Apify vs. Firecrawl: how Firecrawl compares to the Apify Actors built for the same job

Firecrawl is a web data API. You send it a URL or a search query, and it sends back clean Markdown or JSON your LLM can use. Apify offers thousands of tools for AI, and some of them do exactly what Firecrawl does: Web Fetch, RAG Web Browser, Website Content Crawler, and AI Web Scraper.

This comparison works on two levels. First, it puts Firecrawl's four core features side by side with the Apify Actors that match them. Then it looks at Alexandria, the library Firecrawl launched to move beyond its own endpoints, and at what Apify offers for the same jobs.

Apify and Firecrawl at a glance

Firecrawl started as an API-first crawler. Its core endpoints scrape a page, search the web, crawl a site, and extract structured data. In September 2026, Firecrawl launched Alexandria, a library of data providers and indexes that AI agents can query through Firecrawl.

Apify is a marketplace of ready-to-run tools for AI that automate work on the web. Thousands of Actors get web data, generate leads, monitor social media, track competitors, and integrate with existing apps and agents. Whichever Actor you pick, you get:

• Anti-blocking technology and Apify Proxy
• A native scheduler for recurring runs
• Integrations with LangChain, LlamaIndex, n8n, Zapier, Make, vector databases, and more
• One API, with datasets and webhooks, for every Actor
• MCP and CLI to easily embed Apify in your AI workflows

Here's how Firecrawl's features map to Apify Actors:

How Apify and Firecrawl pricing works

Both platforms include a monthly allowance with each plan. On Firecrawl, each plan includes a monthly credit allowance, and each operation costs a set number of credits. On Apify, each plan includes prepaid platform usage, and each Actor charges per event or per compute unit. Higher Apify plans get discounts on Actor prices.

Concurrency limits

Both platforms limit how much work runs in parallel, but they count it differently.

Firecrawl sets a fixed number of browsers you can use at once for each plan, from 2 on the free plan to 100 or more on Scale. Jobs over that limit wait in a queue until a browser frees up. Each plan also caps how many requests you can send per minute. If you go over that cap, you get an error.

Apify sets two limits for each plan: how many Actor runs you can have at once, and how much memory (RAM) those runs can use. Whichever you reach first limits how much you can run at once.

Free tiers

Both platforms have one. Firecrawl's free plan includes 1,000 credits a month, enough for 1,000 page scrapes, with no credit card required. Apify's free plan includes $5 of prepaid usage every month, which covers about 3,300 Web Fetch fetches, for example.

Firecrawl

The Standard plan costs $83 a month (billed annually) and includes 100,000 credits. A page scrape uses 1 credit and a scrape with JSON extraction uses 5, so the plan covers 100,000 plain scrapes, 20,000 JSON extractions, or any mix of the two. Unused credits on Standard don't roll over to the next month. Only Scale (one month) and Enterprise (custom terms) carry credits over.

Apify

The Starter plan costs $19 a month and includes $19 of prepaid usage. Each Actor draws from that balance in its own way:

• Per event: Web Fetch charges $1.50 per 1,000 successful fetches on Starter, so $19 covers about 12,600 fetches.
• Per compute unit: Website Content Crawler charges for the compute it uses, at $0.20 per compute unit on Starter. A simple static site crawled over raw HTTP costs about $0.20 per 1,000 pages, so $19 covers roughly 90,000 pages of a simple site. A JavaScript-heavy site that needs a headless browser uses more.

Once you've used up your prepaid usage, you pay as you go.

Fetch a single page as Markdown: Firecrawl Scrape vs. Web Fetch

Firecrawl Scrape and Web Fetch both take a URL, render JavaScript, get past bot protection, and return the page as Markdown, HTML, or plain text.

Firecrawl Scrape returns a page as Markdown, HTML, raw HTML, screenshots, links, image URLs, a page summary, product data, brand colors and fonts, or JSON. It can click, type, scroll, and wait before scraping, emulate a mobile device, set the country and language, and parse PDF and DOCX files. By default, it serves pages from a cache up to two days old, which you can turn off when you need a fresh copy. Batch scraping handles many URLs in one call.

