Firecrawl alternative
The best Firecrawl alternatives
Firecrawl is moving toward the web as a dataset for agents. If your job is the opposite — a URL you already have, and several questions about it — or you want different billing, here are the options.
By Roger Campos · Last updated: September 2026
TL;DR
If you crawl whole sites, the real alternatives are Apify and the self-hosted Crawl4AI — or Firecrawl's own AGPL core. If you mostly scrape one URL at a time, a per-URL API fits better: URLpipe returns Markdown, a screenshot, metadata, Lighthouse and console errors, never bills a cache hit, and keeps going past its allowance instead of answering 402.
Free plan, no credit card. 1,000 credits a month.
Why switch
Why people look for a Firecrawl alternative
- Cache hits are billed. Firecrawl caches (maxAge defaults to two days), but a cached result spends credits like a fresh scrape.
- The quota is a wall by default. At the allowance the API answers 402 unless you turn on auto-recharge, which buys credits in $5 packs.
- Single scrapes are synchronous. Webhooks cover crawl, batch scrape, extract, agent and monitor jobs — not a single URL.
- Scope. With a $75M Series B and Alexandria (September 2026), Firecrawl is building the web as a searchable dataset for agents. Teams that only ever scrape known URLs pay for a larger tool than they use.
- Page health. There's no Lighthouse audit or console capture.
Pick your shape
Two kinds of alternative
If you crawl: Apify or Crawl4AI
Apify's Website Content Crawler takes a start URL and writes Markdown for every page it finds, on a schedule, with storage and webhooks — billed by compute rather than by page. Crawl4AI is an Apache-2.0 Python crawler you host yourself, with deep crawling and CSS or LLM extraction. Firecrawl's own core is AGPL-3.0 and self-hostable too.
If you read one URL at a time: URLpipe
URLpipe does not crawl or discover URLs. It takes the URL you have and answers several questions about it — Markdown, rendered HTML, a full-page screenshot, metadata, a summary, keywords, Lighthouse and console errors — one at a time, or several from one page visit with /scrape, which is the closest thing to Firecrawl's formats array.
Benchmark
Markdown quality, measured
| Strategy | Visible text kept | Text the reader never sees | Cost / page |
|---|---|---|---|
| URLpipe — deterministic walk of the rendered DOM | 87.2% | 11.0% | $0 |
| Readability (the approach Jina Reader runs) | 88.2% | 21.3% | — |
| Firecrawl's selector blocklist | 85.8% | 17.0% | — |
| An LLM rewriting the page | 79.0% | 22.0% | $0.0025 |
Measured on 33 real pages, each strategy run on the same fetched DOM. These are the strategies, reimplemented — not the vendors' live APIs, which add their own tuning. URLpipe's converter reads no CSS, so text hidden only by a stylesheet can still leak.
Migration
Moving a Firecrawl scrape to URLpipe
curl -X POST https://api.firecrawl.dev/v2/scrape \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $FIRECRAWL_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"url": "https://example.com", "formats": ["markdown", "screenshot"]}'curl -X POST https://urlpipe.dev/scrape \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $URLPIPE_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"url": "https://example.com",
"operations": ["markdown", "meta", "screenshot"],
"report_to": "https://your-app.com/webhooks/urlpipe"
}'| Firecrawl | URLpipe |
|---|---|
| formats: markdown | /markdown, or "markdown" in /scrape |
| formats: html / rawHtml | /html (rendered) |
| formats: screenshot | /screenshot — full page by default |
| formats: summary | /summarize |
| metadata in the response | /meta |
| maxAge | max_age — and a hit is free |
| onlyMainContent, excludeTags | Main content by default; page_options.remove_selectors |
| waitFor | page_options.wait_for_selector or delay |
| crawl, map, extract with a schema, PDFs | No equivalent — keep Firecrawl or use a crawler |
Every URLpipe endpoint is async by default: you get a token at once and the result at a signed webhook, or at GET /result/:token. Send "sync": true to wait for it instead, as a Firecrawl scrape does.
