Comparison
webscrapingapi.dev vs Firecrawl
Firecrawl turns websites into LLM-ready data: scrape, crawl, map, search and schema-based extraction, sold by the credit, with an open-source core. webscrapingapi.dev does one of those things, scraping a URL you already know, and does it for free. If crawling or LLM extraction is the job, this page will point you to Firecrawl.
Firecrawl's numbers were read from its pricing page in September 2026 and may have changed since. webscrapingapi.dev's numbers come from the same constants the API enforces.
In short
- Both return Markdown. Only Firecrawl crawls whole sites, searches the web, and extracts JSON with an LLM.
- webscrapingapi.dev's free cap is 50,000 credits a day; Firecrawl's free plan is 1,000 credits a month and Hobby is $19/month for 5,000.
- webscrapingapi.dev has ready-made JSON endpoints for a handful of sites; Firecrawl is general-purpose and self-hostable.
| Feature | webscrapingapi.dev | Firecrawl |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free. 50,000 credits per account per day (about 1.5 million a month), no card, no plan to pick. | Free plan: 1,000 credits a month, 2 concurrent requests. Hobby $19/month ($16 billed yearly) for 5,000 credits; Standard 100,000, Growth 500,000 and Scale 1,000,000 credits a month at higher tiers; Enterprise is custom. |
| What one credit buys | One plain fetch is 1 credit. A JavaScript render is 5, metadata 1, a site endpoint 1 (0 when the answer comes from the shared cache). | One page on scrape, crawl or map. JSON, Question and Highlight formats add 4 credits a page; search is 2 credits per 10 results. |
| Output formats | HTML, plain text, Markdown, or JSON from CSS extraction rules. A separate metadata endpoint returns title, Open Graph and JSON-LD. | Markdown, HTML, links and screenshots, plus JSON through LLM extraction with a schema or a prompt. |
| Crawl a whole site | No. One URL per request. | Yes: crawl and map endpoints with a job queue. |
| Web search | No. | Yes, a search endpoint. |
| LLM extraction | No. Extraction is CSS selectors: deterministic, 1 credit, no model in the loop. | Yes, schema- or prompt-based, at extra credits per page. |
| Proxies and anti-bot | None. Requests come from Google Cloud IPs. A page that blocks the request returns SITE_BLOCKED and the credit is refunded. | Proxy rotation and bot handling are part of the service. |
| JavaScript rendering | Yes: headless Chrome, 5 credits, with an optional wait-for selector. | Yes; browser-based rendering is the default. |
| Ready-made JSON endpoints | 7 sites today: Amazon, YouTube, App Store, Google Play, Hacker News, Wikipedia, GitHub. New ones are built on request through the board. | None; it is a general-purpose scraper. |
| Limits | 60 requests a minute per key, up to 5 keys per account. | 2 concurrent browsers and 10 requests a minute on Free; 25 browsers and 500 a minute on Standard; more on higher plans. |
| Open source, self-hosting | No. Hosted only. | Yes. The core is open source (AGPL) and can be self-hosted. |
| Compliance and support | One maintainer, no SLA. Questions and site requests go to the public board. | SOC 2 Type II; support tiers by plan; SLA and SSO on Enterprise. |
Choose Firecrawl when
- You need to crawl whole sites into an LLM pipeline, with search and schema-based extraction.
- You need compliance paperwork, an SLA, or a self-hosted deployment.
- Your targets need proxies and bot handling.
Choose webscrapingapi.dev when
- You fetch known URLs and want Markdown or CSS-extracted JSON at zero cost, 50,000 times a day.
- You want deterministic extraction without a model in the loop.
- You want clean JSON for Amazon, YouTube, App Store, Google Play, Hacker News, Wikipedia, GitHub without writing a parser.
Questions people ask
Can webscrapingapi.dev crawl a whole website like Firecrawl?
No. It scrapes one URL per request. For crawling, use Firecrawl, or do your own link discovery and send each URL.
Does webscrapingapi.dev return Markdown like Firecrawl?
Yes. Add format=markdown to /v1/scrape and the page body comes back as GitHub-flavored Markdown, which is what most agents and RAG pipelines want.
Which one is cheaper for 100,000 pages a month?
On webscrapingapi.dev that volume sits inside the free daily cap of 50,000 credits, so it costs nothing as long as the pages do not need JavaScript rendering. Firecrawl's Standard plan covers 100,000 credits a month at its listed price.
Something wrong or out of date here? Say so on the board and it gets fixed.