Both are good tools. The difference is the business model and where each one wins on real workloads. We ran a 34-case parity battery on 2026-04-14 with real API keys on both services and published every request, response, duration, and cost. This page shows where each tool wins — no marketing tricks, no cherry-picked numbers.
"We apologize for the inconvenience but we do not support this site. If you are part of an enterprise and want to have a further conversation about this, please fill out our intake form here."
— Firecrawl API response when you try to scrape LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook. Tested 2026-04-15.
FairCrawl scrapes those sites today. Same public data, same HTTP GET, no enterprise contact form.
Firecrawl's "cheaper" pricing is bulk-tier-only. Entry pricing is $16/mo minimum regardless of usage. FairCrawl has no floor — pay exactly for what you scrape.
| Monthly volume | Use case | FairCrawl | Firecrawl | Savings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100 pages/month | Weekend project, prototyping | $0.07 | $16.00 | 229× cheaper |
| 1,000 pages/month | Small app, occasional scraping | $0.70 | $16.00 | 23× cheaper |
| 10,000 pages/month | Growing product, daily pipelines | $7.00 | $83.00 | 12× cheaper |
| 100,000 pages/month | Mid-market data team | $70.00 | $83.00 | 1.2× cheaper |
| 500,000 pages/month | High-volume production | $350.00 | $333.00 | 5% cheaper |
FairCrawl: $0.0007/page × volume. Firecrawl: Hobby $16/mo up to 3,000 credits, Standard $83/mo up to 100,000 credits, Growth $333/mo up to 500,000 credits. Firecrawl charges whichever tier covers your usage.
Wall-clock times from the same machine, same moment, both production APIs. Firecrawl caches popular URLs at the edge — we don't (yet). Our /map is faster because our sitemap cascade is more efficient.
| Test | FairCrawl | Firecrawl | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Static site scrape (example.com) | 5.2s | 0.5s | Firecrawl edge cache — they're 10× faster here |
| JS-heavy scrape (stripe.com/pricing) | 5.6s | 0.7s | Firecrawl edge cache again; we're fresh every time |
| URL discovery /map (no sitemap fallback) | 4.9s | 6.3s | FairCrawl 1.3× faster when there's no sitemap to cheat with |
| Browser actions /interact (cookie session) | 7.1s | 4.2s | Firecrawl faster; both work |
| Agent: find Stripe transaction fee | 7.0s | 241s | FairCrawl 35× faster — real parity battery result |
| Agent: compare pricing across tools | 14.9s | 179s | FairCrawl 12× faster — agent is our killer feature |
| SSRF block: cloud metadata IP (169.254.169.254) | 400 blocked | 200 LEAKED | FairCrawl blocks, Firecrawl does not — real security gap |
The latency gap on scrape is primarily edge caching. Firecrawl has been in market longer and built out CDN-style caching for high-traffic targets. For agents and batch pipelines where you're scraping a long tail of URLs, the cache advantage is smaller — and our /map and /agent are competitive.
Every endpoint Firecrawl has, we have. Plus things they don't.
| Feature | FairCrawl | Firecrawl | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single page scrape | ✓ | ✓ | Both work |
| Automatic JS rendering | ✓ | ✓ | Both work |
| Clean main-content extraction | ✓ | ✓ | Both use Mozilla Readability |
| Full-page screenshots | ✓ | ✓ | Both work |
| PDF parsing (fast + OCR) | ✓ | ✓ | Both work |
| DOCX parsing | ✓ | ✓ | Both work |
| Login / cookie support | ✓ | ✓ | Both work |
| Residential proxies | ✓ | ✓ | Both work |
| Location-based proxy country | ✓ | ✓ | Both work |
| Ask a question about a page (query param) | ✓ | ✓ | Both work |
| Feature | FairCrawl | Firecrawl | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Multi-page crawl | ✓ | ✓ | Both work |
| URL discovery (/map) | faster | ✓ | FairCrawl 1.7× faster on stripe.com (6.3s vs 10.9s) |
| Browser actions (click/fill/wait/scroll/navigate) | ✓ | ✓ | Both work |
| Session persistence (profile_id) | ✓ | ✓ | Both work |
| NL orchestration (/agent) | ✓ | ✓ | FairCrawl uses Gemini function-calling |
| Feature | FairCrawl | Firecrawl | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scrape LinkedIn profiles | ✓ | REFUSED | Firecrawl: 'We do not support this site. Contact enterprise.' FairCrawl: 19,000 chars extracted from Satya Nadella's profile, $0.0007. |
| Scrape Twitter/X posts | ✓ | REFUSED | Firecrawl: 'Contact enterprise.' FairCrawl: typed /tweet endpoint via public syndication API. |
| Scrape Reddit threads | ✓ | REFUSED | Firecrawl: 'Contact enterprise.' FairCrawl: routes to Reddit's public JSON endpoint. |
| Scrape TikTok profiles | ✓ | REFUSED | Firecrawl: 'Contact enterprise.' FairCrawl: typed /tiktok endpoint. |
| Scrape Instagram / Facebook / Meta | ✓ | REFUSED | Firecrawl: 'Contact enterprise.' FairCrawl: typed endpoints. |
| Feature | FairCrawl | Firecrawl | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freshness tracking for sources | ✓ | — | Track when data becomes stale |
| URL monitoring (watches) | ✓ | — | Add URL, extract schema, get notified on change |
| Multi-source research (/research) | ✓ | — | 14 sources fan-out + synthesis |
| Company enrichment | ✓ | — | Native, not a 3rd-party actor |
| Feature | FairCrawl | Firecrawl | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| TypeScript / Node SDK | ✓ | ✓ | Both work |
| Python SDK | ✓ | ✓ | FairCrawl: sync + async via httpx |
| MCP server (Claude Code / Cursor / Windsurf) | ✓ | ✓ | Both work |
| CLI | ✓ | ✓ | Both work |
| Go / Rust / Java / Elixir SDKs | — | ✓ | Firecrawl ahead here |
| Feature | FairCrawl | Firecrawl | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subscription required | — | ✓ | Firecrawl: $16/mo minimum |
| Credits expire monthly | — | ✓ | FairCrawl: never expire |
| Pay exactly for what you use | ✓ | — | Firecrawl: credit packs, waste on unused |
| Free tier | 100 scrapes, no card | 500 credits one-time | Both one-time, FairCrawl has no expiry |
100 free scrapes on signup. No credit card. Then $0.0007 each, no subscription. Drop in your Firecrawl workflow and see for yourself.
Read the docs →