and how many pages need a browser. The Apify figure assumes you write your own actor and use datacenter proxies; a browser-based actor at 100K pages runs about $66.67. The Zyte figure assumes every target site lands in Tier 1; Tier 3 sites in browser mode run $240 for the same volume.

How we compared

We fetched every vendor’s pricing page and billing docs on September 2, 2026 and recorded what was printed, not what a third-party tracker said. Where a vendor’s page only rendered one billing toggle, as Firecrawl’s did with yearly rates, we say which one we saw. Where we derived a number by arithmetic on vendor figures, such as Apify’s cost per 1,000 pages from its published compute unit estimates, we call it derived.

For performance we lean on two of our own published tests. The first is a 1,000-URL crawl benchmark from February 2026 that ran Spider, Firecrawl and Crawl4AI over the same list from the same machine, with the method written up in our Crawl4AI vs Firecrawl vs Spider benchmark. The second is the Spider Browser dataset, 999 URLs across 254 domains, published at github.com/spider-rs/spider-browser-dataset. Both are our own work. Nobody outside Spider has reproduced them, and we say that every time we quote them.

For third-party numbers we used Scrapeway’s August 2026 test runs where they exist, and we attribute them inline. We could not verify Firecrawl’s month-to-month prices from its own page, Jina Reader’s current token price, the license of the Jina Reader repository, ScrapingBee’s annual discount, or Bright Data’s rollover policy. Where a figure is unverified it does not appear as a fact in this guide.

1. Spider Cloud

Spider Cloud is a research lab for web data quality, and the product is a crawl and scrape API that returns markdown, text, HTML or JSON from any URL or site. It has an MCP server at mcp.spider.cloud, SDKs for Python, Node and Rust, a synchronous crawl that returns pages directly or streams them as JSONL, and request modes that pick between plain HTTP, a smart mode that renders only when a page needs it, and a full browser. The engine is the open-source spider crate, MIT licensed.

Pricing as of September 2026

Spider bills usage: $1 per GB of content transferred, measured before any transformation, plus $0.001 per minute of server-side compute. Failed requests cost nothing. Credits start at $1 for 10,000 and never expire. By our own estimate, from the pricing guide, a mixed 100,000-page workload in smart mode lands between $8 and $15, 10,000 pages in HTTP mode around $0.80 to $1.00, and 1,000,000 pages in chrome mode with markdown and metadata around $80 to $160. Those are our numbers and not independently verified.

There is no per-feature multiplier. JavaScript rendering rolls into compute time. Standard proxy rotation is included. Residential and ISP proxy pools and AI extraction are priced separately. The alternative to usage billing is Unlimited, where you buy concurrency from 2 units at $40 a month and the per-unit price drops from $20 to $13 as you add units.

Where it shines

Data quality is the reason to pick it, and the evidence we have is our own. In the February 2026 crawl benchmark, Spider finished the 1,000-URL corpus at 99.9% success and 74 pages a second averaged across static, JavaScript-heavy and protected pages, against Firecrawl’s 95.3% and 16 pages a second. Spider Browser passed 100% of the 999-URL dataset across 254 domains in February 2026. Both are our own benchmarks and not independently verified.

The billing model fits bursty workloads. There is no cycle to lose credits at the end of, and a month with no crawling costs nothing. The crawl endpoint accepts a limit, a depth and a return format in one call and gives results back in the same response, so agents do not poll a job ID.

Where it falls short

There is no free tier of monthly credits. You put in at least $1 to start, which is a low bar but still a bar, and Firecrawl’s free 1,000 credits a month is easier to try. Geo-targeting is not available on Unlimited yet, and Unlimited uses a smaller flat-rate proxy pool than pay as you go. The AI Studio add-on is in alpha. The community is smaller than Firecrawl’s, so there are fewer third-party tutorials and integrations to copy from. And because billing is by weight and time, the invoice is harder to predict in advance than a flat credit count, which some finance teams dislike.