Web Fetch is simpler by design: one URL in, one page out, as Markdown, HTML, plain text, a list of links, or the raw response. It handles web pages, PDFs, images, and text files such as JSON or CSV, and you can send custom headers for localized content or a session cookie. It renders JavaScript only for sites that need it, and when you use it via the server interface, you get the page back directly in the response. It's also available as an MCP server for AI agents. Responses are capped at 10 MB and 2 minutes.

Where they differ

• Output: Firecrawl has many more formats and can interact with the page before scraping. Web Fetch sticks to text formats and the raw response.
• Volume: Firecrawl scrapes many URLs in one batch call. Web Fetch takes one URL per request.
• Concurrency: Firecrawl caps parallel work by plan, from 2 concurrent browsers on the free plan to 100 or more on Scale, and from 10 to 10,000 scrape requests per minute. Jobs over the browser limit wait in a queue, and going over the per-minute cap returns an error. Enterprise plans can get higher limits. Web Fetch used via the server interface scales on its own, and one run serves many requests at once.
• Freshness: Firecrawl serves cached pages by default, which makes repeat requests fast. Web Fetch fetches the live page every time.

Benchmark results. In the Apify web unblocker benchmark, run on 384 deliberately hard URLs (social platforms, paywalled news, e-commerce, and JavaScript-heavy pages), Web Fetch got through on 351 URLs (91%) and Firecrawl on 341 (89%). Firecrawl was faster, with p95 latency of 19.0 seconds against 48.1 seconds for Web Fetch.

Pricing. Web Fetch costs $1.50 per 1,000 successful fetches on Free and Starter, $1.25 on Scale, and $1 on Business, and failed requests are free. A Firecrawl scrape costs 1 credit, so the price per page depends on your plan: about $3.20 per 1,000 pages on Hobby, down to about $0.60 per 1,000 on Scale (annual billing). Firecrawl doesn't charge for a scrape that returns nothing, but a page that returns an error such as 403 still costs 1 credit.

Search the web and read the results: Firecrawl Search vs. RAG Web Browser

Both tools take a search query, find the top results, open them, and return their content as Markdown.

Firecrawl Search can search the web, news, and images in one call. You can narrow results by category (research sites, PDFs, or Firecrawl's Developer Index), location, time range, or domain, and scrape each result in any Scrape format.

RAG Web Browser searches Google and scrapes up to 100 results per query. You can choose a full browser or a faster raw HTTP client, strip unwanted page elements with CSS selectors, and have it close cookie dialogs automatically. You can also set how many pages it opens in parallel and how often it retries failed ones. It accepts a single URL instead of a query, too. Like Web Fetch, you can use it via the server interface, so an AI agent can call it as a live search tool and get results in the response.

Where they differ

• Sources: Firecrawl searches web, news, and images, with filters for category, location, time range, and domain. RAG Web Browser searches Google.
• Output: Firecrawl can return each result in any Scrape format, including screenshots and JSON. RAG Web Browser returns Markdown, text, or HTML.
• Scraping control: RAG Web Browser lets you choose the scraping tool, remove page elements, and tune parallelism and retries. Firecrawl applies its Scrape options to each result.

Pricing. Firecrawl charges 2 credits per 10 search results, plus 1 credit for each result page it fetches. Searching and reading 10 pages costs 12 credits.

RAG Web Browser charges per search result and per fetched page, and the price drops as your Apify plan goes up:

Crawl a whole site into Markdown: Firecrawl Crawl vs. Website Content Crawler

Both tools start from a URL, discover a site's pages, and return each one as clean content for your LLM.

Firecrawl Crawl finds pages through the sitemap and by following links from a starting URL, then returns each page as Markdown, HTML, JSON, a summary, or a screenshot. You can filter URLs with include and exclude patterns, set a page limit and link depth, include subdomains, or describe the crawl in plain English and let Firecrawl set the options. Results arrive by polling, live streaming, or webhooks. If you only need a site's list of URLs, the Map endpoint returns it without crawling.

