Firecrawl vs ScraperAPI
Firecrawl
Best for turning sites into model input $16/ScraperAPI
A credit per standard page, and a published multiplier for every hard one $49/Firecrawl vs ScraperAPI comes down to what a typical page costs you. Firecrawl charges 1 credit for a page with JavaScript handled and returns Markdown, so a rendered page is $0.00083 on Standard; ScraperAPI charges 1 credit for a plain page and 10 to render it, so the same page is about $0.0015 on Startup. For plain HTML at volume ScraperAPI is cheaper, and for Google, Bing or LinkedIn it has published credit costs where Firecrawl has none. For model input from rendered company sites, Firecrawl is cheaper and shorter.
Where they actually differ
Every value comes from the same record that drives the Sourcing APIs listing, so this table cannot disagree with the cards. Accented tags are data one provider returns and the other does not.
| Compare | Firecrawl | ScraperAPI |
|---|---|---|
| What sets it apart | Any website, as clean Markdown an agent can read | One credit a page, until the page fights back |
| Entry price | $16/mo annual | $49/mo |
| Unit cost | $0.0032 per credit | $0.00049 per credit |
| Billing model | Subscription Credit packs Free tier | Subscription Pay as you go Free tier |
| Free tier | Free plan, 1,000 credits a month, no card. Keyless scrape and search too. | 1,000 free API credits a month at 5 concurrent connections, plus a 7-day trial with 5,000 credits and no card. |
| GTM motion covered | Source Signal | Source Signal |
| Data returned | FirmographicsTechnographicsIntent and newsWeb pages | FirmographicsTechnographicsIntent and newsWeb pages |
| MCP server | Yes Hosted, with a keyless tier | Yes Remote at mcp.scraperapi.com/mcp, or self-hosted |
| Interfaces | REST API MCP server Bulk or async n8n node | REST API MCP server Bulk or async Webhooks n8n node |
| Auth | Bearer token, and some endpoints work with no key at all | API key as the api_key query parameter |
| Rate limits | Per team, per endpoint: 10/min scrape on Free to 10,000 on Scale. Concurrency binds first. | Concurrent threads by plan: 5 on Free, 20 Hobby, 50 Startup, 100 Business, 200 Scaling, 300 Professional, 500 Advanced. Over the limit is a 429, turned away rather than queued, at no charge. |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II | None published |
| Best for | Best for turning sites into model input | A credit per standard page, and a published multiplier for every hard one |
Pick each one when
Firecrawl
- Pages go into a model, and Markdown saves a step.
- Most of your targets need JavaScript rendered.
- You want a free plan that renews every month and keyless endpoints to test with.
ScraperAPI
- You fetch plain HTML at volume and parse it yourself.
- Google, Bing or LinkedIn pages are in the mix, at published credit costs.
- Pay as you go past the allowance matters, which ScraperAPI's Scaling plan offers.
Neither of these indexes anything: they fetch pages. Take a hundred URLs you really need, the hardest ones included, run them through both free tiers, and count the pages that came back usable and what each one cost, retries and multipliers included. That ratio is the number you are actually buying.
What each one costs, tier by tier
Both publish a full rate card, so this comparison runs on numbers rather than on adjectives. Firecrawl lists 4 tiers and ScraperAPI lists 8. Every figure is read off the vendor's own pricing page, and the pages they came from are listed at the foot of this one.
| The short version | Firecrawl | ScraperAPI |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan with the API | Hobby, $16 | Hobby, $49 |
| Tiers published | 4 | 8 |
| Free tier | Free plan, 1,000 credits a month, no card. Keyless scrape and search too. | 1,000 free API credits a month at 5 concurrent connections, plus a 7-day trial with 5,000 credits and no card. |
| Unit cost at entry | $0.0032 per credit | $0.00049 per credit |
The cheapest paid plan is rarely the plan you end up on, because what moves you up a tier is usually volume rather than a feature. The two rate cards below are what you are choosing between.
Firecrawl
Firecrawl publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $16 to $333.
Free
- No cost, no card
- 1,000 pages or 500 searches
- 2 concurrent browsers
- Plus the keyless endpoints, which need no account
Hobby
- $19 a month paying month to month
- 2,500 searches or 5,000 pages scraped
- 5 concurrent requests
- $0.0032 a credit
- 1,000 extra credits per $5
Standard
- $99 a month paying month to month
- 50,000 searches or 100,000 pages scraped
- 25 concurrent requests
- $0.00083 a credit, four times better than Hobby
- 2,000 extra credits per $5
Growth
- 50 concurrent requests
- Scale is $599 a month for 1,000,000 credits
- Enterprise above that
ScraperAPI
ScraperAPI publishes 8 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $49 to $1,975, with a quoted tier above it.
