Firecrawl Alternatives 2026: Free, Open Source and Hosted

String vs Firecrawl: 98.6% vs 81.2%, and no bill when a page is blocked

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 $99 per month and bills $0.16 per 1,000 fetch requests on a standard proxy, $0.90 on a premium proxy, $0.80 for a browser request on a standard proxy, and $3.25 for a browser request on a premium proxy. Starter costs $19 per month and bills $0.25, $2.40, $1.20, and $4.80 for the same four paths. The first 20,000 standard fetches are free with no card. Blocked requests are not billed, and credits roll over on every plan.

Benchmark success. 98.6%, or 493 of 500, the highest result among all 17 providers. String passed 100% of requests against AWS WAF, Kasada, and Fastly; 98.7% against Cloudflare; 97.9% against DataDome; 97.8% against PerimeterX; and 97% against Akamai, its weakest category. It returned content on all five attempts for 95 sites and partial content on the other 5.

Latency. 4.24 seconds, the fastest of the 17 providers tested.

Strengths.

• Highest benchmark pass rate, including all five attempts on all 17 sites where Firecrawl returned nothing.
• Outcome-based billing. A blocked request costs nothing, so testing a difficult target list is free when String fails.
• Per-request escalation. If a page clears on a plain fetch, it bills at the lower rate even when the domain uses anti-bot protection.
• Markdown, raw HTML, or a JSON envelope (the default), chosen per request. String also ships search, asynchronous sitemap crawling, and remote Chrome over CDP through a WebSocket endpoint. Search APIs on their own are compared in the best web search APIs.

Weaknesses.

• No crawl-to-content endpoint. Sitemap crawling returns URLs, and each page then requires a separate fetch.
• No change monitoring.
• No document parsing for PDF or DOCX files.
• No self-hosted option.
• Kroger returned 2 of 5 attempts, and Skyscanner, Yellow Pages, MarketWatch, and Barron's each dropped one. Firecrawl returned all five attempts on all five of those sites, the only sites where it beat String.

String's MCP server

• Registry entry: ai.usestring/web-access
• Hosted endpoint: https://mcp.usestring.ai/v3/mcp
• Local install: npm i @usestring/mcp, authenticated with a STRING_AI_API_KEY environment variable
• Tools: web_access_fetch, web_access_search, and web_access_sitemap

MCP calls use the same API, pricing, and underlying infrastructure as direct calls.

Trying String against your own list

curl https://request.usestring.ai/v1/fetch \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $STRING_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://www.example.com/the-page-that-blocks-you", "format": "markdown"}'

Leave out format and the page comes back in a JSON envelope. To move a Python project over step by step, see how to migrate from Firecrawl to String in Python. The first 20,000 standard fetches 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.

What customers say after switching from Firecrawl

better than firecrawl with similar speeds

love this

Nathan, a String customer that moved from Firecrawl, on Slack.

Crawl4AI vs Firecrawl: free self-hosting vs a hosted crawler

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.

• Free and local-first, which is useful for privacy-sensitive RAG pipelines.
• Fine-grained browser control through Playwright, including hooks, session reuse, stealth modes, CSS, XPath, and LLM-based extraction.
• Adaptive crawling that stops once it has enough information to answer a query.

Weaknesses.

• You become the infrastructure team. Against Cloudflare, DataDome, or Kasada, proxy selection, browser behavior, and captcha handling are your problem. The benchmark shows funded vendors ranging from 27.6% to 98.6% on exactly that work.
• There is no managed provider absorbing the anti-bot arms race.

Crawl4AI works best on easy-to-access sites or paired with an unblocking API for targets that fight back.

Free and open-source Firecrawl alternatives

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.

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 20,000 free standard fetches, Bright Data's Web Unlocker 5,000 a month, Firecrawl 1,000 credits a month, and Zyte a $5 credit.

Apify vs Firecrawl: prebuilt scrapers vs crawl-to-content

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. 79.4%, or 397 of 500, eighth of 17. 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. 24.87 seconds, fourteenth of 17.

Strengths.

• The deepest catalog of prebuilt, site-specific scrapers.
• Overage billing means a workload can run past the prepaid amount without changing plans.
• A native MCP server and the open-source Crawlee library.

