unlob vs Firecrawl
Firecrawl turns URLs into clean markdown. unlob finds the URLs. They are complements more often than alternatives.
Verified 5 August 2026·Figures from vendors' own pages
Price
| Provider | Own index? | $ / 1,000 queries | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
$29 per month for 50,000 requests. | Yes Our own crawl and index | $0.58 | This page |
$199 per month for 500,000 requests. | Yes Our own crawl and index | $0.40 | This page |
When Firecrawl is the better choice
A comparison page that cannot name a scenario where the competitor wins is an advertisement. Here are the real ones.
Choose Firecrawl
- Crawling an entire site systematically, which is not something a search index does.
- Extracting from pages behind heavy JavaScript or unusual structures.
- Structured extraction against a schema you define.
- Working with URLs you already have — a customer’s own documentation, for instance.
Choose unlob
- You need to find the pages, not just read them.
- Reading cleaned passages directly from the index is cheaper than fetching and extracting each one.
- Trust signals — corroboration, authority, centrality — that an extraction tool has no way to provide.
The substantive differences
| Firecrawl | unlob | |
|---|---|---|
| Input | A URL or a domain. | A question. |
| Index | None — it fetches live. | A standing index, with live delta crawling behind it. |
| Together | Ideal when you have URLs and need their full content extracted to a schema. | Ideal for finding which URLs matter. Many stacks use both. |
Sources
Every figure on this page was read from the vendor's own pricing page or funding announcement on the date shown.
- Firecrawl: Firecrawl pricingread 5 August 2026
- Firecrawl: Firecrawl Series Aread 5 August 2026
Frequently asked questions
Do I need both Firecrawl and unlob?
Often not. /doc/:id returns cleaned text for anything in the index, which covers most retrieval workloads. Add Firecrawl when you need to crawl a specific site exhaustively, or extract structured fields from pages you already have.
Check the claims yourself
The free tier is 10,000 requests a month with no card. That is enough to test coverage, latency and result quality against your own queries — which is a better comparison than this page.