Website Content Crawler finds pages through the sitemap and by following links, filters URLs with glob patterns, and strips navigation, footers, cookie banners, and ads. You can choose a fast raw HTTP client for static sites, a headless browser for JavaScript-heavy ones, or adaptive switching between the two. It downloads linked PDF, DOCX, XLSX, and CSV files, and returns pages as Markdown, HTML, or text.

You can also turn on AI summaries, and Website Content Crawler will add a summary of a few sentences to every page it crawls. That gives you a quick preview of what a crawl found without loading full page content into your LLM's context window.

Where they differ

• Crawler type: Website Content Crawler lets you pick raw HTTP, a headless browser, or adaptive switching. Firecrawl handles JavaScript rendering for you.
• Output: Firecrawl can return screenshots and JSON for each page. Website Content Crawler returns text formats and downloads linked files.
• Setup and delivery: Firecrawl can set crawl options from a plain-English description, stream results live, and list a site's URLs with Map.

Pricing. Firecrawl Crawl costs 1 credit per page, plus 4 for JSON, and PDFs cost 1 credit per PDF page. Map costs 1 credit per request, however many URLs it returns, according to Firecrawl's Map docs. Website Content Crawler is priced on usage, so the cost depends on how heavy the site is. Crawling with the raw HTTP client costs about $0.20 per 1,000 pages. A headless browser costs about $0.50–$5 per 1,000 pages. For sites that work over plain HTTP, that's cheaper than Firecrawl on any plan.

Structured data from a plain-English prompt: Firecrawl JSON format vs. AI Web Scraper

Both let you describe the data you want in plain English and get JSON back, with no CSS selectors to maintain.

Firecrawl JSON format adds structured extraction to its scrape or crawl calls. You can pass a JSON schema to get exact fields and data types, or just a prompt and let the model decide the structure. For jobs that go beyond known URLs, Firecrawl's /agent endpoint takes a prompt (and optionally URLs and a schema), searches and navigates on its own, and returns structured data. You can set its effort level and cap spending per run.

AI Web Scraper has three modes:

• Single page: extracts data from the URLs you provide, like Firecrawl's JSON format.
• Scout: finds the pages that match your request and returns their links and Markdown.
• Agentic: finds the right pages through the sitemap and your start URLs, opens each item page, follows links to more items, and returns one detailed record per item. Use it when the data you want is buried deep in a site, for example, "find the pricing pages and extract the plans from each."

In every mode, you describe what you want in a prompt. In Scout and Agentic modes, you can also set a page limit, and in Agentic mode, a crawl depth. There's no separate schema input, so you describe the fields in the prompt. Results export as JSON, CSV, XML, or Excel, and the Actor handles JavaScript-heavy sites with Apify's anti-blocking built in.

Where they differ

• Schema: Firecrawl accepts a JSON schema for exact fields and types. AI Web Scraper takes the fields in the prompt.
• Page discovery: AI Web Scraper's Scout and Agentic modes find the right pages within a site on their own. Firecrawl's JSON format works on the pages you scrape or crawl, and /agent can search the open web. Agentic mode is the closest match to /agent, but it works from the start URLs you give it.
• Export: AI Web Scraper exports to CSV, XML, or Excel as well as JSON. Firecrawl returns JSON in the API response.

Pricing. Firecrawl's JSON format costs 4 extra credits per page, so 5 credits in total. The /agent endpoint gives you 5 free runs a day, and after that the price depends on how complex the task is. Firecrawl says most runs use a few hundred credits. AI Web Scraper costs $30 per 1,000 page extractions on Free, $25 on Starter, $22 on Scale, and $20 on Business, with LLM tokens included.

Firecrawl's Alexandria library

With Alexandria, Firecrawl is adding tools beyond its own endpoints. At the time of writing, the library lists about 90 providers. Three are indexes maintained by Firecrawl, and the rest come from third-party publishers.

