Firecrawl vs Apify
Firecrawl is one of the tools people move to when they leave Apify. Apify scores higher, 4.2 to 3.9, though the right pick depends on who you are. Only Firecrawl runs on your own server.
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Firecrawl
3.9/ 5 · Freemium
Turn any website into clean Markdown or JSON for AI agents
Apify
4.2/ 5 · Freemium
A marketplace of ready-made scrapers and AI tools, run in the cloud
The short answer
They solve the same problem from opposite ends. Firecrawl is one API: send any URL and get clean Markdown or JSON back, billed per page in credits, from $19 a month for 5,000. Apify is a marketplace of almost 80,000 ready-made scrapers (Actors) for specific sites, billed as prepaid usage plus compute units, proxies and storage, from $19 a month of usage.
Pick Firecrawl if you're feeding arbitrary pages into an LLM, RAG pipeline or coding agent and want a cost you can predict per page. Pick Apify if a well-maintained Actor already exists for the site you need, such as Google Maps, Instagram or TikTok, because someone else keeps that scraper working when the site changes. Both let unused allowance expire monthly on their standard plans.
Side by side
| Detail | Firecrawl | Apify |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Proprietary |
| Self-hostable | Yes | No |
| Our rating | 3.9 / 5 | 4.2 / 5 |
| Replaces | Apify | Bright Data |
| Best for | Developers and AI builders who need live web pages as clean text inside an LLM app, RAG pipeline or agent, and would rather pay per page than run headless browsers and proxies. | Teams that need data from well-known sites (maps, social networks, marketplaces) without writing a scraper, and developers who want to host their own crawlers on managed infrastructure. |
| Limits | Everything draws on one monthly credit pool: a basic page is 1 credit, but search is 2 credits per 10 results, browser interaction is 2 credits a minute and JSON extraction adds 4 credits a page. Credits on Free, Hobby, Standard and Growth vanish at the end of the month. Rate limits are low on Free (10 scrape requests and 2 crawl requests a minute, 2 concurrent browsers). Single sign-on, zero data retention and an SLA are Enterprise-only, and self-hosting leaves out Agent, Browser, Interact and the managed anti-bot paths. | Every plan is prepaid usage plus pay as you go: $5, $19, $199 or $999 of usage a month, then overage on paid plans. Compute units cost $0.13 to $0.20 each, residential proxies $7 to $8 per GB, and storage and data transfer are billed on top. Unused prepaid usage expires monthly. Free accounts are blocked when their $5 runs out. Store Actors may charge per event on top of platform usage, so read each Actor's pricing tab before running it at scale. |
| What you buy | One API for search, scrape, crawl, map and interact | A store of ~80,000 Actors plus hosting for your own |
| Price model | Monthly credits: 1 per page, +4 for JSON, 2 per 10 search results | Prepaid usage, then compute units ($0.13–$0.20), proxies, storage and Actor fees |
| Free plan | 1,000 credits a month, no card | $5 of usage a month, no card |
| Entry paid plan | Hobby, $19/month for 5,000 credits | Starter, $19/month of prepaid usage plus overage |
| Unused allowance | Expires monthly below Scale ($749) | Expires at the end of each billing cycle |
| Output for AI | Markdown, HTML, JSON, screenshots | Website Content Crawler: Markdown, text or HTML; other Actors return JSON datasets |
| Open source | Core engine, AGPL-3.0 | Crawlee library, Apache-2.0 (platform is proprietary) |
| AI agent access | MCP server (keyless option), CLI skills, ChatGPT and Claude connectors | MCP server, API and CLI |
What's good, what isn't
Firecrawl
- Pro: Returns Markdown, HTML, JSON or screenshots from one API call
- Pro: Free plan of 1,000 credits a month with no card, plus a keyless MCP server for agents
- Pro: Search, scrape, crawl, map and browser interaction share one credit balance
- Pro: Open-source core under AGPL-3.0 that you can run with Docker Compose
- Pro: Official SDKs for Python, Node, Go, Java, Ruby, Rust, .NET, PHP and Elixir
- Con: Unused credits expire each month on Free, Hobby, Standard and Growth; only Scale rolls over, for one month
- Con: JSON, Question and Highlight formats add 4 credits per page, so structured extraction costs 5 credits a page
- Con: Pages that answer with a 403 or 404 still cost a credit
- Con: Agent, Browser, Interact and the dashboard aren't part of the self-hosted stack
Apify
- Pro: Almost 80,000 ready-made Actors, with Google Maps, TikTok, Instagram and e-commerce scrapers among the most used
- Pro: Free plan with $5 of usage a month and no credit card
- Pro: Website Content Crawler turns whole sites into Markdown for LLMs and RAG
- Pro: Build your own scrapers on Crawlee, Apify's open-source library (Apache-2.0)
- Pro: SOC 2 Type II audited, with an MCP server and integrations for AI agents
- Con: Costs mix plan fees, compute units, proxies, storage and data transfer, so a run's price is hard to know before you test it
- Con: Unused prepaid usage expires at the end of each billing cycle
- Con: Store Actors are built by third parties, so quality, pricing model and upkeep vary from one to the next
- Con: On the free plan, running out of usage blocks you until the next monthly cycle
So which one?
Pick Firecrawl if you're one of these:
Developers and AI builders who need live web pages as clean text inside an LLM app, RAG pipeline or agent, and would rather pay per page than run headless browsers and proxies.
The quickest way to give an LLM app or agent clean text from live web pages, with an MCP server, SDKs in nine languages and an open-source core. Credits are shared across every endpoint and don't roll over below Scale, and options like JSON extraction cost five times a basic scrape.
Full Firecrawl reviewPick Apify if you're one of these:
Teams that need data from well-known sites (maps, social networks, marketplaces) without writing a scraper, and developers who want to host their own crawlers on managed infrastructure.
The fastest route to data from a specific popular site, because someone has usually already built and maintained the scraper. The bill is prepaid usage plus compute units, proxies and storage, so it is harder to predict than a per-page API.
Full Apify reviewFirecrawl vs Apify: questions
Is Firecrawl cheaper than Apify?
For general pages, usually easier to predict: Firecrawl Standard is $99 for 100,000 basic pages, about $0.001 each. Apify's cost per page depends on the Actor, memory, run time and proxies, so you only know after a test run. For one popular site with a pay-per-result Actor, Apify can be cheaper.
Which is better for RAG and LLM apps?
Firecrawl is built around LLM-ready Markdown and JSON from any URL. Apify's Website Content Crawler does the same job as an Actor and integrates with LangChain, LlamaIndex and vector databases. Firecrawl needs less setup; Apify gives more crawl settings.
Which one has the better free plan?
Firecrawl gives 1,000 credits a month, roughly 1,000 basic pages. Apify gives $5 of platform usage a month, which covers small Actor runs; when it runs out, free accounts are blocked until the next cycle. Neither needs a card.
Can I self-host either?
Firecrawl's core is open source under AGPL-3.0 and runs with Docker Compose, without Agent, Browser or Interact. Apify's platform can't be self-hosted, but its Crawlee library is open source and runs anywhere.
ChatGPT
Claude
Perplexity
Grok