Firecrawl alternatives: 7 tools compared for 2026, with pricing

$ Set up https://www.routergrowth.com/SKILL.md, then scrape [url] into markdown and show me which provider answered, how long it took and what it cost.

We make RouterGrowth, one of the tools on this list, so read it as a vendor's view. Firecrawl is also one of the providers RouterGrowth routes to, which gives us a reason to be fair to it. Every figure about another product was taken from that product's own page on 8 October 2026 and is linked at the end.

Firecrawl made one thing easy: give it a URL, get back clean markdown an LLM can read. It has since added search, crawling, structured extraction and browser sessions, and it is open source. People look for a Firecrawl alternative for a few specific reasons. They want to self-host without running Firecrawl's stack. They only need search, or only need one page read now and then. They hit a site Firecrawl could not fetch. Or they need structured data from a platform, such as Instagram or Google Maps, where a general page scraper is the wrong tool.

What does Firecrawl cost in 2026?

Firecrawl sells monthly credits. One credit is one page on a basic scrape, crawl or map, and a search costs two credits per ten results.

Structured formats such as JSON add four credits per page. A scrape that returns no result is not charged; a page that answers with an error status such as 403 or 404 is returned and costs one credit. Paid plans can top up beyond the monthly allowance.

At volume that is hard to beat: on Standard, a page costs a fraction of a tenth of a cent. If you scrape tens of thousands of pages a month and Firecrawl fetches the sites you need, stay. The alternatives below win on other axes.

Which Firecrawl alternative fits which job?

What are the seven alternatives, one by one?

1. RouterGrowth: more than one provider behind the call

RouterGrowth does not run its own scraping engine. web.scrape routes one call across Firecrawl and Apify: it tries the first provider, falls through to the next when a page fails or comes back empty, and charges only the attempt that delivered. web.search does the same for search. For an agent, that turns a failed fetch into a second attempt instead of a broken step. The run record shows which provider answered and how long it took, as described in the AI web scraping guide.

The same key covers what a page scraper does not: live Google results, social posts and comments, Google Maps places and reviews, contact enrichment and sending.

• Choose it when an agent reads a few hundred or a few thousand pages a month, reliability matters more than unit price, or you want search, scraping and the rest of a GTM stack on one balance.
• Skip it when you scrape at volume. Per page, Firecrawl's own Standard plan is far cheaper than any router on top of it, and RouterGrowth reads one page per call rather than crawling a whole site.

2. Crawl4AI: open source, on your own machines

Crawl4AI describes itself as the open-source web crawler for LLMs and AI agents. You install it, run it on your own infrastructure and pay nothing for the software. A hosted version, Crawl4AI Cloud, launched recently with free credit to start.

• Choose it when you have engineers, want full control, and the data must not leave your environment.
• Skip it when you do not want to operate browsers, proxies and retries yourself. That is the work a hosted API sells.

3. Jina Reader: a URL prefix

Jina Reader converts a URL to LLM-friendly text by prefixing it with r.jina.ai. It works without an API key at a low rate limit; a free key raises the limit and comes with 10 million tokens, after which you pay by tokens in the output.

• Choose it when you need one page as text, right now, with nothing to install.
• Skip it when you need crawling, structured extraction or hard-to-fetch sites.

4. Tavily: search first

Tavily is a search API built for agents, with extract and crawl endpoints alongside. The free plan has 1,000 API credits a month, pay as you go is $0.008 a credit, and monthly plans start at 4,000 credits.

• Choose it when the agent's job starts with a question, not a URL.
• Skip it when you already know the pages and need them fetched at volume.

5. Apify: actors for specific platforms

Apify is a platform of ready-made scrapers, called Actors, for specific sites: social networks, maps, stores, job boards. The Free plan includes $5 of usage a month. Starter is $19 a month plus pay as you go, Scale $199 and Business $999, with compute billed per unit and proxies priced separately. The full breakdown is in Apify alternatives.

• Choose it when you need structured records from a platform, not the markdown of a page.
• Skip it when you want the simplest possible page-to-text call.

6. Spider: billed by bandwidth

Spider prices by resource instead of by page: $1 per GB of bandwidth plus a small compute charge, with failed requests costing nothing, and an unlimited plan at $350 a month.

• Choose it when you crawl very large numbers of light pages and want cost tied to bytes.
• Skip it when you want a predictable price per page for heavy, rendered sites.

7. ScrapingBee: the classic scraping API

ScrapingBee is a general scraping API with rotating and premium proxies and JavaScript rendering. Plans are $49 a month for Freelance, $99 for Startup, $249 for Business and $599 for Business+, after 1,000 free API credits.

• Choose it when you want raw HTML and control over proxies and rendering.
• Skip it when you want markdown for a model out of the box.

When should you stay on Firecrawl?

Stay when volume is real and steady, when its crawl and structured extraction are part of your pipeline, or when you self-host it already. Its price per page at the Standard tier and above is lower than almost anything on this list, and one vendor is simpler than two.

Add a second option when failures cost you more than pages do. An agent that reads twenty pages per task, at a 98% success rate per page, loses a page on about one task in three. The cheapest fix is a second provider behind the same call.

How do you read the web from an agent with failover?

1. Search. web.search returns structured results for a query. See the web search API guide.
2. Read. web.scrape returns one URL as markdown, from whichever provider delivers.
3. Check the SERP when ranking matters. seo.serp returns the live Google or Bing results as JSON.
4. Use the right tool for platforms. Social posts, comments and Google Maps data have their own calls, covered in the social media API guide.

Sources

Checked 8 October 2026: Firecrawl pricing, Crawl4AI on GitHub, Jina Reader, Tavily pricing, Apify pricing, Spider pricing, ScrapingBee pricing.

What does each call cost?#

Prices below are the starting price per successful call. /v1/inspect returns the exact figure before the run and reserves it against your balance; failures and unbilled no-matches release the hold in full.

One prepaid balance covers every row. Capabilities marked coming soon are listed but not yet executable.

FAQ#

Is there a free Firecrawl alternative?

Firecrawl has its own free plan with 1,000 credits a month. Crawl4AI is free and open source if you host it. Jina Reader is free for basic use, and Tavily includes 1,000 free credits a month.

Is there an open-source Firecrawl alternative?

Crawl4AI is the best-known one, built for LLM pipelines. Firecrawl itself is open source too, so self-hosting Firecrawl is also an option.

What is the difference between Firecrawl and Apify?

Firecrawl turns any page into clean text or structured output. Apify runs purpose-built scrapers for specific platforms and returns structured records. Many teams use both, which is the reason RouterGrowth routes page scraping across the two.

Firecrawl or Tavily for an AI agent?

Tavily when the agent starts from a question and needs sources; Firecrawl when it starts from URLs and needs the full page. Both now overlap, since Firecrawl has search and Tavily has extraction.

Is RouterGrowth cheaper than Firecrawl?

Not at volume. Per page, Firecrawl's monthly plans cost less. RouterGrowth costs less when use is light or uneven, because there is no plan and nothing to pay in a quiet month, and it adds failover across providers.

Which Firecrawl alternative has an MCP server?

RouterGrowth exposes search, scraping and the rest of its catalog through one MCP server. Firecrawl and several tools here also publish their own MCP servers; check each vendor for the current state.