Comparison ·
Firecrawl Alternatives (2026): Markdown, Crawling and Screenshots for AI Agents
Firecrawl turns web pages into Markdown for LLMs, crawls whole sites and adds search, structured JSON and browser actions on top. Most teams look for an alternative for one of three reasons: they want to self-host under a permissive license, they only need single-URL Markdown and want something simpler, or they need a reliable image of the page next to the text. This guide compares five options on what they do, what they cost and where each one falls short, using the vendors' published docs and pricing as of October 2026.
Disclosure: SnapshotFlow publishes this blog and is one of the five tools compared. We point out where the other tools are stronger, including where Firecrawl is cheaper than us.
TL;DR
- Crawl4AI: open-source Python crawler under Apache 2.0 that you run yourself; a hosted cloud is also available.
- Jina Reader: the shortest setup for a known URL. Put
r.jina.ai/in front of it. - Tavily Extract: extraction on the same credits as Tavily search.
- Cloudflare Browser Run: Markdown, screenshots, PDF and crawl on Workers, billed by browser time.
- SnapshotFlow: a screenshot API that also returns Markdown, for workflows where screenshot quality and controls matter.
- Keep Firecrawl for large crawls, search plus scrape in one API, or LLM extraction into JSON. Per Markdown page it is among the cheapest here.
What Firecrawl does and what it costs
To compare fairly, here is the baseline. Firecrawl has endpoints for scrape, crawl, map, search, structured extraction and an agent. Scrape returns Markdown by default and strips navigation and footers (onlyMainContent is on by default). Other formats include HTML, raw HTML, links, images, summary, JSON and a screenshot, and several formats can be requested together, so Markdown and a screenshot can come back from one call. Screenshots are limited to one per request, and the docs note that screenshot URLs expire after 24 hours.
| Firecrawl plan | Price per month | Credits | Cost per page if all credits are used |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 1,000 | Free, 10 scrape requests per minute |
| Hobby | $19 | 5,000 | about $0.0038 |
| Standard | $99 | 100,000 | about $0.001 |
| Growth | $399 | 500,000 | about $0.0008 |
A scrape or crawled page costs 1 credit, JSON extraction adds 4 credits per page, PDF parsing adds 1 credit per PDF page, and search costs 2 credits per 10 results. On Hobby, pay-as-you-go adds 1,000 credits for $5, so exceeding 5,000 pages does not require upgrading to Standard. Annual billing is cheaper. The numbers above are monthly prices from Firecrawl's pricing page.
Comparison table
| Type | Crawl a site | Screenshot | Free tier | Paid pricing model | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Firecrawl | API, or self-host (AGPL-3.0) | Yes | Yes, URL expires in 24 h | 1,000 credits / month | From $19 / month for 5,000 credits |
| Crawl4AI | Python library (Apache 2.0) + cloud | Yes | Yes | Open source; cloud 1,000 credits / month | Cloud from $10 / month |
| Jina Reader | API | No | Yes (screenshot, pageshot) | 20 requests / min without a key; 10M tokens per new key | Per output token |
| Tavily Extract | API | Yes (Crawl endpoint) | Not listed in the docs | 1,000 credits / month | $0.008 per credit pay-as-you-go |
| Cloudflare Browser Run | API on Workers | Yes (/crawl) | Yes | 10 browser minutes / day | Workers Paid ($5 / month minimum): 10 browser hours included, then $0.09 per hour |
| SnapshotFlow | Screenshot API with extraction | No | Yes, plus visual diff | 300 requests, one time | From $15 / month for 2,000 requests |
Cost at 1,000 and 10,000 pages a month
Per-page prices above assume you use the whole plan. For a real budget, here is the cheapest published option for two volumes of single-page Markdown extraction, without crawling, search or LLM extraction.
