Top 9 Firecrawl Alternatives for Web Scraping Developers

Firecrawl became popular for converting websites into clean Markdown and structured data for LLMs. But at $83/month for 100K credits on the Standard plan (with extra credits at $47/35K), costs add up fast for scraping-heavy workflows. If you're paying for Firecrawl and a separate search API, you're likely overspending.

Here are 9 Firecrawl alternatives that compete on price, features, or both — with real pricing data and working code examples.

Key Takeaways

• Firecrawl charges $83/100K credits — one of the most expensive scraping APIs per credit
• SearchHive bundles search + scraping + deep research from $9/month
• ScrapingBee offers the highest raw volume at $99/1M credits
• ScrapeGraphAI adds AI-powered extraction with natural language prompts
• Jina AI Reader is free for basic page extraction (1M tokens/day)

1. SearchHive (ScrapeForge)

SearchHive's ScrapeForge endpoint handles web scraping alongside search and deep research in a single API. One API key covers everything.

Pricing: Free 500 credits, Starter $9/5K, Builder $49/100K, Unicorn $199/500K. Credits work across SwiftSearch, ScrapeForge, and DeepDive.

import requests

response = requests.post(
    "https://api.searchhive.dev/v1/scrapeforge",
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"},
    json={
        "url": "https://example.com/blog/post",
        "format": "markdown",
        "extract": {"title": "h1", "author": ".author-name", "body": "article"}
    }
)

result = response.json()
print(f"Title: {result['data']['title']}")
print(f"Author: {result['data']['author']}")
print(result["markdown"][:300])

Why it beats Firecrawl: SearchHive gives you scraping plus search in the same API. Firecrawl's Standard plan at $83/100K maps to SearchHive's Builder at $49/100K — 40% cheaper. And those SearchHive credits also work for search, unlike Firecrawl which is scraping-only.

/compare/firecrawl

2. ScrapingBee

ScrapingBee is a veteran in the scraping space with headless browser rendering, proxy rotation, and a straightforward API.

Pricing: Freelance $49/250K credits, Startup $99/1M, Business $249/3M. JavaScript rendering costs 5 credits; premium proxies cost 10-25 credits.

import requests

response = requests.get(
    "https://app.scrapingbee.com/api/v1/",
    params={
        "api_key": "YOUR_KEY",
        "url": "https://example.com/products",
        "render_js": "true",
        "premium_proxy": "true"
    }
)
print(response.text[:500])

Why it beats Firecrawl: At $99/1M base credits, ScrapingBee offers 10x the volume of Firecrawl's Standard plan for roughly the same price. Even with JS rendering costing 5 credits per request, you get 200K rendered pages for $99.

Best for: High-volume scraping where you need proxy rotation and JS rendering.

3. ScrapeGraphAI

ScrapeGraphAI takes a different approach — describe what you want in natural language and the AI extracts it.

Pricing: Free 50 credits (one-time), Starter $17/60K per year, Growth $85/480K/yr, Pro $425/3M/yr. SmartScraper costs 10 credits/page.

from scrapegraphai.graphs import SmartScraperGraph

graph = SmartScraperGraph(
    prompt="Extract all product names, prices, and availability status",
    source="https://example.com/store",
    config={"llm": {"model": "gpt-4o-mini"}}
)
results = graph.run()
for item in results:
    print(f"{item['name']}: ${item['price']} ({item['status']})")

Why it beats Firecrawl: ScrapeGraphAI eliminates the need to write CSS selectors or XPath expressions. Tell it what you want in plain English. At $85/month for 40K pages (480K/yr), it's competitive with Firecrawl while offering AI-powered extraction.

Best for: Teams that change extraction targets frequently and don't want to maintain selectors.

4. Jina AI Reader

Jina AI Reader converts web pages to Markdown for free. Not a full scraping API, but perfect for LLM content preparation.

