Last updated: September 24, 2026. Benchmark figures come from the September 16, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark: 100 sites, 16 providers, 5 attempts per site. Pricing was checked against each vendor's published pages on September 23 and 24, 2026.
The best Firecrawl alternatives in 2026 are String, ScraperAPI, Apify, Bright Data and Zyte for hosted scraping, and Crawl4AI, Crawlee and Scrapy if you want free, open-source software you run yourself. String passed 97.0% of requests on 100 bot-protected sites in the September 2026 Web Data Frontier Benchmark, against Firecrawl's 80.2%, and it had the fastest latency score of the 16 APIs tested. ScraperAPI placed third at 84.0%, one place above Firecrawl. Apify placed fifth at 77.4%, Bright Data sixth at 74.6% and Zyte eleventh at 68.0%.
Firecrawl returned nothing on 17 of the 100 sites, LinkedIn, Instagram, Reddit, The New York Times and arXiv among them. On 8 of those 17, at least 10 of the other 15 APIs returned the page on all five attempts. Those misses are specific to Firecrawl; most of the field clears the same pages. String returned content on 16 of the 17, and on 14 of them it passed all five attempts. The per-site results are in the public repository.
At $100 a month, String Growth bills $0.20 per 1,000 successful plain fetches and up to $4.00 per 1,000 for a browser on a premium proxy. Firecrawl Standard, $99 a month, includes 100,000 credits, or $0.99 per 1,000 pages at full use, easy or protected alike. Pricing models differ enough across vendors that no single number ranks them; the pricing section below explains why. If you are comparing String and Firecrawl head to head, the String vs Firecrawl page goes further on both.
The right alternative still depends on the job:
| Provider | Best for | Benchmark success | Latency score | What $100 a month buys (per 1,000) | Free tier | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | Hard, bot-protected targets that have to return content reliably | 97.0% | 7.06s | Growth, $100: $0.20 for a plain fetch; $1.00 to $2.00 with a browser or a premium proxy; $4.00 with both. Blocked requests are free | 5,000 requests, no card | No crawl-to-content endpoint and no self-hosting |
| Firecrawl | Crawling easy-to-access sites | 80.2% | 9.11s | Standard, $99 billed monthly: 100,000 credits, or $0.99 per 1,000 pages at full use, easy or protected alike | 1,000 credits a month | Credits are charged on 403 and 404 responses; unused credits reset monthly below Scale; JSON output adds 4 credits per page |
| ScraperAPI | Cheap volume on easy targets | 84.0% | 12.97s | No $100 tier. Hobby, $49: $0.49 per 1,000 standard pages; Startup, $149: $0.15. On Hobby, a Cloudflare-protected page is $5.39 and LinkedIn is $14.70 | 1,000 credits, plus a 7-day trial with 5,000 | Per-site credit multipliers reach 30x, and anti-bot bypass adds 10 credits per request |
| Apify | Renting a prebuilt scraper for a specific site | 77.4% | 20.64s | No $100 tier. Starter, $19, or Scale, $199, in prepaid usage that expires monthly. The Web Fetch Actor bills $1.50 per 1,000 successful fetches on Starter and $1.25 on Scale | $5 of usage a month | Actor fees, compute units, proxy bandwidth, and storage are separate meters |
| Bright Data | Buying proxies, datasets, SERP APIs, and unblocking under one contract | 74.6% | 15.62s | No plan near $100. Pay as you go: $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests; premium domains billed higher at an unpublished rate | 5,000 requests a month | Premium-domain pricing is not published, and enabling custom headers or cookies switches billing to all requests rather than successful ones |
| Zyte API | Teams already running Scrapy spiders | 68.0% | 17.46s | $100 commitment: $0.10 to $0.95 per 1,000 HTTP responses and $0.75 to $12.00 per 1,000 browser responses, by tier | $5 credit | Zyte assigns each domain's tier, reviews assignments quarterly, and can move a domain to a higher tier with two weeks' notice |
| Crawl4AI | Free, self-hosted crawling when you can run your own proxy and anti-bot infrastructure | Not tested; it is a library rather than a hosted provider | Not tested | $0 for the software; you pay for proxies, servers, captcha solving, and engineering time | Free software | You own the anti-bot problem |
Benchmark figures come from the September 16, 2026 Web Data Frontier Benchmark run, with 500 requests per provider. The latency score is failure-aware: per target, the p75 of a provider's successful attempts; a provider with no successful attempt on a target inherits the p75 of the providers that succeeded. Pricing comes from each vendor's published pages, checked September 23 and 24, 2026, at the plan closest to $100 per month billed monthly.