Weaknesses.

• Four separate meters make cost difficult to forecast.
• A compute unit represents one gigabyte of memory for one hour, so cost per 1,000 results depends heavily on how efficiently an Actor was built.
• Anti-bot performance depends on the Actor and the proxy infrastructure its author selected.

String publishes Actors at apify.com/usestring. Each uses the same endpoint that scored 98.6%, which makes Apify and String complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Our Apify alternatives page covers when a hosted API is the better fit than an Actor.

Bright Data vs Firecrawl: 75.4% vs 81.2%, one contract for proxies and data

Bright Data is the incumbent enterprise platform. Web Unlocker is its product most comparable to String and Firecrawl's scrape endpoint. More detail is on our Bright Data alternatives page, and the two are compared head to head for agent workloads in Firecrawl vs Bright Data for AI agents.

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. 75.4%, or 377 of 500. That ranked tenth of 17.

Latency. 27.88 seconds, fifteenth of 17.

Strengths.

• One enterprise contract for proxies, datasets, SERP APIs, and unblocking.
• ISO 27001 certification, and a SOC compliance badge on its site.
• Billing on successful requests only, unless custom headers, cookies, or expect elements are enabled.
• An official MCP server.

Weaknesses.

• Bright Data missed 123 of 500 requests. String missed 7 of 500.
• Its published per-request rate is roughly 6 to 9 times String Growth's standard rate, and premium-domain rates are not published.

ScraperAPI vs Firecrawl: a $0.49 headline rate vs flat credits

ScraperAPI is the budget credit option among web scraping APIs. We rank the ScraperAPI alternatives on the same benchmark separately.

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. 76.4%, or 382 of 500, ninth of 17 and three places below Firecrawl. In August it placed tenth at 64.2% and in September third at 84.0%; the August-to-September gain was an adapter correction on our side, not a product change.

Latency. 15.19 seconds, sixth fastest of 17.

Strengths.

• The lowest simple headline rate here when targets are easy-to-access.
• 81.0% against Akamai, third of 17 behind String and Scrape.do.

Weaknesses.

• Kasada was its weakest anti-bot column, at 53.3% across 3 sites.
• High-value targets cost 5 to 30 times the advertised standard rate. LinkedIn is approximately 92 times String Growth's standard rate.
• No self-hosted option for the API itself. ScraperAPI does ship an official MCP server, hosted at mcp.scraperapi.com or run locally, and a markdown output format.

Zyte API vs Firecrawl: difficulty tiers vs flat credits

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. 79.6%, or 398 of 500, seventh of 17. It passed every Kasada request, as did eight other providers, String and Firecrawl among them.

Latency. 14.43 seconds, fifth fastest of 17.

Strengths.

• The strongest Scrapy integration for teams already running spiders.
• Outcome-based billing.
• A difficulty model that can be fair once the target mix is known.

Weaknesses.

• The broadest published range in this comparison: 16x within browser tiers and 124x from the cheapest pay-as-you-go HTTP tier to the most expensive browser tier.
• Zyte assigns the tier and can reassign it. A domain's price can rise at Zyte's quarterly review, with two weeks' notice, so a budget built on today's tier is not fixed.
• HTML and structured extraction rather than markdown-first. Zyte runs a remote MCP server for fetching, extraction, search, and Scrapy Cloud jobs.

Where providers specialise: success by anti-bot vendor

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.

String led the Akamai column and tied Firecrawl on Cloudflare. It did not lead DataDome, where Context.dev passed 100% against String's 97.9%, or PerimeterX, where Scrape.do and Firecrawl passed 100% against String's 97.8%. Akamai, at 97%, is String's weakest category in this run.

Oxylabs cleared 91.1% of PerimeterX targets and 68% of Cloudflare targets. Nimble scored 51% against Akamai and 82.2% against PerimeterX. Neither pattern is visible in an overall score. The Nimble alternatives page follows that kind of split site by site.

Firecrawl scored 100% against PerimeterX, 98.7% against Cloudflare, 85.3% against DataDome, and 80% against Akamai. Its lowest category is the social platforms below.

Can Firecrawl scrape LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok?

Not in the October 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.

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.

