Top Firecrawl Alternatives in 2026

Apify is the biggest step up from Firecrawl if you want a marketplace instead of writing extraction logic yourself. Its Store has thousands of pre-built Actors for sites like Google Maps, Instagram, and Amazon, so jobs that would need a custom Firecrawl crawl config are often already built by someone else. Pricing starts at $29/month with a matching credit allowance, plus separate meters for compute units, proxy bandwidth, and storage, so the bill has more moving parts than Firecrawl's single credit pool. The free plan itself never expires or converts to a paid trial, but like every Apify tier its $5/month credit allotment does not roll over: unused credits are gone at the end of the month. Apify also runs an MCP server so AI agents can call Actors directly as tools, matching Firecrawl's own agent-pipeline audience. The tradeoff is a less predictable bill, since heavy anti-bot targets can push proxy costs past the subscription itself.

Bright Data is the pick once Firecrawl's credit system stops covering the sites you actually need. It runs one of the larger residential, datacenter, and mobile IP pools in the industry, plus 1,000+ pre-built scrapers for specific sites, which matters once a target starts blocking Firecrawl's stealth mode. Pricing is usage-based rather than a flat subscription: Web Scraper API and SERP API pay-as-you-go both start at $1.50 per 1,000 successful records, dropping to $1.30 on the $499/month Scale plan, and you're only billed for successful deliveries. The free tier gives 5,000 shared credits a month with no card required. The cost of that scale is complexity: pricing is split across separate pages for proxies, the Scraper API, SERP API, and Datasets, so estimating a real monthly bill takes more work than reading Firecrawl's single pricing page.

Zyte is the closest match to Firecrawl's own pitch: point an API at a URL and get back content, with proxy rotation, headless rendering, and anti-bot handling done for you. The real difference is billing. Zyte charges per successful request rather than per monthly credit block, from about $0.06 to $1.27 per 1,000 HTTP requests depending on commitment tier, with no monthly minimum on the pay-as-you-go plan. That suits teams with spiky or occasional volume that Firecrawl's subscription-only tiers punish. Browser-rendered requests cost up to about 13x plain HTTP, a steeper multiplier than Firecrawl's own roughly 5x stealth-mode markup, so JavaScript-heavy targets can cost more here, not less. Zyte also owns Scrapy Cloud, useful if your team already builds spiders in the open-source Scrapy framework instead of calling a hosted API.

ScrapingBee fits teams that want an API as simple as Firecrawl's but with a lighter feature set. Plans start at $49/month for 250,000 credits, with a 1,000-credit free trial and no card required to test it. That's pricier to start than Firecrawl's free tier or its $19/month entry plan, but cheaper than Bright Data's $499/month Scale plan or Octoparse's $69-83/month cloud tiers. Its credit math has the same trap as Firecrawl's stealth mode: a plain request costs 1 credit, but JS rendering costs 5 and stealth proxies cost 75, so the headline credit count overstates real capacity once you turn on the features most scraping jobs actually need. Independent benchmarking puts its success rate on 13 heavily-protected sites at around 31%, with some major targets near 0%, so it works well for general-purpose targets but isn't the pick for LinkedIn- or Amazon-scale anti-bot fights. It joined the Oxylabs group in January 2026, with existing prices unchanged.

Octoparse is for the ops or research side of the reader base rather than the developer side: a desktop app where you click the fields you want on a page and it builds the scraper for you, no API call required. The free plan is a genuine forever tier (50,000 rows/month), and paid plans add cloud scheduling, IP rotation, and automatic CAPTCHA solving starting at $69/month billed annually ($83/month month-to-month). 500+ preset templates cover common sites out of the box. The catch is the jump between tiers: Standard caps out at 100 tasks and 3 concurrent cloud runs, so bigger jobs push you straight to the $249/month Professional plan (billed annually; $299/month month-to-month), and residential proxies and CAPTCHA solving are separate add-ons on top of whatever plan you're on.

Browse AI covers the same no-code job as Octoparse but leans harder into monitoring: train a robot by clicking on a page once, then have it re-run on a schedule and alert you when something changes, with exports straight to Google Sheets, Airtable, or Zapier. The free plan gives 50 credits a month (1 credit equals 10 rows or 1 screenshot) across 2 websites, and paid tiers start at $19/month billed annually for 12,000 credits/year and 5 websites. It's SOC 2 Type 2 certified, which matters if scraped data touches client work. The gap versus Firecrawl is the same as Octoparse's: no code-first API or SDK layer, and G2 reviewers most often flag the free plan's credit limits as the thing they'd change.