Free
- 5 concurrent connections
- Plus a 7-day trial with 5,000 credits, no card
Hobby
- 100,000 API credits a month
- 20 concurrent threads, US and EU geotargeting only
- $0.00049 a credit, so $0.0049 a rendered page
Startup
- 1,000,000 API credits a month
- 50 concurrent threads, US and EU geotargeting only
Business
- 3,000,000 API credits a month
- 100 concurrent threads, global geotargeting
Scaling
- 5,000,000 API credits a month
- 200 concurrent threads, pay as you go past the allowance
Enterprise
- 22,000,000+ API credits, 500+ concurrent threads
- Ultra Premium keeps a minimum of $3 per 1,000 requests, $7 rendered
2 steps between the fifth and the last are not drawn here. The cost model below reads all 8.
What Firecrawl and ScraperAPI cost at your volume
Put your own volume in. The model picks the cheapest published plan that covers it on each side, which is the question a rate card cannot answer and the one that decides the bill.
Firecrawl
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
ScraperAPI
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
Plans are read from each vendor's own pricing page and the model picks the cheapest one that covers you, so these are list prices on the billing term each vendor publishes, annual where that is how it prices, before any discount you negotiate.
What a year costs at three volumes
The same plan-fit arithmetic as the model above, run out to a year, because an annual number is what a budget actually asks for.
Every column moves with volume, through a bigger plan or more seats.
| A year at | Firecrawl | ScraperAPI |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $0 Free | $0 Free |
| 10,000 a month | $996 Standard | $588 Hobby |
| 50,000 a month | $996 Standard | $588 Hobby |
These are list prices on the published plan that covers each volume, on the billing term each vendor publishes, so they are the number before you negotiate.
How this plays out once it is running
Both sell a monthly pool of credits and both say concurrency, not a request rate, is the ceiling. The difference is what a credit buys. Firecrawl prices by page and output: 1 credit for a basic scrape, crawl or map with rendering included, 4 more for the JSON, Question or Highlight formats, and 2 per 10 search results. ScraperAPI prices by difficulty: 1 for a standard page, 10 to render or use premium proxies, 25 for both or for Google and Bing, 30 for LinkedIn, and 10 more behind Cloudflare, Datadome or PerimeterX.
So the answer depends on the mix. On Startup, ScraperAPI's plain page is $0.000149, five times cheaper than Firecrawl's $0.00083 on Standard; its rendered page is about $0.0015, nearly twice Firecrawl's. On both, concurrency binds before any per-minute limit: Firecrawl runs 5 browsers on Hobby and 25 on Standard, ScraperAPI 20 threads on Hobby and 50 on Startup.
What each one is genuinely good at
These are the things that keep somebody paying after the first month, which is a different question from what the marketing page leads with.
Firecrawl
Rendering is included in the page price
A basic scrape is 1 credit whether or not the page needed JavaScript, at $0.0032 on Hobby and $0.00083 on Standard. On ScraperAPI rendering multiplies the credit cost by ten, so a crawl of modern company websites costs the same on Firecrawl as a crawl of static ones.
Markdown out, not HTML
Firecrawl returns the page with the navigation, cookie banner and scripts already removed. A pipeline that feeds a model drops the cleanup step entirely, which is engineering time rather than credits but usually the larger cost.
A free plan that renews, plus keyless endpoints
1,000 credits every month with no card, and some endpoints answer with no key at all. ScraperAPI also gives 1,000 credits a month, at 5 concurrent connections, but a rendered page there spends 10 of them.
ScraperAPI
The cheapest plain page in this pairing
A standard page is 1 credit, and a credit is $0.00049 on Hobby, $0.000149 on Startup and about $0.0001 on Business. For static HTML at volume that undercuts Firecrawl's cheapest published rate.
Published credit costs for search engines and LinkedIn
Google and Bing pages are 25 credits and LinkedIn 30, written down on the pricing page. Firecrawl's search is its own endpoint at 2 credits per 10 results; it does not price Google's results page as a target.
An async batch API and an MCP server
Large jobs can go through the asynchronous API and come back by callback, and a remote MCP server runs at mcp.scraperapi.com/mcp. A 429 for exceeding concurrency is turned away at no charge.
Where each one falls down
Every provider on this site has a case it handles badly, and the people who find out are the ones who bought it for that case. These are the ones worth knowing before you sign rather than after.
Firecrawl
Concurrency is small on the cheap plans
Two browsers on Free, 5 on Hobby, 25 on Standard. Firecrawl says plainly that concurrent browsers are the real bottleneck, so a 10,000-page job on Hobby takes about five and a half hours at 10 seconds a page, whatever the credit balance.