Firecrawl popularized "URL in, markdown out." Its SDKs and documentation are strong. Its core is open source under AGPL. Its MCP server lets Claude and Cursor scrape without custom glue.
If most of what you fetch is documentation, blogs, and other easy-to-access pages at low concurrency, Firecrawl works. Nothing in this comparison changes that.
People generally look for a Firecrawl alternative for two reasons: performance on hard sites, and pricing.
Firecrawl's issue tracker documents scrapes blocked by Cloudflare and self-hosted instances failing against stronger anti-bot systems.
In the September 2026 Web Data Frontier Benchmark, Firecrawl passed 80.2% of requests. That ranked fourth of sixteen providers. It has improved in every run: 70.9% in July, 78.6% in August after a Firecrawl engineer submitted a better adapter configuration to the public repository, and 80.2% in September.
Firecrawl sells monthly credit bundles. Hobby is 5,000 credits for $19 per month. Standard is 100,000 for $99. Growth is 500,000 for $399. Scale is 1,000,000 for $749. Annual contracts discount each plan by roughly 16 to 20 percent. The free plan carries 1,000 credits per month. There is no pay-per-use option. At full use, Standard works out to $0.99 per 1,000 pages billed monthly, or $0.83 on an annual contract.
A plain scrape is 1 credit. JSON output, the question and highlights formats, and PII redaction each add 4 credits per page. A cached scrape still costs a full credit. Earlier in 2026 an enhanced-proxy request cost 5 credits; as of August 17, 2026, Firecrawl's docs state that enhanced proxy requests cost the same 1 credit as basic ones, and the proxy parameter is deprecated. A protected page and an easy page now cost the same on Firecrawl.
Firecrawl's billing page states that the charge depends on whether Firecrawl returned a document, not on the target's status code. A page that comes back as 403 Forbidden or 404 Not Found costs 1 credit; a scrape that fails outright costs nothing. Hobby, Standard and Growth credits do not roll over. The billing docs say annual Scale plans roll unused credits over for one month and annual Enterprise plans for two; the pricing page says Scale rolls over without naming the annual term. A feature called Smart Upgrade moves an account up one credit tier automatically when its balance reaches zero.
There are public examples of unexpected consumption. Firecrawl's issue tracker includes a report of 100 credits exhausted in 60 seconds on one single-page application, through the Agent endpoint. In a Reddit thread about scraper tools, the original poster asked Firecrawl's CEO why a single website scrape sometimes uses multiple credits.
Success rates come from the Web Data Frontier Benchmark. The September 16 run covered 100 real sites, including Amazon, Walmart, Zillow, and Ticketmaster; 16 providers; 5 attempts per site; and 8,000 live, billable requests. The full ranking of all 16 web scraping APIs uses the same run.
Each provider ran through an adapter published in the repository. September is the first run in which every provider ran at its strongest published setting; several had run below theirs in August. That is why ScraperAPI moved from 64.2% in August to 84.0%: the change measures our adapter catching up, not a change in ScraperAPI's product. A request passed only when the response contained a marker from the real page. A captcha interstitial returning HTTP 200 counted as a failure.
Disclosure: String built the benchmark and sells the product that ranks first.
