Crawl4AI vs Firecrawl
Both turn web pages into clean data for AI. Firecrawl charges 1 credit for every basic page. Crawl4AI charges by the work the page needed, never charges a failed call, and comes from the team that wrote the open-source crawler.
Crawl4AI vs Firecrawl: the short answer
Which one fits
Different tools fit different jobs. Here is when each one is the better choice.
FChoose Firecrawl if
- You want their ready data indexes: , research papers and SEC filings.
- You need a live browser your code drives, .
- You want an official SDK in Go, Rust or Java.
- Almost every page you fetch is a hard site, where their costs less.
Choose Crawl4AI if
- You build with AI agents: one message sets Crawl4AI up in Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, Gemini CLI or OpenCode, and 17 MCP tools let the agent run recipes, price a call first and manage its budget.
- You want to pay for the work a page needed, and nothing for a failed or blocked call.
- You need named sites as rows: 93 recipes, a LinkedIn profile for 1 credit. Firecrawl says it .
- You want money that stays yours: 14-day refunds and extra credits that never expire.
- You need data in the EU, Singapore or the US, and a team with an audit log from Builder.
- You want to run it inside your network on the same engine, Apache 2.0.
For enterprise teams
The controls your security team asks for
Crawl4AI's Enterprise plan next to Firecrawl's. Firecrawl's side restates its own pages; click a line to see the quote.
| Control | Crawl4AI Enterprise | FFirecrawl Enterprise |
|---|---|---|
| SSO (SAML, OIDC) | ✓ Yes | |
| SCIM user sync | ✓ Yes | |
| Teams, roles and audit log | ✓ From Builder ($99), no seat limit | |
| Zero data retention | ✓ Yes | |
| IP allowlist and key limits | ✓ Yes | |
| Static exit IPs | ✓ Yes | |
| Where data is processed | EU, Singapore or US, your choice | |
| Deployment | Cloud, dedicated fleet, inside your network, managed pipeline; one engine | |
| DPA and invoice billing | ✓ Every Enterprise plan | |
| Refunds | 14 days, if no credits were used | |
| Status page | Hourly uptime per service, public | |
| Uptime and response SLA | Typical: 99.9% a month; service down: first answer within 1 hour, 24/7; part broken: 4 business hours; a question: 1 business day; 5% of the month's fee back if missed, 10% under 99% | |
| Support | A named engineer | |
| Security assurance | Controls monitored every day in Drata, with the evidence kept; dependencies watched for known vulnerabilities; SOC 2 audit by Sensiba under way, report target January 2027. Security pack on request: policies, audit status, DPA, questionnaire answers. |
Bring your current invoice
Send us your last scraping bill, from Firecrawl or anyone else. We price the same workload on Crawl4AI and walk you through it on a 30-minute call.
What it costs you
Your pages a month, how many need a real browser or are hard sites, how many get blocked, and how many you fetch again. The rest are plain pages. Both lines use each product's public monthly plans.
Monthly plans, no yearly discount. Crawl4AI: the cheapest plan whose monthly cap fits, plus extra credits at that plan's rate; above Scale's cap is Enterprise (dashed). Firecrawl: the cheapest plan plus $5 top-ups, 1 credit per basic page; JSON extraction adds 4 credits a page and is not in this chart. Blocked pages: free on Crawl4AI, 1 credit on Firecrawl. Repeat pages: half price on Crawl4AI, full price on Firecrawl.
Same job, two calls
6 jobs an agent does every day. The call on each side, and the price of 1,000 of them at list. The label marks the side that costs less for that job.
curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/scrape \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
-d '{"url":"https://example.com","format":"md"}'0.1 credit. $0.08 per 1,000 on Builder.
curl https://api.firecrawl.dev/v2/scrape \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
-d '{"url":"https://example.com",
"formats":["markdown"]}'1 credit a page: .
curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/site \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
-d '{"url":"https://docs.example.com"}'/site: 0.5 credit for the call, then each page at its /scrape price. Up to 500 pages a call; /scan lists up to 50,000 URLs.
curl https://api.firecrawl.dev/v2/crawl \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
-d '{"url":"https://docs.example.com",
"limit":1000}', and the crawl (default 10,000) before it starts.
curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/scrape \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
-d '{"url":"https://hard-site.example",
"proxy":"extra"}'2 credits for a hard page. A page we cannot get costs nothing.
curl https://api.firecrawl.dev/v2/scrape \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
-d '{"url":"https://hard-site.example",
"proxy":"auto"}'Same 1 credit. A page still blocked after their retry .
curl "https://api.crawl4ai.com/search?q=best+crm" \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY"
1 credit a search. Google's own results page as data with /serp, also 1 credit.
curl https://api.firecrawl.dev/v2/search \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
-d '{"query":"best crm","limit":10}'. A Google results page with ads and maps: Not published.
curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/recipes/linkedin-profile \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
-d '{"profile":"satyanadella"}'A recipe: 2 units × 0.5 credit. The same named columns every time; one of 93.
curl https://api.firecrawl.dev/v2/scrape \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
-d '{"url":"https://linkedin.com/in/…"}'; data providers answer at .
curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/extract \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
-d '{"url":"https://news.ycombinator.com",
"instruction":"the top stories",
"schema":{…}}'Median of real calls this week: 0.5 credit for the page plus the model's tokens.
curl https://api.firecrawl.dev/v2/scrape \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
-d '{"url":"https://news.ycombinator.com",
"formats":[{"type":"json","schema":{…}}]}'. Their /extract endpoint .
