Firecrawl alternatives
Crawl, scrape and clean any URL into markdown for an LLM. A complement to a search API rather than a replacement — it needs URLs to start from.
Verified 5 August 2026·Figures from vendors' own pages
Firecrawl at a glance
- Vendor
- Firecrawl
- Category
- Crawl & extraction
- Own index
- No — Crawl and extraction, not an index
- Price per 1,000
- Not published as a flat rate
- Free tier
- 500 credits on signup
- MCP server
- Yes
- Graph traversal
- No
- Coverage transparency
- No
- Funding
- $16.2M
- Investors
- Nexus Venture Partners, Y Combinator, Tobias Lütke
Pricing detail. Credit-based per page crawled or scraped, not per search.
The alternatives
unlob
$0.40/1kOur own index, admitted rather than ranked. Metadata-only passage hits, six coverage-graph traversal tools, an MCP server, and an endpoint that tells you why any URL is or is not in the index. Smaller than the well-funded incumbents, and considerably cheaper than all of them.
Jina Reader
Prefix any URL and get clean markdown back. The lowest-friction extraction tool there is, and priced per token rather than per page.
Diffbot
One of the very few independent commercial web crawls, feeding a structured Knowledge Graph. Entity-shaped rather than passage-shaped.
Bright Data
Proxy and unblocking infrastructure with a scraping suite and an agent-facing MCP server. Built for volume collection, priced accordingly.
DataForSEO
$0.60/1kIndustrial SERP infrastructure built for SEO tooling rather than agents. The cheapest per query in the field, with the lowest-level API to match.
Parallel Search
$1/1kA suite of web search, extraction and research APIs on a proprietary index, from the former Twitter CEO. The closest competitor to unlob by thesis.
Serper
$1/1kThe cheapest way to get raw Google results into an agent. Fast, minimal, and entirely dependent on Google continuing to be scrapeable.
Brave Search API
$5/1kA genuinely independent index of 40B+ pages, sold as a conventional search API with an LLM-context option. Long the default independent choice.
Free developer tier removed February 2026
Google Custom Search JSON API
$5/1kGoogle's own programmable search endpoint. Real Google results, a hard 10,000/day ceiling, and terms written for site search rather than agents.
Sources
- Firecrawl pricingread 5 August 2026
- Firecrawl Series Aread 5 August 2026
Frequently asked questions
What is the best alternative to Firecrawl?
It depends what you are replacing. If you need an independent index at the lowest price, unlob is $0.40 per 1,000 queries. If you need systematic crawling of specific sites, Firecrawl may still be the right tool — we say so on our comparison page rather than pretending otherwise.
Does Firecrawl own its own web index?
No — Crawl and extraction, not an index. That is a legitimate architecture, but it means the product depends on an upstream provider it does not control.
How much does Firecrawl cost?
Credit-based per page crawled or scraped, not per search.
Try the cheapest own-index alternative
10,000 free requests a month, no card. Test coverage and latency against your own queries before you commit to anything.