6 Best Firecrawl Alternatives in 2026 for LLM-Ready Web Data

The best Firecrawl alternatives in 2026 are Scrape.ly, Crawl4AI, Apify, Bright Data, ScrapingBee and Browserless. Of these Firecrawl alternatives, Scrape.ly is the one we recommend: its Website Content Crawler turns whole sites into clean Markdown for $0.50 per 1,000 pages, the free plan's $5 monthly credit covers about 8,000 of them, and your AI agents can call it, plus 567 other Actors, over a hosted MCP server.

Below: what Firecrawl charges and where teams hit its limits, how six alternatives compare, a real crawl we ran on 22 October 2026 with its exact cost, and how to move a Firecrawl pipeline over. Prices were checked on each vendor's own page that day.

Why teams look for Firecrawl alternatives

Firecrawl is a well-made API that turns websites into LLM-ready Markdown and JSON. The reasons teams look elsewhere come from how it bills, per its pricing page and billing docs:

• Credits come in plan-sized blocks. Free has 1,000 credits a month, Hobby $19 a month for 5,000, Standard $99 for 100,000, Growth $399 for 500,000 and Scale $749 for 1,000,000 (less if billed yearly). Crawling 10,000 pages means Standard, or Hobby plus top-ups.
• Anything beyond a plain page costs more than 1 credit. JSON extraction adds 4 credits per page, so a structured page costs 5. PDF parsing adds 1 credit per PDF page, PII redaction 4.
• Error pages are billed. A page that comes back 403 or 404 is still returned as a document and costs 1 credit.
• Top-ups are dearest on the small plans. Pay-as-you-go adds credits in $5 increments: 1,000 credits on Hobby, 2,000 on Standard, 2,500 on Growth, 5,000 on Scale. On Hobby that's $5 per 1,000 pages.
• It's one API with fixed endpoints. Scrape, crawl, map, search, interact and agent. When a site needs its own scraper (Google Maps places, Amazon products, job listings), you need a second tool.

If you want a lower price per page, more pages on the free tier, or site-specific scrapers next to your crawler, that's where the alternatives come in.

What to look for in a Firecrawl alternative

• A low price per page, counted per page crawled, with a free tier big enough to test real sites.
• Clean Markdown and text with source metadata, so chunks in your vector store can cite their page.
• Crawl controls that stop a runaway job: page limits, depth, include and exclude patterns.
• More than one tool. Search-and-read, llms.txt generation, article extraction and site-specific scrapers for when Markdown isn't enough.
• Agent access over MCP, signed in with OAuth, with a spending limit.
• A dollar cap per job, so one bad crawl can't drain your balance.

Firecrawl alternatives compared

Firecrawl's per-1,000 range divides each monthly plan price by its credits: $19 for 5,000 is $3.80 per 1,000 and $749 for 1,000,000 is $0.75.

1. Scrape.ly: per-page crawling, agents and 568 Actors

Scrape.ly runs scrapers called Actors in the cloud. For the jobs people use Firecrawl for, four Actors in the Store cover the ground:

The Website Content Crawler follows same-site links from your start URLs, removes navigation and boilerplate with Mozilla Readability (or Extractus or Defuddle), and saves text and markdown with the page's title, description, canonical URL, language and Open Graph data. Server-rendered pages are fetched over HTTP with a Chrome TLS fingerprint. Pages whose content only appears after JavaScript are opened in Chrome automatically. maxCrawlPages, maxResults, maxCrawlDepth and include and exclude globs stop a runaway crawl, and a URL that fails goes to a separate errors dataset while the rest of the crawl continues.

On top of that:

• Pay per page from a prepaid balance. The free plan gives you $5 of usage each month without a card, about 8,000 pages at our run's rate. Starter at $19 a month includes $19 of usage, about 30,000 pages, and that credit works for any Actor, proxy traffic or browser time, not only crawling.
• A dollar cap per run. Set maxTotalChargeUsd and the run stops when it reaches that amount, compute, proxy and page fees included.
• Built for agents. The hosted MCP server at https://api.scrape.ly/mcp signs in with OAuth or a token, and agents search the Store, read an Actor's input schema, run it and page through the results. Give them a scoped API key with a daily charge limit. More on the agents page.
• Proxies and a hosted browser. Residential traffic costs $4 per GB on Free down to $2 on Business, and the Scrapely browser handles sites that block headless Chrome, with Cloudflare Turnstile solving.
• Custom code when you need it. Write your own Actor with the JavaScript or Python SDK, or bring an Apify Actor: most run unchanged.

