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
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&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.
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.
/crawl — point it at a domain and ingest every page.The most common reasons teams evaluate a switch.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every request type has a fixed, published credit cost — no surprises, and you only pay for successful requests.
Plans from $29/mo (250k credits) · $99/mo (1M) · $249/mo (3M). Failed requests are always free. See full pricing.
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.
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.
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.
/crawl) to ingest entire domains for RAG.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.
Get started with 2,000 free API credits. No credit card required.