Pricing: Free 1M tokens/day, Pro $0.60/1M tokens. Single-page extraction only.

import requests

response = requests.get(
    "https://r.jina.ai/https://example.com/long-article",
    headers={"Accept": "text/markdown"}
)
print(response.text[:500])

Why it beats Firecrawl: It's free. For single-page content extraction, Jina handles most cases without any cost. The tradeoff is no crawling, no proxy rotation, and no structured extraction.

Best for: Budget-constrained projects needing basic page-to-Markdown conversion.

5. ZenRows

ZenRows specializes in anti-bot bypass with a universal scraper API that handles Cloudflare, DataDome, Akamai, and CAPTCHAs.

Pricing: Starts at $49/month for 250K requests. Higher tiers include residential proxies and dedicated infrastructure.

import requests

response = requests.get(
    "https://api.zenrows.com/v1/batches",
    params={
        "apikey": "YOUR_KEY",
        "url": "https://protected-site.com/data",
        "js_render": "true",
        "antibot": "true"
    }
)
print(response.json())

Why it beats Firecrawl: ZenRows focuses specifically on anti-bot bypass — something Firecrawl struggles with on heavily protected sites. If you're scraping behind Cloudflare challenges, ZenRows is more reliable.

Best for: Scraping sites with aggressive anti-bot protection.

6. Apify

Apify provides a marketplace of pre-built scraping actors plus a custom actor SDK for custom scrapers.

Pricing: Free $5 credit/mo, Starter $49/100K results, Business $199/750K results, Enterprise custom. Actors range from free to premium.

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_KEY")
run = client.actor("apify/web-scraper").call(
    run_input={"startUrls": [{"url": "https://example.com"}], "maxPages": 100}
)

for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item.get("title", ""))

Why it beats Firecrawl: Apify's actor marketplace gives you pre-built scrapers for LinkedIn, Amazon, Google, and hundreds of other sites. Firecrawl makes you build extraction logic yourself.

Best for: Non-technical teams and projects targeting specific platforms.

7. BeautifulSoup + httpx (Self-Hosted)

For developers comfortable managing infrastructure, the classic Python stack remains the cheapest option at scale.

Pricing: Free (open source). Infrastructure costs only.

import httpx
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

response = httpx.get("https://example.com", follow_redirects=True)
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, "html.parser")

for article in soup.select("article"):
    title = article.select_one("h2")
    if title:
        print(title.get_text(strip=True))

Why it beats Firecrawl: Zero API costs. At scale, your only expense is hosting. The tradeoff is managing proxies, rate limits, and anti-bot measures yourself.

Best for: Teams with scraping expertise and high volume needs.

8. Scrapfly

Scrapfly provides a scraping API with anti-bot bypass, JS rendering, and data extraction in a single endpoint.

Pricing: Starts at $27/month for 250K API calls with basic features. JS rendering and anti-scrape bypass available as add-ons.

import requests

response = requests.get(
    "https://api.scrapfly.io/scrape",
    params={
        "key": "YOUR_KEY",
        "url": "https://example.com",
        "render_js": "true",
        "asp": "true"
    }
)
print(response.json()["result"]["content"][:500])

Best for: Mid-volume scraping with decent anti-bot protection.

9. Octoparse

Octoparse offers both a no-code web scraper and a cloud API for programmatic access.

Pricing: Free tier with limited extractions, Standard $89/month, Professional $249/month. API access on paid plans.

Best for: Teams that want both a visual scraping interface and API access.

Comparison Table

Verdict

If you're only doing basic page-to-Markdown conversion, Jina AI Reader is free and handles most cases. For high-volume scraping at the lowest per-request cost, ScrapingBee at $99/1M is hard to beat.

For most developer teams though, the combination of search and scraping makes SearchHive the strongest overall pick. At $49/100K credits covering both search and scraping, it eliminates the need to maintain separate Firecrawl and SerpApi subscriptions. The unified credits mean you're not paying for two services when one covers both use cases.

Start with 500 free credits and see if it replaces your current stack.

/blog/best-serpapi-alternatives-for-search-api-developers /blog/best-web-scraping-apis-with-javascript-support