Firecrawl-maintained indexes

• Developer Index: documentation, READMEs, repositories, issues, and pull requests
• Research Index: scientific paper abstracts, with tools to read passages and follow citations
• Government Index: tax forms, laws, regulations, and permit information from US federal, state, county, and city sites

An index is a stored copy of pages crawled earlier. That makes it fast to query, but it's only as fresh as its last update. If your use case needs live data, use a tool that fetches from the source. For example, a GitHub search scraper on Apify returns what's on GitHub right now.

E-commerce tools

Alexandria lists several retail tools, including Etsy, IKEA US, Newegg US, Nike US, and PSA. E-commerce sites are some of the hardest to scrape, so a dedicated retail category is a useful addition.

The coverage is thin, though. There's no dedicated tool for Amazon or eBay, and most tools target US stores. On Apify, E-commerce Scraping Tool works with Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Zalando, and any online store with public product pages, including stores outside any listed coverage. Apify Store also has dedicated Actors for regional marketplaces, such as Leboncoin in France.

Contact details with FullEnrich

Alexandria includes FullEnrich as a third-party data provider for people and company search, profile lookups, firmographics, and verified contact data.

FullEnrich isn't on Apify, but other contact data providers are, including Icypeas and ScaleList. You can also get emails, phone numbers, and social profiles straight from company websites with Contact Details Scraper, which is Apify-maintained.

When to use Firecrawl

• You want a short learning curve. One API with a handful of endpoints is quick to pick up.
• You want to self-host. Firecrawl's core is open source, so you can run it yourself and avoid vendor lock-in.
• You need low latency. Caching for recently fetched pages and in-house indexes make repeat lookups and searches fast.
• You need rich output from a single call. Scrape returns screenshots, product data, and branding alongside Markdown, and it can click and scroll before scraping.

When to use Apify

• You need social media data. On Apify, Instagram Scraper returns posts, reels, comments, and profiles, TikTok Scraper returns videos, profiles, and hashtags, and YouTube Scraper returns video and channel stats, playlists, and subtitles. Firecrawl's core features map to four Actors; Apify Store has thousands more.
• You need retail data outside of the US. Alexandria gives more data options to pick from on Firecrawl, but it still lacks the depth of Apify Store. Particularly if you’re looking for retail data outside of the US.
• You need to get past tough blocking. Web Fetch had the highest success rate in the unblocker benchmark, and every Actor runs with Apify's anti-blocking technology.
• You want crawler options to control costs. Website Content Crawler lets you pick a cheap HTTP crawler or a headless browser, and downloads linked files.
• You want to schedule whole jobs. The native scheduler runs any Actor on a cron schedule, from a nightly site crawl to a weekly social media scrape, and webhooks pass the results on when a run finishes.
• You want to build your own tool. If nothing in Apify Store fits, you can build your own Actor with the Apify SDK, run it on the same infrastructure, and publish it for others to use. Apify maintains a Claude Skill for Actor development to help you get started.
• You need high concurrency. Firecrawl concurrency limit is quite tight, allowing only 2 concurrent browsers on the free plan. If you need to run multiple jobs in parallel, Apify is preferable. Especially if you use an Actor with a server interface like the Web Fetch, which doesn't have a concurrency limit.

The verdict

For fetching, searching, crawling, and extracting, Firecrawl and the matching Apify Actors are close competitors. Firecrawl is faster and simpler to start with. Apify gets through more blocking, gives you more crawler options, and costs less for simple crawls. The bigger difference is what surrounds those four tools. Firecrawl is one web data API with a growing library of data providers. On Apify, the four matching Actors are a small part of a marketplace that also covers social media, e-commerce, and lead generation, and every Actor runs on the same infrastructure, with the same scheduler, integrations, and API.

Note: This evaluation is based on our understanding of information available to us as of September 2026. Readers should conduct their own research for detailed comparisons. Product names, logos, and brands are used for identification only and remain the property of their respective owners. Their use does not imply affiliation or endorsement.