The harness, targets, pass criteria, and provider configurations are all open on GitHub. The repository accepts a user's own API keys. The original benchmark post explains the pass criteria and why the latency score is failure-aware. Any provider can inspect a result, contest its setup, or submit a correction.
Firecrawl did. Its engineer said the configuration was wrong, opened a pull request, and improved Firecrawl's score by 7.7 points. Every run since uses the corrected adapter.
String's Web Access API is a web scraping API that makes one HTTP call against any URL. Proxy rotation, anti-bot handling, captcha solving, and JavaScript rendering happen behind the endpoint.
Pricing. Usage-based rather than a prepaid page bundle. Growth costs $100 per month and bills $0.20 per 1,000 fetch requests on a standard proxy, $2.00 on a premium proxy, $1.00 for a browser request on a standard proxy, and $4.00 for a browser request on a premium proxy. Starter costs $20 per month and bills $0.30, $3.00, $1.50, and $6.00 for the same four paths. The first 5,000 requests are free with no card. Blocked requests are not billed, and credits roll over on every plan.
Benchmark success. 97.0%, or 485 of 500, the highest result among all 16 providers. String passed 100% of requests against Cloudflare, PerimeterX, AWS WAF, and Fastly; 98% against Akamai; 93.3% against Kasada; and 92.6% against DataDome, its weakest category. It returned content on all five attempts for 93 sites, partial content on 5, and no content on 2.
Latency. 7.06 seconds, the fastest of the 16 providers tested.
Strengths.
Weaknesses.
ai.usestring/web-accesshttps://mcp.usestring.ai/v1/mcpnpm i @usestring/mcp, authenticated with a STRING_AI_API_KEY environment variableweb_access_fetch, web_access_search, and web_access_sitemapMCP calls use the same API, pricing, and underlying infrastructure as direct calls.
POST https://request.usestring.ai/v1/fetch
{"url": "https://www.example.com/the-page-that-blocks-you"}
Markdown returns by default. The first 5,000 requests are free, and blocked requests are not billed.
If ScraperAPI is also on your shortlist, the ScraperAPI alternatives comparison ranks six tools on the same run.
Crawl4AI is the strongest free alternative to Firecrawl. It is an Apache 2.0 Python library with more than 84,000 GitHub stars, built to produce markdown for language models. Our guide to the best web scraping tools sets it beside Scrapy, Playwright and the hosted APIs.
Pricing. The software is free. The infrastructure is not. You pay for browser servers, residential proxy bandwidth, captcha solving, and the engineering time required to keep each layer working.
Benchmark success. Not tested. Crawl4AI is a library rather than a hosted fetch API.
Latency. Not tested.
Strengths.
Weaknesses.
Crawl4AI works best on easy-to-access sites or paired with an unblocking API for targets that fight back.
Firecrawl is open source itself. Its repository is AGPL-3.0, and you can self-host it. The self-hosted build leaves out the part this page measures: Firecrawl's self-hosting guide says Fire-engine, and "its advanced anti-bot behavior", is "not included". A developer who ran it against protected sites filed the result as a bug: the self-hosted instance "fails to scrape or crawl websites protected by robust anti-bot systems (e.g., Cloudflare or custom WAFs)", while Browserless on the same server succeeded. A second user replied that they had the same problem.
That is the trade with every tool in this table. The software is free. Proxies, browsers, captcha handling and the work of keeping them unblocked are yours. None of these libraries was in the benchmark, because the benchmark measures hosted APIs, so none of them is ranked here.
