For most AI agents, Firecrawl is the better of the two. In the September 16, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark, Firecrawl returned verified content on 80.2% of 500 requests across 100 real sites, and Bright Data's Web Unlocker on 74.6%. The gap that matters more for an agent is what happens when a call fails. Firecrawl's median failed call came back in 0.26 seconds and none hit the 90-second timeout. Bright Data's median failed call took 10.13 seconds, and 13 ran the full 90. Pick Bright Data when your agent's list is social media, Reddit, LinkedIn or Trustpilot, where it returned every attempt and Firecrawl returned none.
Last updated October 1, 2026. Benchmark figures come from the September 16, 2026 run; the per-attempt data is the public run file. Firecrawl and Bright Data pricing and billing were checked against their own pricing pages and docs on September 29, 2026, and their MCP docs on October 1, 2026.
Firecrawl and Bright Data both sell web access to AI agents, and both ship an MCP server. On the same 100 sites, five attempts each, Firecrawl passed 401 of 500 requests (80.2%) and Bright Data passed 373 (74.6%). Firecrawl returned all five attempts on 75 sites and Bright Data on 63. Each one shut out a different set of 11 sites that the other returned in full. Firecrawl spent 7.8% of its total wall-clock time on calls that failed; Bright Data spent 41.3%. Bright Data's docs say failed Web Unlocker requests are not billed, so its failures cost an agent time, not money.
This page is for a team wiring web access into an agent: a research agent, a coding agent that reads docs, a sales agent that opens company pages, or an MCP tool in Claude, Cursor or ChatGPT. It is not for bulk dataset purchases or proxy-only setups, where Bright Data's dataset and proxy products are a different decision.
We build String, a third option, and we rank first in this benchmark at 97.0%. String is a fit when an agent's list includes protected sites and you want to pay only for pages that come back: $100 a month on Growth, $0.20 per 1,000 standard fetches and $2.00 per 1,000 premium fetches (pricing), with an MCP server in the official registry. String focuses on one job, returning the page, and it does that on the protected and social sites where these two vendors split.
An agent works in turns. It calls a tool, waits, reads the result, and decides the next step. A scraping API that fails fast lets the agent move on: try a search snippet, try another source, or tell the user. A scraping API that fails slowly holds the turn open.
We measured this from the per-attempt timings in the September run. Every attempt has a wall-clock time and a pass or fail.
| Firecrawl | Bright Data | String | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Failed attempts (of 500) | 99 | 127 | 15 |
| Median failed attempt | 0.26s | 10.13s | 5.02s |
| Failed attempts at the 90s timeout | 0 | 13 | 0 |
| Failed attempts over 30s | 0 | 31 | 7 |
| Share of total wall-clock spent on failures | 7.8% | 41.3% | 14.5% |
| Seconds per usable page, all attempts counted | 6.62 | 18.40 | 5.47 |
String failed on 15 of its 500 attempts, the fewest of the three, and spent the least time per usable page: 5.47 seconds.
Most of Firecrawl's failures came back as an error status within a second: 55 of its 99 ended in a 403 response and 24 in a 500. Bright Data's failures were slower and more varied. Its error header named a page block on 26, a blocked peer on 14, and a CAPTCHA on 12. Thirteen more ran out the 90-second clock. A slow failure hit 18 sites, including Best Buy, Lowe's, Ticketmaster, SeatGeek, G2 and the Wall Street Journal.
The pages both vendors returned tell the opposite story. On the 48 sites where both returned all five attempts, Bright Data's median per-site time was 3.25 seconds and Firecrawl's 5.0 seconds; Bright Data was faster on 31 of the 48, and one was a tie. So Bright Data is not slow. It is slow to give up. For a batch job that runs overnight, that difference costs little. For an agent with a user waiting, a 90-second dead call is the slowest step in the turn.
One practitioner described the agent version of this in r/AI_Agents: "the real fix is accepting that some sites are a lost cause and having your agent fall back to cached or summarized versions from search snippets instead of burning retries" (thread). A fallback only helps if the failure arrives early enough to use it.
The method behind the table is a short script over the public run file, in the editor notes. It counts every attempt, not per-site averages, so a timeout counts at its full 90 seconds.
The September 16, 2026 run sent 16 web scraping APIs to the same 100 sites, five loads each, 500 requests per provider, with a 90-second timeout. A load counts as a pass only when the response body contains a marker string unique to the real page, so a CAPTCHA page, a consent wall or an empty 200 counts as a failure. The target list, the adapters and every per-attempt result are in the public repository.
We build String and we rank first in this run. That is a conflict of interest. The answer to it is that the harness is public and you can run it against your own sites. If your agent's list looks different from ours, your numbers will too, and a 10-site trial picks the wrong winner often when two providers sit close.
