Firecrawl vs ScrapingBee
Firecrawl
Best for turning sites into model input $16/ScrapingBee
Best for cheap rendered pages at volume $19/Firecrawl vs ScrapingBee is closer than the credit counts suggest. A rendered page is 1 Firecrawl credit and 5 ScrapingBee credits, yet it costs about $0.0005 on ScrapingBee's $99 Startup plan against $0.00083 on Firecrawl's Standard at $83 billed annually, and Startup runs 100 concurrent requests to Standard's 25 browsers. Firecrawl wins when the output goes into a model, because the page arrives as Markdown, and when you need crawl, map or search from the same key. ScrapingBee wins on raw fetching at volume.
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 | ScrapingBee |
|---|---|---|
| What sets it apart | Any website, as clean Markdown an agent can read | One endpoint, credits priced by how hard the page fights |
| Entry price | $16/mo annual | $19/mo |
| Unit cost | $0.0032 per credit | $0.00025 per credit |
| Billing model | Subscription Credit packs Free tier | Subscription Credit packs Free tier |
| Free tier | Free plan, 1,000 credits a month, no card. Keyless scrape and search too. | 1,000 free API credits to try it, no card. |
| GTM motion covered | Source Signal | Source Signal |
| Data returned | FirmographicsTechnographicsIntent and newsWeb pages | FirmographicsIntent and newsWeb pagesSearch results |
| MCP server | Yes Hosted, with a keyless tier | Yes Hosted, with the key in the URL |
| Interfaces | REST API MCP server Bulk or async n8n node | REST API MCP server n8n node |
| Auth | Bearer token, and some endpoints work with no key at all | Bearer API key; the api_key query parameter is deprecated except for MCP |
| Rate limits | Per team, per endpoint: 10/min scrape on Free to 10,000 on Scale. Concurrency binds first. | Concurrency per plan, 25 to 900 requests at once. No per-minute cap published for scraping. |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II | GDPR DPA |
| Best for | Best for turning sites into model input | Best for cheap rendered pages at volume |
Pick each one when
Firecrawl
- The pages go into a model and Markdown saves a cleanup step.
- You want crawl, map and search on the same credit balance.
- A free plan that renews every month, plus keyless endpoints, suits how you test.
ScrapingBee
- You fetch a lot of pages and the price per page decides it.
- Concurrency matters: 100 requests in flight on Startup.
- You want to switch rendering off and pay 1 credit for a static page.
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 ScrapingBee lists 4. 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 | ScrapingBee |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan with the API | Hobby, $16 | Hobby, $19 |
| Tiers published | 4 | 4 |
| Free tier | Free plan, 1,000 credits a month, no card. Keyless scrape and search too. | 1,000 free API credits to try it, no card. |
| Unit cost at entry | $0.0032 per credit | $0.00025 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
ScrapingBee
ScrapingBee publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $19 to $249.
Hobby
- 25 concurrent requests
- 15,000 default rendered calls
- $0.000253 a credit
Freelance
- 50 concurrent requests
- 50,000 default rendered calls
- $0.000196 a credit
Startup
- 100 concurrent requests
- 200,000 default rendered calls
- $0.000099 a credit
Business
- 200 concurrent requests
- 600,000 default rendered calls
- Business + is $599 for 8,000,000
What Firecrawl and ScrapingBee 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.
ScrapingBee
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.
ScrapingBee publishes only an entry price, so that column is the floor for a year, not a forecast.
| A year at | Firecrawl | ScrapingBee |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $0 Free | $228 Hobby |
| 10,000 a month | $996 Standard | $228 Hobby |
| 50,000 a month | $996 Standard | $228 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 are fetchers that deal with JavaScript and blocking for you, and both say concurrency is the real ceiling. They price the page differently. Firecrawl charges 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. ScrapingBee charges 5 credits for its default call, because JavaScript rendering is on by default, 1 with rendering off, 10 or 25 for premium proxies and 75 for stealth, plus 5 for AI extraction.
Per page on comparable plans, ScrapingBee is cheaper: about $0.0005 for a default rendered page on Startup at $99 for 1,000,000 credits, against $0.00083 on Firecrawl Standard at $83 billed annually for 100,000. On the entry plans it is about $0.0013 on ScrapingBee Hobby at $19, against $0.0032 on Firecrawl Hobby at $16 billed annually. What Firecrawl adds for the difference is Markdown and the rest of its toolkit.
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
Markdown out, with rendering included
One credit returns the page as clean Markdown with the navigation, cookie banner and scripts removed. ScrapingBee returns HTML, and its AI extraction costs 5 more credits per call. For a pipeline that feeds a model, Firecrawl's page is closer to finished.
Crawl, map and search on one balance
Scrape, crawl, map and monitor are 1 credit a page and search is 2 credits per 10 results, all drawn from the same credits. ScrapingBee is one fetch endpoint plus a Google search API; discovering which pages to read is a separate job.
A free plan that renews
1,000 credits every month with no card, and some endpoints answer without a key at all. ScrapingBee's 1,000 free credits are a one-off trial, and at 5 credits a default call that is 200 rendered pages.
ScrapingBee
The cheaper rendered page at every comparable plan
About $0.0005 a default rendered page on Startup and $0.0013 on Hobby, against Firecrawl's $0.00083 on Standard and $0.0032 on Hobby. Switch rendering off and a static page is 1 credit, about $0.0001 on Startup.