| 1,000 pages / month | 10,000 pages / month | |
|---|---|---|
| Firecrawl | $0 (Free, 1,000 credits) | $44 (Hobby $19 + $25 for 5,000 extra credits with pay-as-you-go enabled) |
| Tavily Extract, basic | $0 (200 credits of the free 1,000) | 2,000 credits: about $8 pay-as-you-go beyond the free 1,000 |
| Tavily Extract, advanced | $0 (400 credits) | 4,000 credits: about $24 pay-as-you-go beyond the free 1,000 |
| Cloudflare Browser Run | Free within 10 browser minutes per day. Workers Paid starts at $5 a month with 10 browser hours included, then $0.09 per extra hour. Cost depends on page load time and the daily workload. | |
| Jina Reader | Billed by output tokens, so it depends on page length. New keys include 10M tokens. | |
| Crawl4AI | Self-hosted: your own server costs. Cloud: 1,000 free credits a month, paid from $10. | |
| SnapshotFlow | $15 (Basic, 2,000 requests) | $69 (Growth, 10,000 requests) |
1. Crawl4AI: open source you run yourself
Crawl4AI is a Python crawler built for LLM pipelines. It turns pages into Markdown, follows links across a site, runs JavaScript through Playwright, and can save screenshots and PDFs. It is licensed under Apache 2.0, which matters if your legal team is wary of AGPL, the license Firecrawl uses for its open-source version.
The project now also has Crawl4AI Cloud: 1,000 free credits a month without a card, and paid tiers from $10 a month.
Trade-off: full control and no per-page fees, in exchange for maintaining Playwright, proxies and memory limits yourself. Our Playwright alternative guide covers what that involves.
2. Jina Reader: the shortest URL to Markdown
Jina Reader has the simplest interface in this list. Put https://r.jina.ai/ in front of any URL and get LLM-friendly text back. The default engine renders the page in a headless browser so client-side JavaScript runs first.
Without a key you get 20 requests per minute. A free key raises that and comes with 10M tokens. Usage is billed by tokens in the output, so the cost depends on page size, not on the number of requests, and failed requests are not charged.
The X-Respond-With header switches the output to markdown, html, text, screenshot, pageshot and other formats, and the API spec allows combining them.
Good fit for Markdown from known URLs with almost no setup. Not a fit for crawling a whole site, and the cost is hard to predict ahead of time because it scales with page length.
3. Tavily Extract: if you already search with Tavily
Tavily is a search API for AI agents, and its Extract, Map and Crawl endpoints sit on the same credit system. Basic extraction costs 1 credit per 5 successful URLs and advanced costs 2 credits per 5 URLs, and failed extractions are not charged. At the $0.008 pay-as-you-go rate that is about $0.0016 per URL on basic and $0.0032 on advanced. Every account gets 1,000 free credits a month.
Trade-off: one vendor and one bill for search and extraction, but screenshots are not part of the Extract docs.
4. Cloudflare Browser Run: browser endpoints on Workers
Cloudflare's Browser Run (the API is still named browser_rendering) offers ready-made REST endpoints: /markdown, /content, /screenshot, /pdf, /links, /json for AI extraction, /crawl for following links across a site, and /snapshot, which returns HTML, a screenshot, Markdown and the accessibility tree together.
Pricing is by browser time, not by page. Workers Free includes 10 browser minutes a day. Workers Paid includes 10 hours a month, then $0.09 per extra hour, and failed requests that hit waitForTimeout are not charged. Workers Paid itself has a $5 monthly minimum. Fast pages cost very little; slow pages that need long waits cost more.
Trade-off: a broad set of endpoints close to your Workers code, but no fixed price per page.
5. SnapshotFlow: a screenshot API that also returns Markdown
SnapshotFlow is a screenshot API first. Getting text and an image from one call is not unique: Firecrawl, Jina Reader and Cloudflare's /snapshot can do that too. What SnapshotFlow adds is control over the screenshot itself, which matters when a person or a vision model will judge the page by how it looks: pricing pages, competitor monitoring, evidence of what a page showed at a given time.
| Need | Parameter |
|---|---|
| Remove cookie banners and ads before capture | block_cookie_banners, block_ads, hide_selectors |
| Choose the image format | format=png|jpeg|webp|pdf |
| Full page or retina | full_page, device_scale_factor |
| Wait for the right state | wait_until, wait_for_selector |
| Compare two versions of a page pixel by pixel | GET /diff (Growth and Scale plans) |
Image and Markdown together, in one request and one credit:
For text only, GET /extract?format=markdown returns content, chars and truncated; see the URL to Markdown API guide. The same API does batch captures, change detection and geo-targeted captures, and the MCP server exposes screenshot, extract_text and visual_diff as tools for agents. To wire both endpoints into your own agent instead, see the LangChain screenshot tool guide.
