Firecrawl alternatives, sorted by what you actually need.
Most "alternatives" lists are six scrapers in a trench coat. The useful question is whether you need a scraper at all - so we split them by job, named the free and open-source ones, and told you when to just stay on Firecrawl.
There are two kinds of "Firecrawl alternative": another scraper that does the same job slightly differently, or a different kind of API entirely because scraping was never the right tool. Work out which you are before you migrate anything.
Pick the right tool
They solve different problems. The honest fork, so you don't waste an afternoon.
Use MiroMiro if…
The people who genuinely need to leave are usually the ones who discovered a scraper cannot give them what they came for - the page's design. That is a different category, and it is at the bottom of this list.
- Your agent needs to BUILD UI that matches a reference, not summarize it
- You need design tokens, SVGs, fonts, or component code from a live page
- You tried a scraper and realized markdown could not answer your question
Use Firecrawl if…
If Firecrawl is working and you are only shopping on price, the honest answer is usually: stay. It is well built, well priced, and switching scrapers to save $10/mo is rarely worth the engineering hours.
- You need clean text or markdown from many pages (stay on Firecrawl, or try Jina Reader free)
- You need to crawl and map entire sites
- You need bespoke scraping logic (Apify) or real browser interaction (Browserless)
What each one hands your agent
stripe.com
# Financial infrastructure to grow your revenue
Join the millions of companies that use Stripe to
accept payments online and in person...
[Start now](https://dashboard.stripe.com/register)<section class="relative w-full bg-[#0a2540] py-24">
<h1 class="text-5xl font-semibold text-white">
Financial infrastructure to grow your revenue
</h1>
</section>Same URL, same moment. Every scraper on this page returns the left column. If your agent has to BUILD that hero, the left column is not enough - it has no color, no type scale, no spacing.
MiroMiro vs Firecrawl
| Feature | MiroMiro | Firecrawl |
|---|---|---|
Firecrawl Stay here if content is the product. | Clean markdown, site crawling, cheap. The default for LLM text. | |
Crawl4AI The open-source answer - you own the proxies and upkeep. | Open source, self-hosted, free forever. | |
Jina Reader If price is your only issue, start here. | Free, no account, URL-prefix → clean text. | |
Apify Best when you need bespoke scraping logic. | Actor marketplace, most flexible, most complex. | |
Browserless Right call when you must drive interactions, not just read. | Raw headless-browser control. | |
Tavily Better input for research agents than crawled pages. | Search-shaped API with cited results. | |
ScrapingBee Interest declining sharply year-on-year. | Simple proxy + render API. | |
MiroMiro Not a scraper. The alternative when text was never the answer. | Design tokens, assets, section → component code |
Side by side
MiroMiro
- Free€0300 credits/mo · no card
- Developer€19/mo5,000 credits · 60 req/min
- Growth€79/mo30,000 credits · 120 req/min
- Scale€199/mo200,000 credits · 300 req/min
- BusinessCustomVolume pricing
Firecrawl
- Free$01,000 credits/mo · 2 concurrent
- Hobby$16/mo5,000 pages · 5 concurrent
- Standard$83/mo100,000 pages · 50 concurrent
- Growth$333/mo500,000 pages · 100 concurrent
- Scale$599/mo1,000,000 pages · 150 concurrent
Across the scraper category the pricing is broadly comparable, and Firecrawl sits at the cheap end for LLM-shaped text extraction. If price is your only complaint, Jina Reader is free and will probably do. MiroMiro is not competing on cost-per-page, because it is not selling pages - it sells resolved design.
Firecrawl pricing verified 2026-07-14. Check their site for current rates.
First: are you sure you need an alternative?
Firecrawl is good at what it does. If your complaint is the $16 → $83 gap between Hobby and Standard, or a specific crawl failing on a JS-heavy site, those are usually solvable without a migration. The teams who genuinely should move are the ones whose actual requirement turned out to be something a scraper structurally cannot deliver.
The open-source alternative: Crawl4AI
If you want a Firecrawl replacement you can host yourself, Crawl4AI is the answer most teams land on - a Python crawler built for LLM pipelines that outputs clean markdown, free forever, with full data control and no per-page anxiety. The tradeoff is that you now own the infrastructure: proxies, JS rendering, anti-bot upkeep and retries. The money it saves in fees it can take back in maintenance hours. Pick it when volume is high, budgets are tight, and you have the engineering appetite to run a crawler as a service.