| Library | License | Language | GitHub stars (Sep 24, 2026) | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Crawl4AI | Apache-2.0 | Python | 84,189 | A crawler that returns markdown for language models, with CSS, XPath and LLM extraction |
| Scrapy | BSD-3-Clause | Python | 64,467 | The long-standing Python crawling framework; pair it with Playwright for JavaScript pages |
| ScrapeGraphAI | MIT | Python | 31,250 | A scraper that uses a language model to pull fields from a page by prompt |
| Crawlee | Apache-2.0 | TypeScript | 25,884 | Apify's crawling and browser-automation library, with proxy rotation; a Python version has 9,548 stars |
| Jina Reader | Apache-2.0 | TypeScript | 12,038 | Converts a URL to LLM-ready text by prefixing it with r.jina.ai |
| Spider | MIT | Rust | 2,737 | A low-latency crawler library written in Rust |
| Firecrawl (self-hosted) | AGPL-3.0 | TypeScript | 184,038 | Firecrawl's own core, without Fire-engine |
Pick Crawl4AI if you want the closest free match to Firecrawl's URL-in, markdown-out workflow in Python. Pick Crawlee if your team writes TypeScript. Pick Scrapy if you already run spiders. Whichever you pick, the sites that block you will keep blocking you until you add an unblocking layer, and that layer is the part the hosted APIs on this page sell. One workable setup is a free crawler for discovery, with only the pages that fail sent to a hosted API. String bills nothing for a request it cannot return, so the fallback costs nothing on pages it also fails.
If what you want is a free hosted tier rather than free software: String includes 5,000 free requests, Bright Data's Web Unlocker 5,000 a month, Firecrawl 1,000 credits a month, and Zyte a $5 credit.
Apify runs thousands of prebuilt scrapers called Actors, alongside infrastructure for custom scrapers. If someone has already built a reliable Amazon or LinkedIn Actor, you can rent the finished pipeline instead of starting from zero.
Pricing. Apify has no $100 tier. Each plan is prepaid platform usage: $5 per month on Free, $19 on Starter, $199 on Scale, $999 on Business, with overage billed on top. Usage is metered through compute units at $0.20 per unit on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale, and $0.13 on Business, plus residential proxy bandwidth at $7 to $8 per GB, storage, and per-result Actor fees. Paid Actors add their own per-event or per-result fee on top of platform usage. Unused prepaid usage does not roll over; Apify's pricing FAQ states it expires at the end of the billing cycle. The benchmark ran Apify's Web Fetch Actor, which bills $1.50 per 1,000 successful fetches on Free and Starter, $1.25 on Scale, and $1.00 on Business, and nothing for a failed request.
Benchmark success. 77.4%, or 387 of 500, fifth of 16. The benchmark ran one general fetch Actor, not a site-specific one; a dedicated Actor for a given site can return a page the general path did not.
Latency. 20.64 seconds, twelfth of 16.
Strengths.
Weaknesses.
String publishes Actors at apify.com/usestring. Each uses the same endpoint that scored 97.0%, which makes Apify and String complementary rather than mutually exclusive.
Bright Data is the incumbent enterprise platform. Web Unlocker is its product most comparable to String and Firecrawl's scrape endpoint.
Pricing. Bright Data has no plan near $100 per month. The free tier includes 5,000 requests per month. Pay-as-you-go is $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests. The Scale plan starts at $499 per month with 383,000 requests included and $1.30 per 1,000 beyond that; Bright Data's site lists the Unlocker API as starting from $1.00 per 1,000 at higher commitments. Bright Data classifies some sites as premium domains and bills them at a higher rate, which it does not publish; the rate appears in the account's cost estimate once the feature is enabled. Bright Data bills only successful requests, with one exception: when custom headers, cookies, or expect elements are enabled, it bills all requests, successful and failed.
Benchmark success. 74.6%, or 373 of 500. That ranked sixth of 16.
Latency. 15.62 seconds, fourth fastest of 16.
Strengths.
Weaknesses.
ScraperAPI is the budget credit option among web scraping APIs.
Pricing. ScraperAPI has no $100 tier. Hobby costs $49 per month for 100,000 credits, or $44.10 billed annually. Startup costs $149 for 1,000,000. Business costs $299 for 3,000,000. A free plan carries 1,000 API credits, and a 7-day trial adds 5,000. Credits reset at renewal and do not roll over.