Self-hosted Firecrawl
Before switching tools, note that Firecrawl itself is open source under AGPL-3.0 and can be self-hosted. That removes per-credit costs and keeps data on your servers, but you take on running the browsers. AGPL also has obligations if you modify the code and offer it to users over a network, so check with your legal team. If the license is the problem, Crawl4AI's Apache 2.0 license is the usual answer.
How to choose
| Your situation | Pick |
|---|---|
| Crawl whole docs sites into a RAG index | Firecrawl or Crawl4AI |
| Open source with a permissive license | Crawl4AI |
| Markdown for a known URL, minimal setup | Jina Reader |
| Search and extraction from one vendor | Tavily or Firecrawl |
| LLM extraction into a JSON schema | Firecrawl or Cloudflare /json |
| Already on Cloudflare Workers | Cloudflare Browser Run |
| Clean screenshots (no cookie banners, retina, WebP or PDF) together with the text | SnapshotFlow |
| Evidence, monitoring or visual diffs of pages over time | SnapshotFlow |
Migrating a Firecrawl scrape call
A basic Firecrawl scrape is a POST with a JSON body:
The SnapshotFlow equivalent is a GET to /extract (shown above). The field names differ:
| Firecrawl | SnapshotFlow |
|---|---|
POST /v2/scrape | GET /extract, or GET /screenshot?response_type=json&extract_content=true for image plus text |
Authorization: Bearer | X-Api-Key header |
formats: ["markdown"] | format=markdown (or html, text) |
data.markdown | content, with chars and truncated |
waitFor (ms) | wait_until, wait_for_selector on /screenshot |
onlyMainContent | No equivalent; the whole page is converted |
/crawl, /map, /search | No equivalent |
FAQ
What is the best open-source Firecrawl alternative?
Crawl4AI fits if you want an open-source Python library under the permissive Apache 2.0 license: it turns pages into Markdown, crawls sites and can take screenshots and PDFs. Firecrawl itself is also open source under AGPL-3.0 and can be self-hosted.
Is there a free Firecrawl alternative?
Crawl4AI is free to self-host. Jina Reader works without an API key at 20 requests per minute, and new keys include 10M free tokens. Tavily gives 1,000 free API credits every month, and Crawl4AI Cloud gives 1,000 free credits a month.
Which Firecrawl alternative also returns screenshots?
Crawl4AI, Jina Reader, Cloudflare Browser Run and SnapshotFlow can all return a screenshot, and Firecrawl can too. The differences are in screenshot controls; SnapshotFlow adds cookie-banner and ad blocking, PNG, JPEG, WebP and PDF output, retina scale and pixel diffs between captures.
Is Firecrawl cheaper than a screenshot API for Markdown?
For the two Markdown-only volumes compared here, Firecrawl is cheaper. At 1,000 pages a month Firecrawl is free and SnapshotFlow Basic costs $15. At 10,000 pages, Firecrawl Hobby costs $44 with pay-as-you-go enabled: $19 for 5,000 credits plus $25 for 5,000 extra credits. SnapshotFlow Growth costs $69 for 10,000 requests. A screenshot API makes more sense when you also need a controlled image of the page. See cost at 1,000 and 10,000 pages and screenshot API pricing explained.
Sources
Prices and limits checked on October 30, 2026. Vendors change them often, so confirm before you commit.
- Firecrawl pricing and credit costs
- Firecrawl advanced scraping guide (formats, screenshots, onlyMainContent)
- Crawl4AI on GitHub
- Jina Reader and its OpenAPI spec
- Tavily credits and pricing
- Cloudflare Browser Run pricing, /snapshot endpoint and Workers pricing
- SnapshotFlow pricing and API docs
Try it: 300 free requests, no card
Capture a clean full-page screenshot with cookie banners removed, plus the page's Markdown, from one call. Or connect the MCP server and let your agent capture and read pages itself.