Billing
Built so you never pay twice
A result served from cache costs nothing (max_age defaults to 7 days, up to 30); an identical request that arrives while the first is still running waits for it and costs nothing; an Idempotency-Key makes a retry return the first result; and bot checks we couldn't clear, target 4xx/5xx pages and robots.txt refusals are never billed.
Side by side
URLpipe and Firecrawl, feature by feature
| Capability | URLpipe | Firecrawl |
|---|---|---|
| Clean Markdown from a URL | Yes | Yes |
| Renders JavaScript (real browser) | Yes | Yes |
| Rendered HTML | Yes | Yes |
| Screenshots | Yes | Yes |
| Full-page screenshots | Yes | Yes |
| Element, dark-mode and hidden-selector screenshots | Yes | — |
| Metadata / Open Graph | Yes | Yes |
| AI summary | Yes | Yes |
| Keyword extraction endpoint | Yes | No |
| Lighthouse audits | Yes | No |
| JavaScript console capture | Yes | — |
| Several outputs from one page visit | /scrape | formats array |
| Whole-site crawling | No | Yes |
| Schema-based structured extraction | No | Yes |
| PDF input or output | No | Input |
| MCP server | Hosted | Hosted, or npx |
| Async + webhook for a single URL | Yes | No |
| Idempotency key on retries | Yes | Partial |
| Your own labels on requests, usage by label | Yes | — |
| Cached results cost nothing | Yes | No |
| Residential-IP fetching | One exit, +25 credits/visit | Enhanced proxy |
| Official SDKs | No | 9 languages |
| Self-hostable | No | AGPL-3.0 core |
| Free tier | 1,000 credits/mo | 1,000 credits/mo |
| EU processing, AI included | Yes | — |
Firecrawl: checked against firecrawl.dev/pricing, docs.firecrawl.dev/billing, docs.firecrawl.dev/features/scrape, docs.firecrawl.dev/webhooks/overview, docs.firecrawl.dev/mcp-server, firecrawl.dev/blog/introducing-alexandria-series-b on September 24, 2026. Products change — confirm on each vendor's site before you decide.
Pricing
What each one costs
| URLpipe | Firecrawl | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | $0 — 1,000 credits/mo, no card | $0 — 1,000 credits/mo, 2 concurrent browsers |
| Entry paid plan | Starter $19/mo — 20,000 credits | Hobby $16/mo annual, $19 monthly — 5,000 credits |
| Mid plan | Pro $49/mo — 55,000 credits | Standard $83/mo annual — 100,000 credits |
| Billing unit | Credits per call: Markdown, HTML, screenshot or console 1, Lighthouse 2, metadata 5 | Credits: 1 per page, +4 for JSON extraction |
| Overage | Paid plans never cut off — $1.50 per 1,000 credits | HTTP 402, or auto-recharge in $5 packs |
| Cache hits | Free, up to 30 days old | Billed like a fresh scrape |
A Firecrawl page is about one credit, +4 with JSON extraction; a URLpipe credit depends on the endpoint (/console, /html, /markdown and /screenshot cost 1 credit each; /lighthouse 2; /meta 5; /keywords 15; /summarize 17).
Who it's for
An honest recommendation
Choose URLpipe if…
- You scrape known URLs, not whole sites
- You re-read pages and want cache hits free
- A single URL should be able to report to a webhook
- You want Lighthouse, console errors or full-page screenshot options too
- A paid plan should carry on past its allowance rather than return 402
Choose Firecrawl if…
- You crawl and map whole sites
- You extract data against a schema across many pages
- You parse PDFs and documents
- You want official SDKs, or to self-host the AGPL core
- You want search and Alexandria's curated sources
Keep comparing
More on Firecrawl and its category
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Is URLpipe a good Firecrawl alternative?
What is the best open-source Firecrawl alternative?
Does Firecrawl charge for cached results?
Can Firecrawl send a single scrape to a webhook?
Try URLpipe on the free plan.
1,000 credits a month, no card. Confirm your email and your key is live — most people make their first request inside five minutes.