That creates headline rates of $0.49, $0.15, and $0.10 per 1,000 requests. The actual cost depends on the target and the parameters. A standard page costs 1 credit, Amazon 5, Google and Bing 25, and LinkedIn 30. Sites behind Cloudflare, DataDome, or PerimeterX add 10 credits per request when ScraperAPI bypasses them. Premium proxies add 10, JavaScript rendering adds 10, and ultra-premium adds 30. On Hobby, a standard site costs $0.49 per 1,000 pages, a Cloudflare-protected page $5.39, Amazon $2.45, Google $12.25, and LinkedIn $14.70. ScraperAPI charges for responses with status 200 and 404.
Benchmark success. 84.0%, or 420 of 500, third of 16 and one place above Firecrawl. In August it placed tenth at 64.2%; the gain is an adapter correction on our side, not a product change.
Latency. 12.97 seconds, third fastest of 16.
Strengths.
Weaknesses.
Zyte, formerly Scrapinghub and the company behind Scrapy, prices requests by difficulty tier.
Pricing. Each combination of website and request type maps to one of five tiers, and Zyte assigns the tier. Pay-as-you-go HTTP requests cost $0.13 to $1.27 per 1,000. Browser-rendered requests cost $1.01 to $16.08 per 1,000. A $100 monthly commitment lowers those ranges to $0.10 to $0.95 and $0.75 to $12.00; $200 and $500 commitments lower them further, to a floor of $0.06. Page actions, screenshots, automatic extraction, and custom attributes bill on top of the base request. Zyte charges only for successful responses. The commitment is paid at the start of each month and is not refunded if usage falls short. New website-and-request-type combinations start on a temporary tier. Zyte reviews tier assignments quarterly and gives affected customers two weeks' notice of a change.
Benchmark success. 68.0%, or 340 of 500, eleventh of 16. Zyte and Apify were the only providers to pass every Kasada request.
Latency. 17.46 seconds, seventh fastest of 16.
Strengths.
Weaknesses.
Overall success rate does not show where a provider fails. Two products can land within a point of each other and fail on different parts of the web. The anti-bot cut shows this. These four vendors protect 63 of the 100 benchmark sites between them.
| Provider | DataDome (19 sites) | Akamai (20) | Cloudflare (15) | PerimeterX (9) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | 92.6% | 98% | 100% | 100% |
| ScraperAPI | 82.1% | 92% | 89.3% | 88.9% |
| Firecrawl | 77.9% | 84% | 93.3% | 93.3% |
| Oxylabs | 65.3% | 67% | 57.3% | 86.7% |
| Nimble | 58.9% | 53% | 62.7% | 84.4% |
String led every anti-bot column except DataDome, where Scrapfly tied it at 92.6%, and Kasada (3 sites), where Apify and Zyte returned 100% against String's 93.3%. DataDome is String's weakest category in this run.
Oxylabs cleared 86.7% of PerimeterX targets and 57.3% of Cloudflare targets. Nimble scored 53% against Akamai and 84.4% against PerimeterX. Neither pattern is visible in an overall score. The Nimble alternatives page follows that kind of split site by site.
Firecrawl scored 93.3% against Cloudflare and PerimeterX, 84% against Akamai, and 77.9% against DataDome. Its lowest category is the social platforms below.
Not in the September benchmark.
Across eight social platforms, String returned content on all 40 requests. Firecrawl returned content on 10 of 40, with all 10 successes coming from X and YouTube.
| Platform | String | Firecrawl |
|---|---|---|
| 5/5 | 0/5 | |
| 5/5 | 0/5 | |
| 5/5 | 0/5 | |
| TikTok | 5/5 | 0/5 |
| 5/5 | 0/5 | |
| 5/5 | 0/5 | |
| X | 5/5 | 5/5 |
| YouTube | 5/5 | 5/5 |
Part of this gap is deliberate. In the pull request that corrected Firecrawl's benchmark adapter, a Firecrawl engineer wrote that the company blocks 10 benchmark sites by policy. On some platforms Firecrawl returns HTTP 403 with "This website is no longer supported."