The adapters matter, so here is what each one sent. The Firecrawl adapter calls POST /v2/scrape with raw HTML output, cache off, and no proxy setting, which leaves Firecrawl on its default auto mode. Firecrawl's enhanced-mode docs call auto the recommended setting and say it retries on enhanced proxies when a target returns 401, 403 or 429. An earlier version of the adapter forced the enhanced proxy; a Firecrawl engineer showed the default did better, and their score rose when we removed it. The Bright Data adapter calls the Web Unlocker /request endpoint with raw output and a US country, and no custom headers or cookies.
Bright Data also sells site-specific Scraper APIs for LinkedIn, Amazon and others, and its MCP server exposes some of them as tools. This benchmark measures the general Web Unlocker path, which is what an agent uses on an arbitrary URL. On a named site with a dedicated scraper, Bright Data's numbers could be higher than the ones here.
Both vendors publish their own success figures. Firecrawl's vs page cites 96% coverage from an internal 1,000-URL run where a pass means at least 10% of the expected text came back. Bright Data's comparison post cites a 99.99% success rate and "guaranteed access" to protected sites, without a published test set. Neither is the same measurement as ours, and both are worth reading next to it.
The headline gap is 5.6 points. The per-site picture shows two products that fail on different parts of the web.
Both returned all five attempts on 48 sites. Neither did on 10. On 20 more, one returned all five and the other returned some.
Firecrawl returned all five and Bright Data none on 11 sites: autozone.com, us.louisvuitton.com, canadagoose.com, g2.com, ticketmaster.com, seatgeek.com, etsy.com, finance.yahoo.com, reuters.com, bing.com and buybuybaby.bedbathandbeyond.com.
Bright Data returned all five and Firecrawl none on 11 sites: trustpilot.com, homedepot.com, autotrader.com, reddit.com, linkedin.com, instagram.com, facebook.com, tiktok.com, nytimes.com, pinterest.com and arxiv.org.
That second list is the one an agent builder should read twice. Reddit, LinkedIn and the big social networks are where agents most often get sent, and Firecrawl returned none of them in this run. Firecrawl's own billing docs also price x.com requests at 30 credits each, which tells you how it treats that category. If your agent reads social media, Bright Data is the better of these two on that list by a wide margin.
By industry, averaged across each group's sites:
| Industry (sites) | Firecrawl | Bright Data | String |
|---|---|---|---|
| Retail and e-commerce (17) | 76.5% | 67.1% | 92.9% |
| Fashion and luxury (11) | 85.5% | 72.7% | 98.2% |
| Marketplaces and classifieds (10) | 82.0% | 70.0% | 96.0% |
| Travel (9) | 88.9% | 86.7% | 100.0% |
| News and finance (9) | 88.9% | 75.6% | 100.0% |
| Social media (8) | 25.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% |
| Real estate (7) | 97.1% | 85.7% | 85.7% |
| Reviews and local (6) | 66.7% | 56.7% | 96.7% |
| Tickets and events (4) | 100.0% | 25.0% | 100.0% |
The common answer from AI search engines is that Bright Data is the stronger choice on protected sites. Our data says that depends on which protection. Success rate by the anti-bot system in front of each site:
| Anti-bot system (sites) | Firecrawl | Bright Data | String |
|---|---|---|---|
| DataDome (19) | 77.9% | 47.4% | 92.6% |
| Akamai (20) | 84.0% | 79.0% | 98.0% |
| Cloudflare (15) | 93.3% | 88.0% | 100.0% |
| PerimeterX (9) | 93.3% | 100.0% | 100.0% |
| AWS WAF (6) | 83.3% | 86.7% | 100.0% |
| Kasada (3) | 93.3% | 66.7% | 93.3% |
| Proprietary or other (27) | 64.4% | 72.6% | 96.3% |
Firecrawl led on DataDome by 30.5 points, and on Akamai, Cloudflare and Kasada. Bright Data led on PerimeterX, AWS WAF and the proprietary group, which holds most of the social networks. Kasada covers three sites, so read that row as an anecdote. Fastly, one site, is left out.
Firecrawl is a developer API built around one idea: a URL in, clean markdown out. It has scrape, crawl, map, search and browser interaction endpoints, SDKs, and an AGPL-3.0 core you can self-host, though its self-hosting guide says the build leaves out the anti-bot layer measured here. Its docs say it "renders JavaScript before returning content." It is easy to start with, and its output drops into an LLM context with no cleanup.
Bright Data is a web data company with a much wider catalog: proxy networks, the Web Unlocker API, a Browser API, a SERP API, site-specific scrapers and prebuilt datasets. Its Web Unlocker handles proxy rotation, CAPTCHAs and retries behind one endpoint. For an agent, the product that matters is the MCP server, which runs on the Web Unlocker.