Error pages still cost a credit
A scrape that returns nothing is free, but a page that answers 403 or 404 is returned and charged 1 credit. A crawl against a site that blocks you is not free just because it failed.
ScraperAPI
The multipliers make the bill hard to predict
The same plan buys 100,000 plain pages, 10,000 rendered ones or about 4,000 Google results pages. A target that adds Cloudflare protection adds 10 credits per request, so cost depends on what the sites do, not on what you planned.
Credits do not roll over, and HTML is all you get
Unused credits expire with the month, and the output is the page's HTML. Turning it into clean text or fields is your code.
No compliance claims in what this directory read
ScraperAPI's pages captured here name no SOC 2, ISO 27001 or DPA. Firecrawl lists SOC 2 Type II and a GDPR DPA, which matters when procurement asks.
Using Firecrawl and ScraperAPI together
Teams comparing these two often end up running both, and the arrangement below is the one they settle on.
The split that works is by page type. Send rendered company websites that will be read by a model to Firecrawl, where rendering costs nothing extra and the output is already Markdown. Send plain HTML and search-engine pages to ScraperAPI, where a plain page is a fraction of a cent and Google has a published price.
Route on the cost header or the target list rather than by trying both on every URL. A rendered page sent to ScraperAPI by mistake costs ten times a plain one; a plain page sent to Firecrawl costs five times what ScraperAPI charges for it on Startup. The routing rule is worth more than either plan's discount.
If the volume is small, do not run both. Two subscriptions, two concurrency limits and two credit pools that do not roll over cost more than the difference in per-page price, and Firecrawl's free 1,000 credits or ScraperAPI's are enough to decide which shape your pages are.
Firecrawl or ScraperAPI, for you
Two questions, answered from the same records as the rest of this page. Nothing is sent anywhere and there is no result to email yourself.
Each answer leans one way. The recommendation appears here once you have picked at least two.
A tool like this can only weigh what is on the page. It does not know your workload, and the one test that does is the bake-off on this page: your own rows, queries or records, run on the cheapest entry each side offers.
Where an answer leans on a certification or an integration, it means that vendor publishes it on the pages this directory read, which is not the same as the other one lacking it. The sources are listed at the foot of the page.
Where the data comes from, and what you may do with it
The question that arrives late and expensively is who is allowed to hold the data. These are the fields each one returns, the coverage it claims and the compliance it publishes.
| Provider | Fields returned | Coverage | Compliance | Redistribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Firecrawl | Firmographics, Technographics, Intent and news, Web pages | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II | Not stated |
| ScraperAPI | Firmographics, Technographics, Intent and news, Web pages | Global | None published | Not stated |
None of these states a redistribution position on its pricing or docs pages. Internally that never matters. Put the rows in something your customers can see and it becomes the question your legal team asks first.
Two practical notes that apply to every provider on this page. A compliance badge describes the vendor rather than your use of it, so a GDPR DPA does not give you a lawful basis for the outreach you send. And every one of these vendors runs its own opt-out, which means a person who asks you to delete their record has to be removed from your copy as well as from theirs.
Moving between Firecrawl and ScraperAPI
Most readers of this page are already on one of these two, and the order below catches the expensive mistakes while they are still free.
Measure the thing you are about to lose
Replay 100 of the queries, URLs or lookups you really send through Firecrawl and record the usable results, the failures and what each one cost. Without that baseline every provider looks cheaper per call than the one you are paying for today.
Check which fields change
ScraperAPI returns every field Firecrawl does, so nothing downstream has to change shape. Confirm the values rather than the keys: the same field can be named, typed or formatted differently on the other side.
Rewrite the auth and the limits, in that order
Firecrawl authenticates with a bearer token, and some endpoints work with no key at all. ScraperAPI uses an API key as the api_key query parameter.
The limits are the part that bites later. Firecrawl's limits: per team, per endpoint: 10/min scrape on Free to 10,000 on Scale. Concurrency binds first.
ScraperAPI's limits: concurrent threads by plan: 5 on Free, 20 Hobby, 50 Startup, 100 Business, 200 Scaling, 300 Professional, 500 Advanced. Over the limit is a 429, turned away rather than queued, at no charge. A loop tuned to the first will either crawl or get throttled on the second.
Run both for one billing cycle
Keep the old key live and route a slice of real traffic to the new one. A month is the shortest honest test, because credit expiry, rollover and the overage rate only show up at renewal and those are where the surprises live.
Cancel on the renewal date
Credits on most of these plans do not survive a downgrade. Check what happens to the balance you have already paid for, and time the switch so you are not buying the same records twice.
The step people skip is the first one, and it is the only one that cannot be done after the fact. Once the old key is off you have nothing to compare the new one against, so a provider that is quietly worse on your workload looks like a provider that is fine.