Why pricing is hard to compare across these providers

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 unit differs. String bills per successful request, at a rate set by the fetch path the request needed. Firecrawl and ScraperAPI sell credits, and a page can cost more than one credit. Zyte bills per successful response at a rate set by the target's difficulty tier. Bright Data bills per successful request, with a separate class for premium domains. Apify meters compute units, proxy bandwidth, storage, and per-Actor fees; its Web Fetch Actor bills per successful fetch.
• The credit is not constant. On ScraperAPI a standard page is 1 credit, Amazon 5, Google 25, LinkedIn 30, and a Cloudflare-protected page 11. On Firecrawl a page returned as JSON is 5 credits and an x.com post is 30. On Zyte the same HTTP request costs close to 10 times more on tier 5 than on tier 1, and Zyte assigns the tier.
• What counts as billable differs. String, Zyte, and Bright Data bill successful responses only, though Bright Data bills every request once custom headers, cookies, or expect elements are enabled. Firecrawl bills whenever it returns a document, including a target 403 or 404. ScraperAPI bills 200 and 404 responses.
• Prepaid balances behave differently. Firecrawl and ScraperAPI credits reset each month. Apify's prepaid usage expires at the end of the cycle. Zyte's monthly commitment is not refunded when usage falls short. String credits roll over.

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.

What $100 a month buys

• String Growth, $99 per month: $0.16 per 1,000 pages that clear on a plain fetch; $0.80 to $0.90 per 1,000 with a browser or a premium proxy; $3.25 with both. Blocked requests are not billed. Credits roll over.
• Firecrawl Standard, $99 per month billed monthly, or $83 on an annual contract: 100,000 credits, or $0.99 per 1,000 pages at full use, easy or protected alike. JSON adds 4 credits per page. Credits reset monthly.
• Zyte, $100 monthly commitment: $0.10 to $0.95 per 1,000 HTTP responses and $0.75 to $12.00 per 1,000 browser responses, by tier. Successful responses only. The commitment is not refunded if usage falls short.
• ScraperAPI has no $100 tier. Hobby, $49: 100,000 credits, or $0.49 per 1,000 standard pages. Startup, $149: 1,000,000 credits, or $0.15 per 1,000. Site multipliers and the anti-bot surcharge apply on both.
• Bright Data has no plan near $100. Pay as you go: $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests; premium domains higher at an unpublished rate. The first paid plan is Scale at $499.
• Apify has no $100 tier. Starter, $19, and Scale, $199, are prepaid usage. The Web Fetch Actor bills $1.50 per 1,000 successful fetches on Starter and $1.25 on Scale; other Actors bill compute units at $0.20 and $0.16, plus proxy bandwidth, storage, and Actor fees.
• Crawl4AI: $0 for the software. Proxies, servers, and captcha solving are your cost.

String against Firecrawl at this level: a page that clears on a plain fetch costs $0.16 per 1,000 on String and $0.99 on Firecrawl. A page that needs a browser on a premium proxy costs $3.25 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.

Is Firecrawl worth it?

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 third-fastest latency score in the October run, 8.87 seconds, behind String's 4.24 and Scrape.do's 5.08. For documentation, blogs and other cooperative sites, it is a good product at $99 a month.

It is weaker as an unblocker. It passed 81.2% of requests, sixth of 17, 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.

Best Firecrawl alternatives for AI-ready web data extraction

String is the best Firecrawl alternative for AI-ready web data: it returns markdown, HTML or schema-based JSON, and it passed 98.6% of requests on 100 bot-protected sites in the October 2026 benchmark, against Firecrawl's 81.2%. Crawl4AI is the best free option, an open-source Python library that turns pages into markdown for language models but leaves proxies and anti-bot work to you.

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 71.2% 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.

Enterprise alternatives to Firecrawl

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:

• Bright Data sells proxies, datasets, SERP APIs and unblocking under one contract, and holds ISO 27001 certification. It passed 75.4% in the October run.
• Zyte fits teams already running Scrapy spiders and prices each site by difficulty tier. It passed 79.6%.
• Firecrawl's annual Enterprise plans roll unused credits over for two months, per its billing docs. It passed 81.2%.
• String offers enterprise pilots on your own target list, and it does not bill a request that returns no content. It passed 98.6%.

