FIRECRAWL ALTERNATIVE

The Firecrawl alternative for protected sites

Firecrawl is great at turning pages into clean markdown. For targets behind Cloudflare or DataDome, WebScraping.AI adds residential and stealth proxies, AI extraction, and pay-only-for-success billing.

2,000 free API credits · No credit card required

WebScraping.AI vs Firecrawl at a glance

An honest, side-by-side comparison. Verify the numbers — this is a market where you should.

WebScraping.AI Firecrawl
Billing on failures Free — only successful requests Charged on successful fetch, even error status
Residential proxies Yes (10–25 credits) Add-on
Stealth proxies (anti-bot) Yes (50 credits) Stealth mode (extra credits)
JS (Chromium) rendering Yes Yes
Natural-language Q&amp;A (<code>/ai/question</code>) Yes Via extract schema
AI field extraction Yes (/ai/fields) Yes (/extract)
LLM-ready markdown / text Yes (/text) Yes (native)
Whole-site crawl Yes (/crawl)
Open source / self-host Yes
First-party MCP server Yes Yes
Pricing model Fixed per request type Per page; credits don't roll over

Pricing and credit costs last checked July 2026. Sources: Firecrawl pricing · WebScraping.AI pricing.

What Firecrawl does well

No tool is right for everyone. Firecrawl is a capable product, and these are the areas where it genuinely shines — worth weighing before you switch.

Native LLM-ready output — clean markdown built for RAG and vector stores, with no post-processing.
Whole-site crawling via /crawl — point it at a domain and ingest every page.
Open source and self-hostable — run it yourself if you need full control.
Excellent DX for AI prototyping, with a generous free tier and a $16 entry plan.

Why developers look for a Firecrawl alternative

The most common reasons teams evaluate a switch.

You pay even when pages error

Firecrawl charges when a page fetches successfully — even if it returns an error status code. WebScraping.AI charges only for genuinely successful requests; failures are always free.

Fewer proxy controls for hard targets

Firecrawl is optimized for clean markdown extraction. For heavily protected targets (Cloudflare, DataDome, PerimeterX), WebScraping.AI gives you explicit control over datacenter, residential, and stealth proxies with geotargeting, each at a published cost.

Credits don't roll over

Unused Firecrawl credits are forfeited at the end of the month. WebScraping.AI's per-request costs are fixed and published up front so you can size your plan accurately.

Agent pricing is unpredictable

Firecrawl's /agent endpoint uses dynamic pricing that can burn large numbers of credits per query. WebScraping.AI charges a fixed credit cost per request type, every time.

Transparent, published pricing

Every request type has a fixed, published credit cost — no surprises, and you only pay for successful requests.

Request type
No JS
+ JS render
Datacenter proxies
1 credit
5 credits
Residential proxies
10 credits
25 credits
Stealth proxies
50 credits
50 credits
AI extraction add-on
+5 credits

Plans from $29/mo (250k credits) · $99/mo (1M) · $249/mo (3M). Failed requests are always free. See full pricing.

Explicit proxy control for protected sites

Firecrawl is a fetch-and-convert engine: it's superb at turning a reachable page into clean markdown. On sites that actively block bots, success depends heavily on proxy quality and rotation.

WebScraping.AI is built proxy-first, giving you explicit choice of datacenter, residential, or stealth proxies with geotargeting, each at a published cost (1 / 5 / 10–25 / 50 credits). That control matters most when a target sits behind Cloudflare or DataDome.

You only pay for what works

This is the cleanest difference between the two. Firecrawl bills for a page that fetches, even if it comes back with an error status. WebScraping.AI bills only for successful requests — a failed scrape costs nothing.

Combined with fixed, published per-request pricing, that makes costs predictable: no rolling credit forfeitures, no dynamic agent pricing, and no paying for blocked pages.

Switching is one API call

Point your requests at WebScraping.AI — here's the equivalent call in your language.

curl -G "https://api.webscraping.ai/text" \
  --data-urlencode "api_key=YOUR_API_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "url=https://example.com/article" \
  --data-urlencode "text_format=plain"
# Response: clean page text, ready to feed to an LLM.
# pip install webscraping_ai
# https://pypi.org/project/webscraping-ai/
from webscraping_ai import Client

client = Client(api_key="YOUR_API_KEY")
text = client.text("https://example.com/article", text_format="plain")
print(text)
# Response: clean page text, ready to feed to an LLM.
// npm install webscraping-ai
// https://www.npmjs.com/package/webscraping-ai
import { WebScrapingAI } from 'webscraping-ai';

const client = new WebScrapingAI({ apiKey: 'YOUR_API_KEY' });
const text = await client.text({
  url: 'https://example.com/article',
  text_format: 'plain',
});
console.log(text);
// Response: clean page text, ready to feed to an LLM.
<?php
// composer require webscraping-ai/webscraping-ai-php
// https://packagist.org/packages/webscraping-ai/webscraping-ai-php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';

use WebScrapingAI\Client;