Who it is for

Teams crawling whole sites into a vector store, agents that make many small fetches and need a fast round trip, and anyone whose Firecrawl bill is driven by expiring credits or the JSON multiplier. Read Spider vs Firecrawl for the head-to-head.

2. Crawl4AI

Crawl4AI is a Python library and Docker server for turning pages into LLM-ready markdown. It is the most starred self-hosted option in this space, with 81.1k stars on September 2, 2026, and it is the tool people reach for when the answer to “why not Firecrawl” is “we don’t want a vendor at all”.

Pricing as of September 2026

The library is free under Apache-2.0 with a custom clause that requires attribution to UncleCode in your product. There is no hosted price to quote: the Crawl4AI docs list a Cloud API in closed beta with access through a form and no printed pricing. Your real cost is the machines you run it on, the proxies you buy separately, and any LLM tokens the extraction strategies spend.

Where it shines

Control. You get raw and “fit” markdown, HTML, JSON, screenshots and PDF from a Python async API you can step through in a debugger. Extraction strategies cover CSS and XPath selectors, LLM extraction through any LiteLLM provider, table extraction and BM25 or cosine content filters. The Docker image ships an MCP endpoint, async job endpoints with webhooks, and since 0.9.0 it requires auth by default and binds to loopback unless you set a token.

Where it falls short

Nothing is bundled. No proxies, no browser fleet, no anti-bot layer beyond what you configure. On our own February 2026 benchmark, Crawl4AI finished the 1,000-URL corpus at 89.7% success and 12 pages a second, with the gap opening on the protected-site slice; that is our measurement and not independently verified. Version 0.9.3 was a security release covering five coordinated-disclosure advisories, so you also own the patch cadence. The SDK is Python only.

Who it is for

Python teams with their own infrastructure who want the crawler in-process and are fine buying proxies elsewhere. Our comparison is at Spider vs Crawl4AI.

3. Jina Reader

Jina Reader is the simplest tool on this list: prefix any URL with r.jina.ai and get markdown back. There is a search variant at s.jina.ai and a grounding endpoint for fact checks. Elastic completed its acquisition of Jina AI on October 9, 2025, and Reader is still live at jina.ai.

Pricing as of September 2026

Reader is billed by token on one key shared with Jina’s embedding and reranking APIs. Every new key comes with 10 million free tokens, per the Reader page. The current per-token price is not printed on the dashboard; a Jina blog post lists $0.02 per million tokens and an older post lists prepaid packages at $0.05 and $0.045 per million. If you assume 3,000 output tokens per page, which is our assumption because Jina publishes no per-page guidance, 100,000 pages is about $6 at the lower rate. Rate limits are 500 requests a minute with a key.

Where it shines

Price and zero setup. There is no SDK to install because the API is a GET request. The output is clean markdown with a JSON envelope carrying url, title, content and timestamp, and ReaderLM-v2 can be requested with a header for harder layouts.

Where it falls short

It is a converter, not a crawler. There is no crawl endpoint, no webhooks, no MCP server, and no published self-host guide. We could not verify the license of the Reader repository. Token billing makes long pages cost more than short ones, and the price you pay is the one figure in this guide we could not confirm from a current vendor page.

Who it is for

Single-URL fetches inside a chat or agent loop where the site is not fighting you. Read Spider vs Jina Reader.

4. Apify

Apify is a platform for running scrapers, called actors, on a schedule with storage, proxies and a marketplace of prebuilt ones. It is a Firecrawl alternative in the sense that it can do the same job and much more, at the cost of a bigger mental model.

Pricing as of September 2026

Plans from apify.com/pricing: Free with $5 of monthly usage and no card, Starter $19 a month ($17 yearly), Scale $199 ($179 yearly), Business $999 ($899 yearly), Enterprise custom. Compute units cost $0.20 on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale and $0.13 on Business. Residential proxy is $8 a GB on Starter down to $7 on Business. Unused prepaid usage does not roll over.

