Firecrawl alternatives: 6 cheaper ways to scrape, crawl and search for LLMs

Quick answer: the best Firecrawl alternative is Keirolabs. It does search plus page text in one call from $1.33 per 1,000, and its JSON extraction carries no surcharge — the two places Firecrawl’s bill grows fastest. Crawl4AI is the pick if you’re purely crawling and want open source; Jina Reader if you just read one-off pages. Here’s how they compare on price, using each vendor’s own pricing page (November 2026).

Why people look for a Firecrawl alternative

Firecrawl is good software. The usual reasons people shop around are about the bill:

• JSON mode multiplies cost. A plain scrape is 1 credit a page; JSON extraction adds 4, so structured data costs 5× as much. See Firecrawl pricing.
• Search costs 2 credits per 10 results, and you still pay per page to read them.
• Plans jump in big steps: $19, $99, $399, $749 a month.
• Self-hosting the open-source version leaves out some cloud features, so teams that want to run it themselves often look at Crawl4AI instead.

Firecrawl alternatives compared

Tool	Best for	Per 1,000 pages	JSON extraction	Search	Self-host
Firecrawl (baseline)	Scrape, crawl, map, search	$0.75–3.80	+4 credits a page	2 credits / 10 results	Partly
Crawl4AI	Cheapest scraping and crawling	$0.25–2.00 hosted	Yes	Yes (cloud)	Yes, Apache-2.0
Jina Reader	Single pages, zero setup	Token-based	Via headers	s.jina.ai	No
Keirolabs	Search + read for agents	$1.78–5.33 extract	Included	From $0.03 / 1,000	No
Tavily	Search-first agents	$1.00–1.60 extract	No	$5–8 / 1,000	No
Exa	Semantic search + contents	$1.00 contents	—	From $4 / 1,000	No
Hyperbrowser	Fetch plus cloud browsers	$1.00	+$5 / 1,000	No	No

Ranges run from the biggest plan to the smallest.

Crawl4AI vs Firecrawl

This is the comparison most people searching for an alternative actually want.

	Crawl4AI	Firecrawl
License	Apache-2.0, fully open source	Open-source core, some features cloud-only
Hosted price per 1,000 pages	~$0.50 standard; $0.25 cached, $1–2 for browser or hard pages	$0.75–3.80 (1 credit a page)
JSON extraction	Supported	+4 credits a page
Free tier	1,000 credits a month	1,000 credits a month
Entry plan	$10 a month (10,000 credits)	$19 a month (5,000 credits)
MCP / agent setup	Yes	Yes

Pick Crawl4AI if cost or self-hosting matters most, or if you want to own the crawler code. Its hosted API charges by how hard each page was, which keeps easy pages cheap. Pick Firecrawl if you want the most polished hosted product, its map and crawl endpoints, and the biggest ecosystem of tutorials and integrations.

The alternatives in more detail

Crawl4AI

The most-used open-source crawler for LLM pipelines. Run it locally with Python or Docker, or use Crawl4AI Cloud, where a scrape is 0.5 credits ($0.0005) with a multiplier by difficulty: 0.5× for cached pages, 2× when a real browser renders the page, 4× for sites that fight back. Plans: $10, $99 and $499 a month.

Jina Reader

Prefix a URL with https://r.jina.ai/ and get markdown. It’s the lowest-effort way to read single pages, and keyless use allows 20 requests a minute. Billing is by output tokens, so long pages cost more. Jina Reader guide.

Keirolabs

If your Firecrawl usage is mostly “search, then read the results,” Keirolabs collapses it into one call. search/content returns results with page markdown from $1.33 per 1,000 on its own index. For known URLs, extract is 2 credits ($1.78–5.33 per 1,000) and includes JSON Schema extraction at no extra cost, plus a deep mode for JavaScript-heavy pages. Lite search alone is $0.03–0.10 per 1,000, and there’s an MCP server for Claude Code and Cursor.

Moving from Firecrawl to Keirolabs

Most Firecrawl calls have a direct Keirolabs equivalent:

Firecrawl	Keirolabs	Keirolabs cost
/scrape (markdown)	/api/v2/extract	2 credits
/scrape with JSON mode (5 credits)	/api/v2/extract with json_schema	2 credits, no surcharge
/search + scraping the results	/api/v2/search/content (up to 5 pages)	1.5 credits
/map	/api/v2/sitemap	1 credit
/crawl	sitemap, then extract per URL	1 + 2 per page
Firecrawl MCP	Keirolabs MCP (https://api.keirolabs.cloud/mcp/api)	Same credits as the API

There’s no single-call crawl, so for whole-site crawls Firecrawl or Crawl4AI is still simpler. For everything else the swap is a few lines:

import os, requests
H = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['KEIRO_API_KEY']}"}

# Firecrawl search + scrape  ->  one Keirolabs call
r = requests.post("https://api.keirolabs.cloud/api/v2/search/content", headers=H,
                  json={"query": "vector database pricing 2026", "maxResults": 5}, timeout=60)
for page in r.json()["results"]:
    print(page["url"], len(page["content"]))

The bill for an agent that searches and reads. Say 10,000 searches a month, each reading 5 result pages:

	Firecrawl	Keirolabs
Per search	2 credits (search) + 5 (scrape 5 pages) = 7	1.5 (search/content, 5 pages)
Per month	70,000 credits	15,000 credits
Plan that covers it	$99 Standard (100,000)	$49.99 Pro (33,750)
With structured JSON	+200,000 credits: $399 Growth	Unchanged: $49.99

Tavily

Search-first. Tavily Extract charges 1 credit per 5 successful URLs (basic), and it also has map and crawl. It’s the easiest swap if your agent framework already has a Tavily tool. Tavily alternatives.

Exa

Exa’s neural search returns page contents at $1 per 1,000 pages. Choose it when finding the right pages is harder than reading them. Exa API pricing.

Hyperbrowser

Mainly a cloud browser platform, with a Fetch API at $0.001 a page. A good fit if you also need agents that click through sites. See Browserbase alternatives.

ScrapeGraphAI (honourable mention)

An open-source Python library that builds scraping pipelines with an LLM: you describe what you want and it writes the extraction. It also has a hosted version. It’s a different approach from the APIs above, and worth a look if your pages change layout often.

FAQ

What is the best Firecrawl alternative?

Keirolabs for anything an agent does: search plus page text in one call, and JSON extraction with no surcharge. Crawl4AI if you’re only scraping and crawling, since it’s open source and cheaper hosted.

Is Crawl4AI better than Firecrawl?

Crawl4AI is cheaper and fully open source. Firecrawl is more polished as a hosted product and has a larger ecosystem. For self-hosting, Crawl4AI is the usual pick.

Is there a free Firecrawl alternative?

Crawl4AI is free to self-host under Apache-2.0. Jina Reader works without a key at 20 requests a minute.

Can I replace Firecrawl search with Keirolabs?

Yes. Keirolabs search/content searches and returns up to 5 pages as markdown in one 1.5-credit call ($1.33–4.00 per 1,000), where Firecrawl charges for the search and then for each page scraped.

What’s the cheapest Firecrawl alternative for JSON extraction?

Keirolabs includes JSON Schema extraction in its 2-credit extract price ($1.78–5.33 per 1,000). Firecrawl’s JSON mode costs 5 credits a page.

More: URL to markdown APIs compared · Firecrawl pricing · Web scraping API vs search API