What practitioners say about Firecrawl
The one part of this page that is not a vendor claim. Quotes are transcribed as written, linked to the thread, and nothing here is the only source for a figure in the tables above.
A credit is a page until you turn on the features you came for
The credit inflation thing is crazy. From "1 credit = 1 page" to burning 5-9 per page the second you enable anything actually useful is not an accident, that's a deliberate design choice if you ask me. [...] Product is good, no question. Just know what you're getting into before you start building on it
r/ProxyEngineering · May 2026 · 3 points
The mechanism is confirmed by Firecrawl's own documentation, which states that operations cost different amounts of credits and names JSON extraction and Interact as the dear ones, so heavier usage reaches the credit cap sooner. That is the thing to model before sizing a plan: the rate card above quotes 1 credit a page, and the page you actually want is usually not a basic scrape.
The 5 to 9 multiplier is this commenter's own and nothing here verifies it, and the rest of their comment is about GitHub stars and the self-hosting license rather than about the API. Take the shape of the warning, read the operations table against your own pipeline, and treat the baseline rate as the cheap case rather than the typical one.
14 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page.
The wider field for both
Sometimes the answer is neither, and the reason you are comparing these two points somewhere else entirely: Firecrawl alternatives and ScraperAPI alternatives both start from the reason people leave.
Firecrawl alternatives
3The simplest way to turn a site into model input. Concurrency, not credits, is what people run into.
See the alternatives →ScraperAPI alternatives
4ScraperAPI is 1 credit a page until the page fights back. Then it is 10, 25, 30 or as many as 75, and that multiplier is the bill.
See the alternatives →Everything in Source
28The full category these two sit in, filtered by data returned, billing model and entry price.
Browse the category →Related comparisons
The 52 providers behind every pairing here are in the main listing.
Pairings that share a side with this one: Firecrawl vs ScrapingBee, Apify vs ScraperAPI and Apify vs Firecrawl. Every comparison in the directory is on the compare hub.
Apify vs Firecrawl
A marketplace that runs other people's crawlers against one endpoint built to turn a page into Markdown. Raw HTTP is cheaper on Apify; a rendered page is close.
Compare them →Apify vs ScraperAPI
A published multiplier for every hard page against a platform where the hard page is priced by the run.
Compare them →Firecrawl vs ScrapingBee
Both render the page for you. One returns Markdown at a credit a page; the other returns HTML at five credits a page, and its credits cost far less.
Compare them →Testing providers one at a time? Run the waterfall in Clay.
Clay runs a waterfall across 150+ data providers from one table, without a separate contract with each. A lookup that finds nothing costs no data credit, and the free plan includes 500 actions a month.
Frontal is a Clay Elite Studio Partner.
Firecrawl and ScraperAPI, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is Firecrawl or ScraperAPI cheaper?
Both have a free tier that carries the API, so neither costs anything to start; what each one includes is in the next answer. Per credit, ScraperAPI is cheaper: $0.00049 per credit, against Firecrawl's $0.0032 per credit.
Can I try Firecrawl and ScraperAPI for free?
Firecrawl: Free plan, 1,000 credits a month, no card. Keyless scrape and search too. ScraperAPI: 1,000 free API credits a month at 5 concurrent connections, plus a 7-day trial with 5,000 credits and no card.
What are the rate limits on Firecrawl and ScraperAPI?
Firecrawl: Per team, per endpoint: 10/min scrape on Free to 10,000 on Scale. Concurrency binds first. ScraperAPI: Concurrent threads by plan: 5 on Free, 20 Hobby, 50 Startup, 100 Business, 200 Scaling, 300 Professional, 500 Advanced. Over the limit is a 429, turned away rather than queued, at no charge.
Do Firecrawl and ScraperAPI both have MCP servers?
Both do. Firecrawl: Hosted, with a keyless tier. ScraperAPI: Remote at mcp.scraperapi.com/mcp, or self-hosted.
Which is better, Firecrawl or ScraperAPI?
Firecrawl vs ScraperAPI comes down to what a typical page costs you.
What are the downsides of Firecrawl and ScraperAPI?
Firecrawl: concurrency is small on the cheap plans; error pages still cost a credit. ScraperAPI: the multipliers make the bill hard to predict; credits do not roll over, and HTML is all you get; no compliance claims in what this directory read. The Limits section above has each one in full.
Can you use Firecrawl and ScraperAPI together?
The split that works is by page type. Send rendered company websites that will be read by a model to Firecrawl, where rendering costs nothing extra and the output is already Markdown.
Can I migrate from Firecrawl to ScraperAPI without losing data?
The fields survive: ScraperAPI returns everything Firecrawl does. What changes is the auth and the limits. Either way, replay a hundred real URLs through both and count the usable pages before you switch.