Apify’s help center says a Cheerio actor averages 3,000 pages per compute unit and a browser actor 300. Derived from those figures, 100,000 pages costs about $6.67 in compute on a Cheerio actor, which the $19 Starter plan covers, or $66.67 on a browser actor.

Where it shines

The Store. Thousands of prebuilt actors for specific sites, scheduling, dataset storage in JSON, CSV, XLSX and more, webhooks, and an MIT-licensed MCP server at mcp.apify.com. Crawlee, the open-source crawler under the platform, is Apache-2.0 in both TypeScript and Python.

Where it falls short

You are building on a platform, not calling an endpoint. Cost is in compute units, which are harder to reason about than pages. Browser-based actors are ten times more expensive than Cheerio ones per page, and the platform itself is not self-hostable. Store actors carry their own prices on top of platform usage. Apify’s Cheerio-per-CU figure assumes the site serves usable HTML without rendering, which is not the case for the JavaScript-heavy sites that push people toward Firecrawl in the first place.

Who it is for

Teams that want a scheduled scraper with storage and are happy to write or rent an actor. Read Spider as an Apify alternative and the wider best Apify alternatives hub.

5. Scrapfly

Scrapfly is a scraping API built around a credit system that itemizes each feature, a free anti-scraping-protection mode that only costs you when it escalates, and a cost_budget parameter that caps what a single request may spend.

Pricing as of September 2026

From scrapfly.io/pricing: Free with 1,000 signup credits, Discovery $30 a month for 200,000 credits, Pro $100 for 1,000,000, Startup $250 for 2,500,000, Enterprise $500 for 5,500,000, Custom from $1,200. Yearly billing gives two months free. Discovery and Free hard-cap at quota; Pro and above switch to pay-as-you-go in 10,000-credit batches at the plan rate.

Credit costs per the billing docs: a datacenter request is 1, JavaScript rendering adds 5, a residential proxy is 25, and bandwidth over the first megabyte is charged per 100KB. A basic page at 100,000 a month is $30 on Discovery. Every page rendered with JavaScript is 6 credits, which pushes 100,000 pages to Pro at $100. Failed requests are not billed unless more than 30% of your traffic fails.

Where it shines

Protected sites and predictable spend. Scrapeway’s August 2026 run listed Scrapfly at 98% success and first of nine APIs tested, with a 15.3 second average response; that is Scrapeway’s measurement. Country selection is free. The MCP server exposes nine tools and there is a hosted version. SDKs cover Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust and Scrapy. The crawler returns screenshots, PDF, WARC and HAR alongside markdown.

Where it falls short

Residential plus JavaScript is 31 credits a page, so a million such pages runs to $3,560 by our arithmetic on Scrapfly’s rates. The 15 second average in Scrapeway’s test is the slowest of the APIs in this guide with a third-party number. Closed source, no self-hosting, and the Discovery tier cannot buy overage, so a spike means an upgrade.

Who it is for

Teams whose targets block plain fetches and who want a per-request spend cap. Read Spider vs Scrapfly.

6. ScrapingBee

ScrapingBee is a general scraping API with a markdown output option, screenshots and a Google Search endpoint. It is on this list because Firecrawl’s own alternatives page lists it and because its $19 entry plan is where a lot of small teams start.

Pricing as of September 2026

From scrapingbee.com/pricing: Hobby $19 a month for 75,000 credits, Freelance $49 for 250,000, Startup $99 for 1,000,000, Business $249 for 3,000,000, Business+ $599 for 8,000,000. Prices are ex-VAT and monthly; we could not find yearly pricing in the page. The trial is 1,000 credits with no card. There is no overage; you upgrade or renew early.

The credit table is the catch. A plain request is 1 credit, JavaScript rendering 5, premium proxy 10, premium plus JavaScript 25, stealth proxy 75. The pricing page marks JavaScript rendering, premium proxies, geotargeting and screenshots as not included on Hobby and Freelance. So 100,000 basic pages is $49 on Freelance, and 100,000 rendered pages is 500,000 credits on Startup at $99.