Crawl4AI vs Firecrawl, side by side
Each Firecrawl cell restates Firecrawl's own pages, read on 12 Nov 2026. Click it to see the quote and the page. "Not published" means those pages say nothing about it, not that it is missing.
| Crawl4AI Cloud | FFirecrawl | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | ||
| How you pay | Credits in every plan: Free, Starter $10, Builder $99, Scale $499 | |
| 1,000 plain / browser / hard pages | $0.10 / $0.50 / $2.00 | |
| Failed calls | Free, blocked pages included | |
| A page already cached | Half price | |
| Extra credits | Never expire | |
| Refunds | 14 days, if no credits were used | |
| What you get back | ||
| Formats | Markdown, HTML, links, media, metadata, tables; engine and cache on every answer | |
| Whole site | /site deep crawl (500 pages a call); /scan up to 50,000 URLs | |
| Search | /search 1 credit; Google results as data with /serp | |
| Named sites | 93 recipes; a LinkedIn profile 1 credit | |
| Documents | PDF, Word and Excel; a PDF costs one page | |
| Change monitoring | Watch (beta) | |
| Agents | ||
| MCP | Hosted, no install; key or OAuth; 17 tools | |
| Setup | One message sets it up in 7 coding agents | |
| Agent budget | Estimate, balance, spend cap and top-up as tools; cost on every answer | Not in their MCP tool list |
| Open source | ||
| License | Apache 2.0, 87,236 GitHub stars | |
| Self-host | The same engine as the Cloud | |
Crawl4AI's prices come from its live price list, GET /v1/prices. Prices change; check each product's own pricing page before you decide.
The trade-off
What each one does better
FWhere Firecrawl does best
- Data indexes. 400+ data providers, research papers and SEC filings inside a search call.
- Live browser sessions. A cloud browser your code clicks and fills, billed by the minute.
- Media formats. Screenshots, branding, audio and video from one call.
- One flat page price. A hard page costs the same 1 credit as a plain one.
Where Crawl4AI is the better choice
- Pay for the work, not the attempt. 0.1 credit for a plain page, nothing for a failed or blocked call, half price for a page we already hold.
- Made for agents. One message sets it up; 17 MCP tools cover recipes, jobs, cost estimates and the budget.
- Ready data from named sites. 93 recipes, LinkedIn included, return fixed columns for about 1 credit.
- Built for enterprise. Three regions, teams and an audit log from Builder, SSO and SCIM, and 14-day refunds.
Switch in one prompt
Move your Firecrawl calls in minutes
Paste this into Claude Code, Cursor or Codex in your project. It finds your Firecrawl calls and moves them to Crawl4AI, one endpoint at a time, and keeps both working until you check the results.
| Firecrawl | Crawl4AI | |
| /v2/scrape | → | POST /scrape |
| /v2/batch/scrape | → | POST /scrape/jobs |
| /v2/crawl | → | POST /site |
| /v2/map | → | POST /scan |
| /v2/search | → | GET /search · /serp |
| formats: json | → | POST /extract |
| LinkedIn, X URLs | → | POST /recipes/{name} |
| /v2/monitor | → | Watch |
From both products' docs, 12 Nov 2026.
Using both
Not either-or. Both speak MCP, so one agent can hold both. A team could keep Firecrawl for screenshots and media formats and use Crawl4AI for recipes, Google results and EU data.
screenshots · media formats
recipes · Google · EU data
Frequently asked questions
How much does Firecrawl cost?
Firecrawl charges 1 credit per page. Plans are Hobby $19 (5,000 credits), Standard $99 (100,000), Growth $399 (500,000) and Scale $749 (1,000,000) a month, so 1,000 pages cost $0.75 to $3.80; JSON extraction makes it 5 credits a page. Crawl4AI charges $0.10 per 1,000 plain pages and $0.50 per 1,000 browser pages.
Does Firecrawl charge for failed requests?
Yes, when the site answers with an error page: Firecrawl's pricing page says a page that answers 403 or 404 costs 1 credit. Crawl4AI charges nothing for a failed call, a blocked page included.
Does Firecrawl give refunds?
Firecrawl's terms say "We do not provide refunds for any reason on our Services." On Crawl4AI, a first plan payment or an extra-credit purchase is refundable within 14 days if none of its credits were used.
Does Firecrawl have EU data residency?
By its own security page, Firecrawl "processes all data in the United States and does not offer EU data residency." Crawl4AI runs in the EU, Singapore and the US, and keeps account and billing data in the EU.
Can Firecrawl scrape LinkedIn?
Firecrawl's docs say "Firecrawl doesn't scrape LinkedIn"; it sends profile and company URLs to data providers at 5 to 40 credits each. Crawl4AI has LinkedIn recipes for profiles, companies, jobs, people search and posts; a profile costs 1 credit.
Which is cheaper for 50,000 pages a month?
With 20% browser pages, 5% hard sites, 5% blocked pages and 10% repeat pages: Crawl4AI $12.41 (Starter plus extra credits), Firecrawl $99 (Standard). Move the sliders above for your own mix.
Is Crawl4AI self-host only, with no search and no public pricing?
No. A page on Firecrawl's site says so, and it is out of date. Crawl4AI Cloud is live in three regions with a public price list, /search and Google results, a hosted MCP server, and 87,236 GitHub stars on the open-source engine (GitHub, 2026-11-12).
Sources and method
- Firecrawl pricing ↗
- Firecrawl billing ↗
- Firecrawl security ↗
- Firecrawl terms ↗
- Firecrawl docs: scrape, crawl, enhanced mode, SIEM, SSO ↗
- Firecrawl status ↗
- Crawl4AI prices ↗
- Crawl4AI legal ↗
We read these pages on 12 Nov 2026. Crawl4AI's facts come from its live price list, docs and terms. Something wrong or out of date? Write to hello@crawl4ai.com and we fix it.