That is a product decision Firecrawl is entitled to make. For the buyer, the effect is still no content. No pricing tier changes that result.
On X, where Firecrawl passed 5 of 5, its billing page states that requests to x.com are handled through the Grok API and cost 30 credits per request rather than 1.
For social listening, creator analytics, or products that read public profiles, this table is the evaluation. A lower price does not fix a 0% pass rate.
Every provider in this comparison publishes a rate card. The rate cards do not describe the same thing, so a single per-page number does not rank them. Four differences account for most of the confusion.
The practical consequence: use the rate card to orient, then price your own target list on each vendor. Success rate on that list decides more of the bill than the headline rate. A page that never returns has no unit price.
String against Firecrawl at this level: a page that clears on a plain fetch costs $0.20 per 1,000 on String and $0.99 on Firecrawl. A page that needs a browser on a premium proxy costs $4.00 on String and $0.99 on Firecrawl. The mix of pages decides. Firecrawl returned nothing on 17 of 100 benchmark sites; no rate applies to those pages.
Yes, for crawling. Firecrawl takes one domain and returns content from every page beneath it, and it also runs change monitoring and document parsing. It had the second-fastest latency score in the September run, 9.11 seconds, behind String's 7.06. For documentation, blogs and other cooperative sites, it is a good product at $99 a month.
It is weaker as an unblocker. It passed 80.2% of requests, fourth of 16, and returned nothing on 17 of 100 sites. Six of those are social platforms, and a Firecrawl engineer has said the company blocks 10 benchmark sites by policy, so no plan fixes those. Firecrawl also charges a credit when a page comes back as a 403 or 404, and plan credits below Scale do not roll over.
So the answer turns on the job. If most of your list is protected retail, travel, social or news pages, the credits buy fewer usable pages than the plan size suggests, and one of the alternatives above will return more of them.
Pick String when failures cluster on protected sites in retail, travel, ticketing, news, or social. Its pay-on-success model also means failed tests against difficult targets do not create usage charges.
Pick Crawl4AI when the budget is zero, targets are easy-to-access, and you have the engineering capacity to operate proxy and browser infrastructure.
Pick Apify when the scraper already exists as an Actor or the workload is too intermittent to justify a subscription. String's Actors are available in the Apify Store, so the choice is not necessarily either-or.
Pick Bright Data when consolidating proxies, datasets, SERP APIs, and unblocking under one contract matters more than speed or benchmark success, or when an existing ISO 27001 certification is a hard procurement gate.
Pick Zyte when you already run Scrapy and have mapped your target mix to its pricing tiers.
Decodo passed 50.6% in the same run; the String vs Decodo page covers it.
Stay on Firecrawl when crawling is the job and success rate, request cost, and concurrency are not the main constraints. Firecrawl can take one domain and return content from every page beneath it. It also ships change monitoring and document parsing, which String does not replicate.
Firecrawl posted the second-fastest latency score of the 16, behind String.
Firecrawl is a crawler with mid-pack unblocking. The decision depends on which of those two capabilities you are buying.
At enterprise volume the published rate cards stop applying. Firecrawl, Bright Data, Zyte, ScraperAPI, Apify and String each sell a custom enterprise plan, so the procurement conversation replaces the prices on this page. What does not change with the contract is the success rate on your target list, and that is the number to test first.
What differs between them at that level:
Run your own URLs through each before signing. On 100 sites, the gap between the top and bottom of these four was 29 points.
String. In the September 2026 Web Data Frontier Benchmark, String passed 97.0% of requests across 100 bot-protected sites. It passed 100% against Cloudflare, PerimeterX, AWS WAF, and Fastly; 98% against Akamai; and 92.6% against DataDome. Firecrawl passed 80.2% overall, and 93.3% against Cloudflare specifically.