Where it shines

Simplicity. One endpoint, MIT SDKs for Python and Node, a hosted MCP server, return_page_markdown and return_page_text flags for LLM use, and a SERP endpoint at 10 credits a search. Only successful responses are charged.

Where it falls short

The multiplier stack. A stealth-proxy request costs 75 times a plain one, which turns the 250,000-credit Freelance plan into 3,333 requests. Scrapeway’s August 2026 run listed ScrapingBee at 40% success against a 56.8% average across the APIs it tested; that is Scrapeway’s number. No self-hosting, sync only, and the features most useful for hard sites are locked out of the two cheapest plans.

Who it is for

Small projects on mostly unprotected sites that want one simple endpoint. Read Spider as a ScrapingBee alternative and the best ScrapingBee alternatives hub.

7. Zyte

Zyte, formerly Scrapinghub, maintains Scrapy and sells the Zyte API, which prices each request by which of five difficulty tiers the target site falls into. It is the most transparent pricing on this list and also the hardest to estimate before you start.

Pricing as of September 2026

From zyte.com/pricing and the API pricing docs: pay per successful response, with a $5 free credit in the first month and a 30-day trial. Pay-as-you-go carries a 25% volume discount; monthly commitments of $100, $200, $350 and $500 raise the discount to 40%, 48%, 48% and 52%. Commitments are paid at the start of the month and do not roll over.

Per 1,000 successful HTTP responses on pay-as-you-go, Tier 1 is $0.13 and Tier 5 is $1.27. Browser rendering multiplies that: Tier 1 browser is $1.01 and Tier 5 browser is $16.08. Screenshots are $0.002 a request. So 100,000 Tier 1 HTTP pages is $13, while the same volume on a Tier 3 site in browser mode is $240 on a $200 commitment.

Where it shines

Price at volume on easy sites, and a pricing table that tells you exactly what a request costs once you know the tier. Tier assignment is automatic and reviewed quarterly with two weeks’ notice. Automatic extraction returns typed product, article and other schemas for a fraction of a cent. Scrapy is BSD-3-Clause and Scrapy Cloud hosts spiders for $9 a unit a month.

Where it falls short

You do not learn a site’s tier until you scrape it, so the estimate you make before signing the commitment can be off by a factor of ten between tiers. There is no official MCP server; Zyte publishes a tutorial for building one. No official Node client. Markdown output is not documented, so LLM teams get browserHtml and convert it themselves. Hosted only.

Who it is for

Scrapy shops and teams with steady volume on a known set of sites. Read Spider as a Zyte alternative.

8. Bright Data

Bright Data runs the largest proxy network in the industry, which it puts at 400 million residential IPs across 195 countries, and sells Web Unlocker, a Web Scraper API, a Scraping Browser and prebuilt datasets on top of it. It is the enterprise answer to a Firecrawl block.

Pricing as of September 2026

From brightdata.com/pricing/web-unlocker: 5,000 free requests a month with no card, pay-as-you-go at $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests, Scale at $499 a month for about 383,000 requests with additional requests at $1.30 per 1,000. The Web Scraper API is priced the same. Scraping Browser is $8 a GB pay-as-you-go. Residential proxies are $8 a GB list, with committed plans from $499 a month. First deposits are matched up to $500. No annual pricing is shown.

At 100,000 pages, Web Unlocker is $150 on pay-as-you-go by our arithmetic. A million pages is $1,301 on Scale. Web Unlocker returns static content; if you need a rendered page you move to the browser product and pay by the gigabyte.

Where it shines

Reach. If a target blocks everything else, the proxy network is the reason to be here. The MCP server is MIT, exposes 69 tools and includes 5,000 free requests a month. There is a Python SDK under MIT. Bright Data has a compliance and KYC process that enterprise procurement teams often require.