$client = new Client('YOUR_API_KEY');
$text = $client->text('https://example.com/article', textFormat: 'plain');
echo is_string($text) ? $text : print_r($text, true);
// Response: clean page text, ready to feed to an LLM.
# gem install webscraping_ai
# https://rubygems.org/gems/webscraping_ai
require 'webscraping_ai'

client = WebScrapingAI::Client.new(api_key: 'YOUR_API_KEY')
text = client.text('https://example.com/article', text_format: 'plain')
puts text.inspect
# Response: clean page text, ready to feed to an LLM.
// go get github.com/webscraping-ai/webscraping-ai-go/v4
// https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/webscraping-ai/webscraping-ai-go/v4
package main

import (
    "context"
    "fmt"

    webscrapingai "github.com/webscraping-ai/webscraping-ai-go/v4"
)

func main() {
    client, _ := webscrapingai.NewClient(&webscrapingai.Config{APIKey: "YOUR_API_KEY"})
    text, _ := client.Text(context.Background(), &webscrapingai.TextOptions{
        URL:        "https://example.com/article",
        TextFormat: "plain",
    })
    fmt.Println(text)
}
// Response: clean page text, ready to feed to an LLM.
// Maven: ai.webscraping:webscraping-ai:4.0.0
// https://central.sonatype.com/artifact/ai.webscraping/webscraping-ai
import ai.webscraping.Client;
import ai.webscraping.Config;
import ai.webscraping.option.TextOptions;

Client client = new Client(Config.builder().apiKey("YOUR_API_KEY").build());
String text = client.text(TextOptions.builder()
    .url("https://example.com/article")
    .textFormat("plain")
    .build());
System.out.println(text);
// Response: clean page text, ready to feed to an LLM.
// dotnet add package WebScrapingAI
// https://www.nuget.org/packages/WebScrapingAI
using WebScrapingAI;

var client = new WebScrapingAIClient(new WebScrapingAIClientOptions { ApiKey = "YOUR_API_KEY" });
var text = await client.TextAsync(new TextRequest {
    Url = "https://example.com/article",
    TextFormat = "plain",
});
Console.WriteLine(text);
// Response: clean page text, ready to feed to an LLM.

Switch to WebScraping.AI if…

You scrape protected, anti-bot sites and want residential and stealth proxies designed for them.
You want to pay only for successful requests, with no charges for blocked or errored pages.
You want general scraping (HTML, text, AI Q&A, fields) — not only markdown conversion.
You want a fixed, published price per request instead of dynamic or expiring credits.

Stick with Firecrawl if…

You need whole-site crawl-to-markdown (/crawl) to ingest entire domains for RAG.
You want an open-source, self-hostable engine you can run yourself.
You're doing small-volume LLM prototyping where Firecrawl's free tier and native markdown are a great fit.

Frequently asked questions

Is WebScraping.AI a good Firecrawl alternative?

It is when your targets are protected. Firecrawl excels at turning reachable pages into markdown; WebScraping.AI adds production residential and stealth proxies, AI extraction, and pay-only-for-success billing, which matters most on anti-bot sites.

Does WebScraping.AI return LLM-ready content like Firecrawl?

Yes. The /text endpoint returns clean page text suitable for LLM input, and /ai/question and /ai/fields return answers and structured data directly. Firecrawl's native markdown is still a strong fit for whole-site RAG ingestion.

How is WebScraping.AI's billing different from Firecrawl's?

WebScraping.AI charges only for successful requests — failures are free. Firecrawl charges when a page fetches successfully even if it returns an error status, and its credits don't roll over month to month.

Can WebScraping.AI crawl an entire website like Firecrawl?

WebScraping.AI scrapes individual URLs you supply rather than auto-crawling a whole domain. If you need to ingest an entire site as markdown, Firecrawl's /crawl is purpose-built for that; for hard-to-reach individual pages, WebScraping.AI's residential and stealth proxies are better suited.

Does WebScraping.AI handle Cloudflare and other anti-bot systems?

Requests can route through rotating residential proxies (10–25 credits) or stealth proxies (50 credits), designed for protected-site scraping where residential or stealth routing is required.

Compare other alternatives

Try WebScraping.AI as your Firecrawl alternative

Get started with 2,000 free API credits. No credit card required.

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