Not in the September benchmark. Firecrawl went 0 for 5 on each. Across all eight social platforms tested, Firecrawl passed 10 of 40 requests, with every success coming from X and YouTube. A Firecrawl engineer has said the company blocks 10 benchmark sites by policy. String passed 40 of 40 requests across the same platforms.
Yes. Crawl4AI (Apache-2.0), Crawlee (Apache-2.0), Scrapy (BSD-3-Clause), ScrapeGraphAI (MIT), Jina Reader (Apache-2.0) and Spider (MIT) are free and open source. Firecrawl's own core is AGPL-3.0 and self-hostable, but its self-hosting guide says Fire-engine, its anti-bot layer, is not included. All of them leave proxies and anti-bot handling to you. Among hosted APIs, String includes 5,000 free requests with no card. Firecrawl includes 1,000 free credits per month. Bright Data's Web Unlocker includes 5,000 free requests per month. ScraperAPI includes 1,000 free credits and a 7-day trial with 5,000. Apify includes $5 of prepaid usage per month, and Zyte a $5 credit.
No single answer holds across targets, because the vendors do not bill the same unit. At the $100-a-month level: Zyte's $100 commitment bills $0.10 to $0.95 per 1,000 HTTP responses by tier; ScraperAPI's nearest tiers bill $0.49 (Hobby, $49) or $0.15 (Startup, $149) per 1,000 standard pages before multipliers; Firecrawl Standard bills $0.99 per 1,000 pages at full credit use; String Growth bills $0.20 per 1,000 plain fetches and $1.00 to $4.00 on browser or premium paths, with no charge for blocked requests. Bright Data has no plan at that level; pay as you go is $1.50 per 1,000. Crawl4AI's software is free.
For easy-to-access sites, several options are cheap. For protected sites, compare the cost per page that actually returns content, and price your own target list on each vendor's estimator.
String, Firecrawl, Apify, Bright Data, and ScraperAPI offer official MCP servers. Crawl4AI ships MCP integration in its open-source package. Zyte publishes a guide to building your own and does not host one.
String's server is listed on the official registry as ai.usestring/web-access. It is hosted at https://mcp.usestring.ai/v1/mcp or installed locally with npm i @usestring/mcp. It exposes fetch, search, and sitemap tools.
At the $100-a-month level, on pages that clear on a plain fetch, yes: String Growth bills $0.20 per 1,000 against Firecrawl Standard's $0.99. On pages that need a browser on a premium proxy, no: String's $4.00 path is above Firecrawl's flat $0.99. In between, the mix decides.
Firecrawl combines subscription and page allowance, so the effective rate depends on how much of the allowance is used, and plan credits reset monthly below Scale. String separates subscription and usage: Starter is $20 per month, then $0.30 per 1,000 successful standard requests; Growth is $100 per month, then $0.20 per 1,000.
As of August 17, 2026, Firecrawl charges the same 1 credit for enhanced-proxy requests as for basic ones, so a protected page no longer costs 5 credits there. Firecrawl charges the credit when the target returns a 403 or 404. String does not bill blocked requests, and String credits roll over on every plan.
When you need change monitoring and document parsing. String does not offer direct equivalents to those features.
Firecrawl also offers a self-hosted AGPL core. Its 80.2% success rate ranked fourth of sixteen on difficult anti-bot targets, but that may not be the binding constraint on easy-to-access content sites. Firecrawl's self-hosting guide states that Fire-engine, and its advanced anti-bot behavior, is not included in the open-source stack, so the self-hosted version does not carry the capability this comparison measures.
Run the benchmark. The harness, 100 target URLs, pass criteria, and provider adapters are public at github.com/usestring/web-data-frontier-benchmark. The repository accepts your own API keys. The live leaderboard carries the same September numbers, and the August 2026 results post covers the previous run.
A full run makes thousands of billable requests, so start with a subset. If the result differs, open a pull request. Firecrawl did, and every run since uses its corrected adapter.