Where it falls short

Cost per page is the highest in this guide by a wide margin, ten times Firecrawl’s Standard rate at 100,000 pages and roughly ten to twenty times Spider’s estimate. Markdown and screenshot output are not in the Unlocker docs, so the LLM-ready conversion is your job. We could not verify a rollover policy or a Node SDK. The product catalog is large enough that picking the right one is its own research project.

Who it is for

Enterprises with a compliance team and targets that nothing cheaper reaches. Read Spider as a Bright Data alternative.

Reasons to consider a Firecrawl alternative

Most teams that leave Firecrawl are not leaving because the API is bad. They leave because of one of these.

Volume between the plan steps. If you crawl between 5,000 and 100,000 pages a month, you are paying Standard rates for Hobby usage or stacking overage packs. Usage-billed tools, Spider and Zyte among them, charge for what ran.

Structured output at scale. Firecrawl’s JSON format is five credits a page. At 100,000 extracted pages a month that is 500,000 credits, which is Growth territory at $333 on yearly billing. Spider prices AI extraction separately from the page fetch, Scrapfly charges 5 credits for an LLM prompt extraction on top of the page, and Zyte’s automatic extraction is fractions of a cent per data type.

Licensing. AGPL on the core is a blocker for some legal teams. Crawl4AI is Apache-2.0 with attribution. The spider crate is MIT. Crawlee is Apache-2.0.

Blocked targets. Firecrawl’s stealth mode is now priced at one credit, but the anti-bot engine is hosted-only and Firecrawl does not sell a proxy product. Scrapfly, Bright Data and Zyte carry residential and ISP pools with per-request pricing. Spider’s residential and ISP pools are priced separately from the base request.

Success rate. Scrapeway’s August 2026 run listed Firecrawl at 64% success with a 4.7 second average; that is Scrapeway’s measurement, on its own URL set. On our own 1,000-URL corpus Firecrawl reached 95.3%. The two numbers measure different things and neither is independent of the party that ran it, which is the honest state of benchmarking in this category.

How to choose

Match the tool to the workload rather than the feature list.

For RAG ingestion of whole sites, you want a crawl endpoint, markdown output, high success on the long tail of pages and a bill that scales with pages. Spider, Firecrawl and Crawl4AI are the three built for this. Pick Crawl4AI if you want it in-process and own the infrastructure. Pick Spider if you want a hosted crawl that returns in one call with usage billing. Pick Firecrawl if the integration you need already exists in its ecosystem and your volume sits near a plan boundary.

For agent tool calls, the fetch is small and frequent and the round trip is what the user feels. Look for a sync endpoint, an MCP server and a low time to first byte. Spider, Firecrawl, Scrapfly, ScrapingBee, Apify and Bright Data all publish MCP servers. Jina Reader is the cheapest per call but has no MCP server and no crawl. Zyte has no official MCP server.

For e-commerce monitoring, the targets are protected, the pages are rendered and you fetch the same URLs on a schedule. Cost per rendered page on a hard site is what matters. Scrapfly’s cost_budget cap, Zyte’s tiered pricing and Bright Data’s Unlocker are built around this. Spider’s chrome mode with the unblocker endpoint covers it with usage billing; Apify’s scheduler is the best fit if you also want the pipeline hosted.

For search, you need a SERP endpoint rather than a scraper. Firecrawl’s search is 2 credits per 10 results, ScrapingBee’s is 10 credits a query, Spider has a search endpoint, and Bright Data sells a SERP API. Jina’s s.jina.ai starts at 10,000 tokens a request.

If two tools look equal on paper, run the same 100 URLs through both and count the pages that came back usable. Pricing pages describe the best case. The long tail of your own targets is where the tools separate.

Try it on your own URLs

Every number in this guide is either a vendor’s list price on September 2, 2026 or a benchmark that names who ran it. The fastest way to check the claims that matter to you is to paste a URL you actually crawl into the Spider playground and look at the markdown that comes back, then do the same on the tool you are comparing. The compare page has the head-to-head posts for every tool in this guide, and the pricing guide shows the worked examples behind the Spider estimates above.