The free alternative: Jina Reader
Jina Reader is the lowest-friction way to turn a URL into LLM-ready text: prefix any URL with r.jina.ai/ and read the markdown back. Genuinely free for light use, no signup, and the output on articles and documentation is excellent. It reads single pages rather than crawling sites, and it offers fewer knobs when a page fights back. If price is your only complaint about Firecrawl, start here before you migrate anything - and note that Firecrawl's own free tier at 1,000 credits a month is also genuinely usable.
The heavier scraper alternatives
Apify is the most capable general platform - thousands of prebuilt scrapers ("Actors") for specific sites, plus scheduling and storage, far more flexible and correspondingly more complex. Browserless gives you raw headless-browser control, the right answer when you need to drive real interactions rather than just read a page. ScrapingBee is a straightforward proxy-and-render API, simpler than Firecrawl but less LLM-oriented, and its search interest has fallen sharply over the past year. Tavily reframes the problem entirely: instead of crawling, it gives agents a search API returning answer-shaped cited results, which is better input for a research agent than a pile of crawled pages.
The category most people actually want
A large share of Firecrawl searchers are trying to make an AI agent rebuild a page. Every scraper on this list will hand that agent text, and the agent will then invent the colors, spacing and layout - because nothing gave it those. Design extraction resolves the live CSS cascade and returns the real tokens, the assets, and the section as working code. If your job is "make my agent build UI that matches this reference," no scraper is the alternative you want. This is a category boundary, not a Firecrawl weakness: content from a scraper, design from a design API, is a real and common pattern.
Common questions
What is the best Firecrawl alternative?
It depends on the job, and anyone who answers without asking is selling you something. For cheap clean text, Jina Reader is free and excellent. For open source you host yourself, Crawl4AI. For flexible bespoke scraping, Apify. For real browser control, Browserless. For research agents, Tavily. But if you are trying to get a page's DESIGN - its tokens, assets, or code - none of those are alternatives, because none of them do that. That is design extraction, which is what MiroMiro does.
Is there a free Firecrawl alternative?
Jina Reader is free with no account - you prefix a URL and get clean text back. Crawl4AI is free and open source if you are willing to host it. Firecrawl's own free tier (1,000 credits/mo) is also genuinely usable, so check whether you have outgrown it before migrating. MiroMiro's free tier is 300 credits/month with no card, though it is solving a different problem.
What is the best open-source Firecrawl alternative?
Crawl4AI. It is the most actively developed open-source crawler built for LLM pipelines, it outputs clean markdown, and it is free forever with complete data control. The honest caveat: self-hosting means you own proxies, JS rendering, anti-bot maintenance and retries. Teams that switch to save subscription fees sometimes find those hours cost more than the plan did. Choose it for high volume, tight budgets, or hard data-residency requirements.
What is a Firecrawl replacement with more features?
Define "more". For more scraping surface - orchestration, prebuilt site-specific scrapers, scheduling, storage - Apify is the bigger platform. For more browser control, Browserless. But if "more features" means getting things Firecrawl structurally does not return (design tokens, brand colors, typography, SVGs, fonts, or a section rebuilt as Tailwind/React/Vue), that is not a bigger scraper - it is a different category, and stacking scraping credits will never get you there.
Why would I not just use a scraper?
Because a scraper returns what the page says, and if your goal is rebuilding the page, you need what it looks like. Markdown does not contain the spacing scale, the resolved colors, the gradients, or the component structure. Feeding it to a coding agent means the agent guesses at all of those - which is exactly why AI-generated UI so often "looks nothing like" the reference.
Can I use Firecrawl and MiroMiro together?
Yes, and that is the most common real setup. Firecrawl (or Jina Reader, or Crawl4AI) handles content: docs, articles, anything your RAG pipeline reads. MiroMiro handles design: the tokens, assets and component code your agent needs to build on-brand UI. They are different outputs from the same URL and they do not overlap, so there is nothing to rip out.
See it in action
Extract a design and see exactly what you get - before you write a line of code.
300 free credits every month. No credit card.