7 Firecrawl Alternatives for AI Web Scraping in 2026

Firecrawl has become a popular choice for developers building AI-powered web scrapers, but its pricing jumps steeply as your usage grows. At $83/month for just 100K pages, it leaves many teams searching for better value — and often, a more complete feature set.

If you're building RAG pipelines, training data pipelines, or AI agents that need fresh web data, there are strong alternatives that cost less and do more. This guide breaks down the 7 best Firecrawl alternatives for AI web scraping in 2026, with real pricing, feature comparisons, and code examples.

Key Takeaways

• SearchHive is the strongest overall alternative — it costs $49/mo for 100K pages (vs Firecrawl's $83/mo) and bundles search, scraping, and deep research in a single API.
• Open-source frameworks like Crawlee and Scrapy are free but require you to handle proxies, rendering, and maintenance yourself.
• Enterprise tools like Bright Data and Apify offer massive scale but at premium prices.
• ZenRows and ScraperAPI excel at proxy management and anti-bot bypass.
• Jina AI Reader is the go-to free option for converting pages into LLM-ready markdown.

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1. SearchHive — Best Overall Alternative

SearchHive is the most cost-effective and feature-rich Firecrawl alternative available today. It doesn't just scrape pages — it combines search, scraping, and AI research into one unified API, which means you can discover URLs, extract content, and run multi-step research workflows without stitching together multiple tools.

Pricing Compared to Firecrawl

SearchHive is cheaper at every single tier. You get 67% more credits on the starter plan and pay 41% less for 100K pages. That gap only widens at the 500K level.

ScrapeForge: AI-Powered Extraction

SearchHive's ScrapeForge engine is built specifically for AI workflows. It converts any web page into clean, structured markdown optimized for LLM consumption — similar to what Firecrawl does, but with tighter integration into the broader search and research pipeline.

Here's how to use ScrapeForge with Python:

import requests

API_KEY = "your_searchhive_api_key"
BASE_URL = "https://api.searchhive.dev/v1"

# Scrape a single page with ScrapeForge
response = requests.post(
    f"{BASE_URL}/scrape",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {API_KEY}"},
    json={
        "url": "https://example.com/blog/post",
        "format": "markdown",
        "remove selectors": ["nav", "footer", ".sidebar"]
    }
)

result = response.json()
print(result["content"])  # Clean markdown ready for LLMs

You can also batch-scrape multiple URLs at once:

# Batch scrape multiple pages in a single request
response = requests.post(
    f"{BASE_URL}/scrape/batch",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {API_KEY}"},
    json={
        "urls": [
            "https://example.com/page-1",
            "https://example.com/page-2",
            "https://example.com/page-3"
        ],
        "format": "markdown",
        "extract": {
            "type": "schema",
            "fields": ["title", "author", "date", "body"]
        }
    }
)

results = response.json()
for item in results["data"]:
    print(f"{item['title']}: {item['body'][:100]}...")

Search + Scrape in One Call

What sets SearchHive apart is the ability to search the web and scrape results in a single API call — something Firecrawl doesn't offer:

# Search and scrape in one step
response = requests.post(
    f"{BASE_URL}/search",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {API_KEY}"},
    json={
        "query": "best AI frameworks 2026",
        "limit": 5,
        "scrape": True,        # Automatically scrape top results
        "format": "markdown"
    }
)

results = response.json()
for result in results["data"]:
    print(f"Title: {result['title']}")
    print(f"Content: {result['content'][:200]}\n")

This search-and-scrape pattern is extremely powerful for RAG pipelines. Instead of maintaining a separate search API (like Google Custom Search or Bing) and a separate scraper, you get both in one call.

For a deeper walkthrough, check out our ScrapeForge guide, or see the full Firecrawl vs SearchHive comparison.

Best For

Teams that want the best price-to-performance ratio and need search, scraping, and research in a single tool.

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2. Apify — Best for Complex Scraping Workflows

Apify is a mature scraping platform that uses actors — pre-built or custom microservices for specific scraping tasks. It has a massive marketplace of actors for popular sites (LinkedIn, Google, Amazon, etc.) and supports headless browser automation.

Pricing

• Free: 10,000 results/month
• Starter: $49/mo (~100K results)
• Advanced: $149/mo (300K results)
• Business: $499/mo (1M+ results)

Pros

• Huge actor marketplace for common sites
• Built-in scheduling, storage, and proxy management
• Supports both no-code and full-code workflows

Cons

• Results-based pricing can be unpredictable (complex actors consume more resources)
• Actor quality varies across the marketplace
• Steeper learning curve than simpler APIs

Best For

Teams that need to scrape specific platforms with pre-built actors, or need complex multi-step scraping pipelines.

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3. ScraperAPI — Best Proxy Rotation Solution

ScraperAPI focuses on one thing: handling proxies, CAPTCHAs, and browser rendering so you don't have to. You send a regular HTTP request, and it routes through a network of proxies with automatic retry and rendering.

Pricing

• Free: 1,000 requests/month
• Hobby: $29/mo (100K requests base) + $0.10–$0.25/extra 1K requests
• Startup: $79/mo (300K requests base)
• Business: $199/mo (750K requests base)
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

Pros

• Simple REST API — just append your target URL
• Automatic proxy rotation and retry logic
• Built-in JavaScript rendering
• Handles CAPTCHAs and rate limiting

Cons

• No built-in search or AI extraction features
• Pricing can escalate quickly with overages
• Raw HTML output — you need to parse it yourself

Best For

Developers who primarily need reliable proxy rotation and anti-bot bypass without managing their own proxy infrastructure.

