Fastcrawl vs Firecrawl

Firecrawl is the closest thing Fastcrawl has to a direct competitor: same core job — give it a URL, get clean LLM-ready data back — with a similar surface of scrape, crawl, map, extract and search endpoints. If you're evaluating both, the differences come down to price, rate limits and a handful of features each one has that the other doesn't.

This comparison is written to be useful even if you pick Firecrawl. Figures were verified against both public pricing pages on 2026-08-29.

Side by side

Where Fastcrawl wins

Price at the entry point. Fastcrawl's Go plan is $5/mo for 5,000 credits. Firecrawl's Hobby tier is $19/mo (when billed yearly) for the same 5,000 credits — roughly four times the cost. The free tiers differ too: 2,000 credits with us against 1,000 with Firecrawl, so you get twice the runway to build a prototype before paying anything.

No rate limit on paid. Fastcrawl's Go plan has no concurrency cap. Requests keep succeeding past 5,000 credits — the overage is metered at $0.25 per 1,000 and you can switch it off for a hard cap if you'd rather never exceed your budget. Firecrawl caps concurrency at 5 on Hobby and 25 on Standard, which matters if your agent bursts.

Predictable billing. One flat credit per call, every format. Firecrawl meters per endpoint: scrape, crawl and map are 1 credit, but search is 2 credits per 10 results and browser-interact is 2 credits per browser minute. If your workload mixes endpoints, our bill is simpler to forecast.

PDF parse is included. Send a PDF URL and get markdown back, on any plan. Firecrawl doesn't offer a PDF parsing endpoint.

Where Firecrawl wins

Browser interact and agent control. Firecrawl can drive a browser — click, scroll, fill forms — billed at 2 credits per browser minute. If your workflow needs to interact with a page rather than just read it, that's a real capability we don't have.

Higher published scale. Firecrawl lists tiers up to 1,000,000 credits per month ($599 Scale) and a custom Enterprise tier. If you're operating at that volume today, they have a ready-made path; with us that's a conversation.

Brand and ecosystem. Firecrawl is better known, with more SDKs, tutorials and third-party integrations. If community examples and Stack Overflow answers matter to your team's velocity, that's a genuine advantage.

Which should you pick?

Pick Fastcrawl if you're cost-sensitive, running a bursty agent workload that would trip a concurrency cap, want PDF parsing, or simply want a bill you can predict without modelling per-endpoint multipliers. Most small-to-mid agent projects land here.

Pick Firecrawl if you need scripted browser interaction, you're already operating above ~100k credits a month and want a published tier to land on, or ecosystem breadth matters more than price.