Best for: RAG and agent teams that want per-page pricing, crawl controls and an MCP path in one account. The full Scrape.ly vs Firecrawl comparison covers every feature.

A real crawl: 10 pages of the Python tutorial

We ran the Website Content Crawler on 22 October 2026 from the Store preset Python tutorial as markdown, raising its page limit from 5 to 10. The input that matters:

{
  "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/" }],
  "maxCrawlPages": 10,
  "maxResults": 10,
  "maxCrawlDepth": 20,
  "htmlTransformer": "readableText",
  "saveMarkdown": true
}

It saved 10 pages in 7.2 seconds and was charged $0.0058. The first five:

All ten together came to about 175,000 characters of Markdown. Each record also carried the canonical URL, description, language, Open Graph tags and response headers, so every chunk you index can link back to its source. The log, without the platform's start-up lines:

2026-10-22T18:25:04.413Z [Scrapely] Container started (setup 1.0 s)
2026-10-22T18:25:05.893Z [scrapely.actor] INFO  Fetching with HTTP. Chrome is used when a page needs JavaScript or a browser input is set.
2026-10-22T18:25:10.132Z [scrapely.actor] INFO  Saved 10 content items. Timing: python 1.1s, imports 0.2s, start 0.2s, crawl 4.2s, 10 requests, median 0.5s, max 1.9s, hedged 0 (won 0)
2026-10-22T18:25:10.680Z [Scrapely] Container state: status=exited exitCode=0 oomKilled=false

The $0.0058 breaks down into $0.005 for 10 crawled pages at $0.0005 each, $0.00048 of compute, $0.00029 of residential proxy traffic and $0.00005 of dataset writes. That's $0.58 per 1,000 pages all-in. Our account runs at Business-plan rates; at Free-plan rates the same run comes to about $0.0062, or $0.62 per 1,000 pages. Both are below the per-page price of every Firecrawl plan billed monthly, even Scale at $749 for a million credits.

2. Crawl4AI

Crawl4AI is an open-source Python crawler that turns websites into LLM-ready Markdown, licensed under Apache 2.0. You install it with pip install -U crawl4ai, run crawl4ai-setup once to install the browser, and crawl from your own code for free. There is also a hosted version with /scrape, /extract, /search, /serp and /answer endpoints and MCP: 1,000 credits a month free at 10 requests a minute, paid from $10 a month.

Best for: developers who want to run the crawler on their own servers and handle browsers, proxies and scaling themselves. If you'd rather not run that infrastructure, Scrape.ly runs the crawl for you at $0.50 per 1,000 pages.

3. Apify

Apify is the original Actor platform, with the Apify Store and a hosted MCP server at mcp.apify.com that loads apify/rag-web-browser and apify/web-fetch by default. Plans include their price as prepaid usage: Free $5, Starter $19, Scale $199, Business $999. Compute costs $0.13 to $0.20 per compute unit and residential proxy $7 to $8 per GB.

Best for: teams already invested in the Apify Store. Scrape.ly uses the same Actor model, runs most Apify Actors unchanged and charges $2 to $4 per GB for residential proxy. See Apify alternatives for the migration.

4. Bright Data

Bright Data's MCP server gives agents 32 tools: search engines, scrape_as_markdown, batch scraping, 1,200+ pre-built scrapers and 14 browser automation tools. Every account gets 5,000 free requests a month. After that, search, scrape and extract cost $1.50 per 1,000 results and browser navigation $8 per GB, pay as you go. The hosted endpoint takes your API token as a URL parameter.

Best for: agents that need a large catalogue of pre-built scrapers behind one proxy network. For crawling a whole site to Markdown, Scrape.ly's $0.50 per 1,000 pages is a third of Bright Data's $1.50 per 1,000 results.

5. ScrapingBee

ScrapingBee is a scraping API that returns HTML, Markdown, plain text or AI-extracted JSON. It bills in credits per request: 1 without JavaScript, 5 with JavaScript rendering (the default), 10 or 25 with premium proxies and 75 with stealth proxy, plus 5 for AI extraction. New accounts get 1,000 free credits. Its remote MCP server takes the API key in the URL and has no crawl tool.

Best for: fetching single known URLs with JavaScript rendering. For multi-page crawls with depth and URL pattern controls, use a crawler.