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4. Bright Data — Best Enterprise-Grade Platform

Bright Data (formerly Luminati Networks) is the largest web data platform in the world. They own their proxy network (residential, mobile, datacenter) and offer a full scraping IDE, pre-built scrapers, and a comprehensive API.

Pricing

• Residential proxy: starts at $15/GB
• Datacenter proxy: $0.60–$1.20/GB
• Web Unlocker (scraping API): starts at $30/GB
• Pre-built scrapers: varies by target site

Pros

• Largest proxy network globally (72M+ residential IPs)
• Extremely high success rates on difficult targets
• Web Unlocker handles sophisticated anti-bot systems
• Enterprise-grade compliance and support

Cons

• GB-based pricing makes cost estimation difficult
• Can get expensive at scale without careful management
• Complex platform with a steep learning curve
• Overkill for small to medium projects

Best For

Enterprise teams and agencies scraping at massive scale that need guaranteed uptime and compliance features.

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5. Crawlee — Best Open-Source Node.js Framework

Crawlee is a free, open-source web scraping framework maintained by Apify. It's written in TypeScript and runs on Node.js, offering browser automation (Playwright/Puppeteer), HTTP crawling, and built-in request queue management.

Pricing

• Free (open-source, MIT license)
• Optional Apify cloud hosting for deployment

Pros

• Completely free with no usage limits
• Automatic parallelization and concurrency management
• Built-in request deduplication and queueing
• Supports both HTTP and headless browser crawling
• Active open-source community

Cons

• Requires Node.js — not ideal for Python-heavy teams
• No managed proxy rotation (you need to bring your own)
• Maintenance and infrastructure are entirely on you
• No built-in AI extraction or search capabilities

Best For

JavaScript/TypeScript developers who want a powerful, free framework and are comfortable managing their own infrastructure.

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6. Scrapy — Best Open-Source Python Framework

Scrapy is the most battle-tested open-source web scraping framework in the Python ecosystem. It's been around since 2008 and powers scraping pipelines at companies like Lateral, Parse.ly, and many others.

Pricing

• Free (open-source, BSD license)

Pros

• Mature, well-documented, and battle-tested
• Native Python — integrates directly with the data science/AI ecosystem
• Built-in selectors, middleware, and item pipelines
• Extremely efficient for large-scale HTTP crawling
• Huge extension ecosystem (scrapy-selenium, scrapy-playwright, etc.)

Cons

• No headless browser support out of the box (needs extensions)
• No proxy rotation built-in (needs scrapy-rotating-proxies or similar)
• Steeper learning curve than API-based tools
• No managed infrastructure — you deploy and maintain everything

Best For

Python developers building custom scraping pipelines who need full control and don't want vendor lock-in.

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7. ZenRows — Best AI-Powered Anti-Bot Bypass

ZenRows is a scraping API that combines proxy rotation with AI-powered anti-bot bypass. It converts any target URL into a clean API endpoint that returns parsed data, handling JavaScript rendering, CAPTCHAs, and fingerprint masking automatically.

Pricing

• Free: 50,000 requests/month
• Starter: $49/mo (250,000 requests)
• Professional: $99/mo (750,000 requests)
• Business: $249/mo (2.5M requests)
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

Pros

• Excellent anti-bot bypass success rates
• Generous free tier (50K requests)
• Simple API — add parameters to your URL
• Built-in JavaScript rendering and geotargeting

Cons

• No built-in search API
• No AI extraction or markdown conversion
• Advanced features (geotargeting, premium proxies) cost extra
• Less focused on LLM-optimized output

Best For

Developers who need reliable scraping of anti-bot-protected sites and want a simple API with high request volume at low cost.

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8. Jina AI Reader — Best Free LLM Extraction

Jina AI Reader (now part of Jina AI) is a free service that converts any web URL into LLM-friendly markdown or structured text. It's not a full scraping platform — it's a specialized tool for making web content readable by AI models.

Pricing

• Free tier: Limited requests (rate-limited)
• API access: Available through Jina AI's API platform with usage-based pricing

Pros

• Completely free for basic usage
• Produces exceptionally clean markdown for LLM consumption
• Simple endpoint: just append your URL to the Reader API
• Good for prototyping and small-scale projects

Cons

• Rate-limited free tier isn't suitable for production scraping
• No proxy rotation or anti-bot bypass
• No batch processing or search integration
• No structured extraction schemas
• Can fail on heavily JavaScript-dependent pages

Best For

Quick prototyping, small-scale projects, and developers who just need to convert a handful of pages into LLM-ready format.

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Full Comparison Table

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Recommendation

The right Firecrawl alternative depends on your use case:

• Best overall: SearchHive — cheapest at every tier, and the only tool that combines search, scraping, and AI research in a single API. At $49/mo for 100K pages, it delivers 41% savings over Firecrawl's $83/mo Standard plan while adding capabilities Firecrawl doesn't have.

• Best free option: Crawlee (Node.js) or Scrapy (Python) — both are mature, open-source frameworks with no usage limits. The trade-off is you manage your own proxies, rendering, and infrastructure.

• Best for proxy-heavy scraping: ZenRows — excellent anti-bot bypass at a competitive $49/mo for 250K requests, with a generous 50K-request free tier.

• Best for enterprises: Bright Data — unmatched proxy network and compliance features, but expect to pay significantly more, especially at scale.

For most AI teams building RAG pipelines, data enrichment workflows, or AI agents that need fresh web data, SearchHive offers the best combination of price, features, and developer experience. The ability to search the web and scrape results in a single API call eliminates the need for separate search and scraping tools, simplifying your stack and reducing costs.

Ready to try it? Get started with SearchHive for free — 500 free credits, no credit card required. See the full feature comparison with Firecrawl or dive into the ScrapeForge documentation to start building today.