Run your own URLs through each before signing. On 100 sites, the gap between the top and bottom of these four was 29 points.

Switching from Firecrawl to String

What carries over. A /v2/scrape call becomes one POST to https://request.usestring.ai/v1/fetch. Keep the URL list and the code that reads markdown, and add "format": "markdown", because String returns a JSON envelope by default. Firecrawl's JSON format with a schema maps to String's jsonSchema extraction.

What you rebuild. Crawl, batch scrape, monitor, change tracking, parse, and Interact sessions have no String equivalent. String's sitemap crawl lists every URL on a site, and each URL is then its own fetch. Most teams that switch keep Firecrawl for crawl and monitor jobs and point the failing fetches at String, and running both is a reasonable end state.

Integrations to reconnect. Firecrawl ships SDKs in nine languages, a CLI, a hosted MCP server, and integrations for n8n, Zapier, Make, LangChain, LlamaIndex, and many agent frameworks. String ships no language SDK, so an SDK call becomes one HTTP POST. Its hosted MCP server runs at mcp.usestring.ai, n8n calls String through the HTTP Request node, and Zapier, LangChain, and the Vercel AI SDK have setup guides in String's docs.

Test on your own failing URLs first. Take the URLs that fail on Firecrawl today, and any page where Firecrawl bills you for a 403 or 404, and run them through String. In the October run Firecrawl returned nothing on 17 of the 100 sites, and String returned all 17 on every attempt. Compare pages returned and cost per usable page, then move only the targets that improve. Leave custom headers off for the test: String does not bill a blocked request unless that request sent custom headers. The first 20,000 String standard fetches are free with no card. The String vs Firecrawl page compares the two products in more depth.

Firecrawl alternative for structured data extraction via API

String is a Firecrawl alternative for structured extraction through an API: send a JSON Schema in the jsonSchema field and it returns only the fields you define. String returned the page on 98.6% of requests in String's Web Data Frontier Benchmark (October 2026).

Best Firecrawl alternative for large-scale web scraping

For large-scale web scraping, the best Firecrawl alternative is String, a web access API that picks a plain request, a premium proxy or a real browser for each page. Every String plan runs up to 10,000 fetches at once, as of October 2026, per String's pricing page.

FAQ

What is the best Firecrawl alternative for Cloudflare-protected sites?

String. In the October 2026 Web Data Frontier Benchmark, String passed 98.6% of requests across 100 bot-protected sites. It passed 100% against AWS WAF, Kasada, and Fastly; 98.7% against Cloudflare; 97.9% against DataDome; and 97% against Akamai. Firecrawl passed 81.2% overall, and 98.7% against Cloudflare specifically.

Can Firecrawl scrape LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok?

Not in the October 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.

Is there a free or open-source Firecrawl alternative?

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 20,000 free standard fetches 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.

What is the cheapest Firecrawl alternative?

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 $0.16 per 1,000 plain fetches and $0.80 to $3.25 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.

Which Firecrawl alternatives have an MCP server?

String, Firecrawl, Apify, Bright Data, and ScraperAPI offer official MCP servers. Crawl4AI ships MCP integration in its open-source package. Zyte runs a remote MCP server.

String's server is listed on the official registry as ai.usestring/web-access. It is hosted at https://mcp.usestring.ai/v3/mcp or installed locally with npm i @usestring/mcp. It exposes fetch, search, and sitemap tools.

Is String cheaper than Firecrawl?

At the $100-a-month level, on pages that clear on a plain fetch, yes: String Growth bills $0.16 per 1,000 against Firecrawl Standard's $0.99. On pages that need a browser on a premium proxy, no: String's $3.25 path is above Firecrawl's flat $0.99. In between, String's $0.80 browser and $0.90 premium-proxy paths are also below Firecrawl's rate.

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's plan fee is usage credit: Starter is $19 per month and includes $19 of usage at $0.25 per 1,000 successful standard requests; Growth is $99 per month and includes $99 of usage at $0.16 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 is Firecrawl still the better choice?

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 81.2% success rate ranked sixth of seventeen 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.

Can I verify these numbers?

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 October numbers, the October 2026 results post has the full write-up, and the September 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.