6. Browserless

Browserless hosts Chrome, Firefox and WebKit browsers that your own automation code connects to. It bills in units, each up to 30 seconds of browser time, with residential proxy traffic at 6 units per MB. The free plan has 1,000 units a month and paid plans start at $35 a month for 20,000 units.

Best for: teams that write their own Puppeteer or Playwright scripts and only need browsers to run them in. It doesn't convert pages to Markdown for you.

How to switch from Firecrawl to Scrape.ly

1. Map your Firecrawl options to crawler inputs. Firecrawl's crawl takes limit, includePaths, excludePaths and maxDiscoveryDepth. The Website Content Crawler takes maxCrawlPages, includeUrlGlobs, excludeUrlGlobs and maxCrawlDepth, and saveMarkdown (on by default) gives you the Markdown.

2. Create a token. Sign up for free, then create an API token under Settings → API & Integrations and export it as SCRAPELY_TOKEN.

3. Call the crawler. Our run took 7 seconds, so the synchronous endpoint works for small crawls. It returns the pages as a JSON array:

curl -X POST "https://api.scrape.ly/v2/actors/querystone~website-content-crawler/run-sync-get-dataset-items" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SCRAPELY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"startUrls": [{"url": "https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/"}], "maxCrawlPages": 10, "maxResults": 10, "proxyConfiguration": {"useScrapelyProxy": true}}'

For bigger crawls, use the Python client, which waits as long as the run takes:

import os
from scrapely_client import ScrapelyClient

client = ScrapelyClient(os.environ["SCRAPELY_TOKEN"], api_url="https://api.scrape.ly")

run = client.actor("querystone/website-content-crawler").call(
    run_input={
        "startUrls": [{"url": "https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/"}],
        "maxCrawlPages": 500,
        "proxyConfiguration": {"useScrapelyProxy": True},
    }
)
print(run.status)  # SUCCEEDED, FAILED, ABORTED or TIMED-OUT
for page in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(page["url"], len(page.get("markdown") or ""))

4. Replace search and single-page calls. Use the RAG Web Browser with a search term (or a single URL) where you called Firecrawl's search or scrape.

5. Give your agent the same tools. Add https://api.scrape.ly/mcp to Claude Code (claude mcp add --transport http scrapely https://api.scrape.ly/mcp, then /mcp to sign in) or Cursor, and ask: "Use scrapely to crawl docs.python.org/3/tutorial with querystone/website-content-crawler, 10 pages, and summarize each page." Setup for every client is on the MCP page, and Best MCP servers for web scraping compares the options.

FAQ

What is the best Firecrawl alternative?

Scrape.ly. Its Website Content Crawler turns sites into Markdown for $0.50 per 1,000 pages, and its hosted MCP server gives agents that crawler plus 567 other Actors. Our 10-page test crawl cost $0.0058.

Is there a free Firecrawl alternative?

Crawl4AI is free and open source if you run it yourself. For a hosted option, Scrape.ly's free plan gives you $5 of usage every month without a card, which covered about 8,000 pages at our run's rate, against Firecrawl Free's 1,000 credits.

Crawl4AI vs Firecrawl: which is better?

Crawl4AI is a free library you host and scale yourself; Firecrawl is a hosted API billed in monthly credits. If you want hosted crawling without running servers and at a lower price per page than Firecrawl, Scrape.ly sits in between: it runs the crawl for you and charges $0.50 per 1,000 pages.

Firecrawl vs Apify: what's the difference?

Firecrawl exposes fixed endpoints (scrape, crawl, map, search, interact, agent) billed in credits. Apify runs full scrapers called Actors and bills compute, proxy and event fees. Scrape.ly runs Apify-compatible Actors and has crawler Actors priced per page, so it covers both styles.

How much does Firecrawl cost compared with Scrape.ly?

Firecrawl charges 1 credit per crawled page, which works out to $0.75 to $3.80 per 1,000 pages on its monthly plans if you use every credit. Scrape.ly's Website Content Crawler charges $0.50 per 1,000 pages plus usage. The full breakdown is in Firecrawl pricing.

Can AI agents use these tools?

Yes. Scrape.ly, Firecrawl, Apify, Bright Data, Crawl4AI's hosted API and ScrapingBee all offer MCP access. Scrape.ly's hosted server signs in with OAuth and lets the agent run any of the 568 Actors in the Store.