More concurrency at adjacent price points
ScrapingBee Startup is $99 a month for 100 concurrent requests; Firecrawl Standard, the nearest plan, is $83 billed annually ($99 month to month) for 25 concurrent browsers. Lower down it is 25 on ScrapingBee Hobby at $19 against 5 on Firecrawl Hobby at $16 billed annually ($19 month to month), and Firecrawl says concurrency is the bottleneck. A 429 from ScrapingBee is not billed.
A cost header on every response
Each response reports what the call cost, so you can measure your real targets on the free credits and know which tier your sites need before choosing a plan.
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
Small concurrency on the cheap plans
Two browsers on Free, 5 on Hobby, 25 on Standard. A 10,000-page job on Hobby takes about five and a half hours at 10 seconds a page, so the plan is chosen on browsers rather than credits.
Error pages are charged
A scrape that returns no result is free, but a 403 or 404 page is returned and costs 1 credit. Crawling a site that blocks you still spends the balance.
ScrapingBee
Stealth is expensive, and the default is not the cheapest call
A hard target needs stealth at 75 credits, about $0.0074 on Startup, nine times Firecrawl's Standard page. And because rendering is on by default, forgetting to switch it off on static pages costs five times what the fetch needed.
Subscription only, and HTML only
There is no pay as you go option, and the output is the page's HTML, so cleaning it for a model is your code or 5 more credits of AI extraction.
The MCP server takes the key in the URL
ScrapingBee's hosted MCP server carries the API key in the URL, a pattern its own API docs deprecate. Treat that URL as a secret wherever it is configured.
Using Firecrawl and ScrapingBee together
Teams comparing these two often end up running both, and the arrangement below is the one they settle on.
Running both makes sense when a pipeline has two kinds of page. Send rendered company websites that a model will read to Firecrawl, where rendering is included and the output is already Markdown. Send bulk fetching of static or semi-static pages to ScrapingBee with rendering switched off, where a page costs about a hundredth of a cent on Startup.
Decide the route by target, not by retrying failures on the other service. A page that needs stealth on ScrapingBee costs nine times Firecrawl's Standard page, and a page Firecrawl cannot reach because the site fights scrapers will usually need that stealth tier anyway.
At small volumes one is enough. Firecrawl's free 1,000 credits a month and ScrapingBee's 1,000 trial credits are each enough to read the cost of your own targets, and two subscriptions with separate concurrency limits are rarely worth it below a few hundred thousand pages a month.
Firecrawl or ScrapingBee, for you
Three 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 |
| ScrapingBee | Firmographics, Intent and news, Web pages, Search results | Global | GDPR DPA | 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 ScrapingBee
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
ScrapingBee does not return technographics, which Firecrawl does. If anything downstream reads that field, the switch changes your pipeline as well as your vendor.
Rewrite the auth and the limits, in that order
Firecrawl authenticates with a bearer token, and some endpoints work with no key at all. ScrapingBee uses a bearer API key; the api_key query parameter is deprecated except for MCP.
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.
ScrapingBee's limits: concurrency per plan, 25 to 900 requests at once. No per-minute cap published for scraping. 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 starts from the reason people leave.
Related comparisons
The 52 providers behind every pairing here are in the main listing.
Pairings that share a side with this one: Firecrawl vs ScraperAPI, Apify vs ScrapingBee and Apify vs Firecrawl. Every comparison in the directory is on the compare hub.
Firecrawl vs ScraperAPI
One credit a rendered page as Markdown, against one credit a plain page as HTML. The multipliers decide which is cheaper.
Compare them →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 ScrapingBee
One endpoint priced in credits that scale with how hard the page fights, against a platform priced by the run.
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 ScrapingBee, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is Firecrawl or ScrapingBee 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, ScrapingBee is cheaper: $0.00025 per credit, against Firecrawl's $0.0032 per credit.
Can I try Firecrawl and ScrapingBee for free?
Firecrawl: Free plan, 1,000 credits a month, no card. Keyless scrape and search too. ScrapingBee: 1,000 free API credits to try it, no card.
What are the rate limits on Firecrawl and ScrapingBee?
Firecrawl: Per team, per endpoint: 10/min scrape on Free to 10,000 on Scale. Concurrency binds first. ScrapingBee: Concurrency per plan, 25 to 900 requests at once. No per-minute cap published for scraping.
Do Firecrawl and ScrapingBee both have MCP servers?
Both do. Firecrawl: Hosted, with a keyless tier. ScrapingBee: Hosted, with the key in the URL.
Which is better, Firecrawl or ScrapingBee?
Firecrawl vs ScrapingBee is closer than the credit counts suggest. Firecrawl wins when the output goes into a model, because the page arrives as Markdown, and when you need crawl, map or search from the same key. ScrapingBee wins on raw fetching at volume.
What are the downsides of Firecrawl and ScrapingBee?
Firecrawl: small concurrency on the cheap plans; error pages are charged. ScrapingBee: stealth is expensive, and the default is not the cheapest call; subscription only, and HTML only; the MCP server takes the key in the URL. The Limits section above has each one in full.
Can you use Firecrawl and ScrapingBee together?
Running both makes sense when a pipeline has two kinds of page. Send rendered company websites that a model will read to Firecrawl, where rendering is included and the output is already Markdown.
Can I migrate from Firecrawl to ScrapingBee without losing data?
Not without losing a field. ScrapingBee does not return technographics, which Firecrawl does, so anything downstream that reads it has to change. Either way, replay a hundred real URLs through both and count the usable pages before you switch.