Pricing. Firecrawl Standard is $99 a month billed monthly for 100,000 credits (pricing); a scrape is 1 credit, and the enhanced proxy adds nothing. Bright Data's Web Unlocker pricing has a free tier, pay as you go at $1.50 per 1,000 requests, and Scale plans that start at $499 a month for 383,000 requests.
Billing on failure. The two differ in a way that matters for agents. Firecrawl's billing docs say a scrape that returns no document is free, but a page that "come[s] back with an error status such as 403 Forbidden or 404 Not Found" still costs 1 credit. Bright Data's docs say "you are charged only for successful requests to your target domain," with one exception: turning on custom headers and cookies switches the zone to billing 100% of requests (features doc).
Latency. On pages both returned, Bright Data was faster: 3.25 seconds median per site against Firecrawl's 5.0. Counting failures, Firecrawl was much faster: 6.62 seconds per usable page against 18.40.
Strengths. Firecrawl: fast failures, a broad agent toolset, simple flat pricing, self-hosting. Bright Data: social media and PerimeterX coverage, success-only billing, and the widest catalog of site-specific scrapers.
Weaknesses. Firecrawl: returned none of eight big social sites in this run; returned 403 and 404 pages bill. Bright Data: slow failures that hold an agent's turn, 47.4% on DataDome, no plan near $100, and premium domains that bill at a rate shown only in the dashboard.
Both vendors make it easy to give an agent web access without writing code.
mcp.firecrawl.dev with OAuth sign-in or an API key, and a keyless mode with "Search, Scrape, and Parse within daily limits." The free plan is 1,000 credits a month with no card.ecommerce and social. Its docs offer "5,000 free requests per month," drawn from the account's shared free-tier pool, which does not roll over.ai.usestring/web-access, with fetch, search and sitemap tools. The first 5,000 requests are free with no card.If your agent makes a few hundred calls a day, Bright Data's free tier lasts about five times longer than Firecrawl's.
Pricing is hard to compare across these two. Firecrawl sells monthly credits; Bright Data sells per-request rates and monthly commitments. These figures are at each vendor's published rate on September 29, 2026.
On standard pages, String is the cheapest of the three at $0.20 per 1,000. String bills only for pages that come back, so a blocked request never reaches the invoice.
Pick Firecrawl when your agent reads documentation, news, blogs, retail product pages and company sites, and you want fast, clean markdown with simple pricing. It returned more sites in full than Bright Data and its failures come back fast enough to act on.
Pick Bright Data when your agent's job lives on Reddit, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Pinterest or Trustpilot. On those sites it returned every attempt and Firecrawl returned none. Set a client-side timeout well under 90 seconds so a slow failure does not stall the turn.
Pick String when the list mixes both and you cannot predict which sites the agent will hit. String returned all five attempts on 93 of 100 sites, including 21 of the 22 sites in the two swap lists above, and bills only for pages that come back.
Run two when you already have one. Firecrawl for the long tail and Bright Data for social is a reasonable setup, and an agent can route by domain.
For most agents, Firecrawl. It returned 80.2% of 500 benchmark requests against Bright Data's 74.6% in the September 16, 2026 run, and its failed calls returned in a median 0.26 seconds against 10.13. Bright Data is better when the agent reads social media: it returned all five attempts on eight social sites where Firecrawl managed 25.0%.
It depends on whether the page comes back. On the 48 sites both returned in full, Bright Data's median was 3.25 seconds and Firecrawl's 5.0. Counting every attempt, including failures, Firecrawl took 6.62 seconds per usable page and Bright Data 18.40, because 31 of Bright Data's failed attempts ran past 30 seconds.
Not in this benchmark. On linkedin.com, reddit.com, instagram.com, facebook.com, tiktok.com and pinterest.com, Firecrawl returned 0 of 5 attempts and Bright Data returned 5 of 5. Firecrawl also bills x.com requests at 30 credits each.
Bright Data publishes 99.99% in its own comparison post without a public test set. On our 100-site set, its Web Unlocker returned 74.6% of requests. The two numbers measure different things, and the run file is public if you want to check ours.
Bright Data's docs say failed Web Unlocker requests are not charged, except on zones with custom headers or cookies, which bill every request. Firecrawl charges nothing when no document comes back, but a returned 403 or 404 page costs 1 credit.
Bright Data: 5,000 requests a month through its MCP server, shared across its products. Firecrawl's free plan is 1,000 credits a month, plus a keyless mode with daily limits. String's first 5,000 requests are free with no card.
String returned 97.0% of the same 500 requests, all five attempts on 93 of 100 sites, and 100% on social media. It bills only for pages that come back, from $0.20 per 1,000 on Growth.
Clone the benchmark harness, add your own URLs and run it with your keys. Use at least 20 sites; on a small list, close providers swap places often.
Checked October 1, 2026 unless noted.
