A Firecrawl alternative with 100,000 credits at $19
Turn docs, blogs and knowledge bases into Markdown for your LLM at 1 credit a page. Firecrawl Hobby includes 5,000 credits for $19/month. ScrapingAnt Enthusiast includes 100,000: 100,000 pages without a browser, or 10,000 rendered in Headless Chrome. Paid plans have no concurrency cap.
10,000 free credits every month · no card · one concurrent request on Free
More credits at every price point
Both price lists with monthly billing. Firecrawl spends one credit per page and raises concurrent browsers with each plan. ScrapingAnt spends credits by request mode, and paid plans have no plan concurrency cap.
| Monthly price | Firecrawl | ScrapingAnt |
|---|---|---|
| $19 | Hobby5,000 credits · 5 concurrent browsers | Enthusiast100,000 credits · no plan cap |
| $49 | No plan at this price | Startup500,000 credits · no plan cap |
| $99 | Standard100,000 credits · 25 concurrent browsers | No plan at this price |
| $249 | No plan at this price | Business3,000,000 credits · no plan cap |
| $399 | Growth500,000 credits · 50 concurrent browsers | No plan at this price |
| $599 | No plan at this price | Business Pro8,000,000 credits · no plan cap |
| $749 | Scale1,000,000 credits · 100 concurrent browsers | No plan at this price |
Firecrawl’s annual billing lowers its prices to $16, $83, $333 and $599 a month for the same credits. ScrapingAnt prices are monthly.
About a tenth of the price per page without a browser
Firecrawl charges one credit per page. ScrapingAnt charges 1 credit for a page fetched without a browser and 10 with Headless Chrome, so docs, articles and other static pages cost far less. Here is what 1,000 pages cost on two plan pairs.
| Page type | Firecrawl Standard ($99) | ScrapingAnt Startup ($49) | Firecrawl Growth ($399) | ScrapingAnt Business ($249) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Markdown or HTML, no browser needed | $0.99 | $0.098 | $0.798 | $0.083 |
| Rendered in a browser | $0.99 | $0.98 | $0.798 | $0.83 |
Docs, blogs and static pages
Documentation, articles and sitemaps often come back complete without a browser. Fetched with browser=false, 1,000 pages cost $0.098 on Startup, about a tenth of Firecrawl Standard’s $0.99.
Rendered pages on a plan half the price
In Headless Chrome, 1,000 pages cost $0.98 on ScrapingAnt Startup and $0.99 on Firecrawl Standard. Startup costs $49 a month, Standard $99, and Startup has no concurrency cap.
Each figure is the monthly price divided by the pages the allowance covers in that mode. At higher rendered volume Firecrawl Growth ($0.798 per 1,000) is slightly cheaper than ScrapingAnt Business ($0.83). On hard targets Firecrawl’s enhanced proxy adds no credits, while ScrapingAnt residential rendering costs 125 per page. Failed requests with no result are free on both; a target’s error page is billed on both. Firecrawl’s JSON format adds 4 credits per page; ScrapingAnt JSON extraction adds 1 credit per 30 characters of Markdown and output.
Checked : Firecrawl plans, Firecrawl credit costs, Firecrawl concurrency, ScrapingAnt plans and ScrapingAnt credit costs. Check again before you buy.
Run as many requests in parallel as your targets allow
Firecrawl ties concurrent browsers to the plan: 5 on Hobby, 25 on Standard, 50 on Growth and 100 on Scale. Jobs above the limit wait in a queue. Paid ScrapingAnt plans have no concurrency limit, so a large backfill on the $19 plan isn’t throttled by the plan.
You still set the worker count. Many sites rate-limit long before you reach a high parallel count.
Markdown for your LLM, at 1 credit a page
/v2/markdown returns the page as Markdown in a JSON field, ready to chunk. In our URL-to-Markdown test packet, a static article came back with the same Markdown without a browser for 1 credit as with Headless Chrome for 10.
One difference to plan for: Firecrawl returns only the main content by default, while ScrapingAnt keeps the whole page, navigation and footer included. Drop those lines in your chunker, or remove the elements with js_snippet on rendered requests.
A Firecrawl MCP alternative for Claude Code, Cursor and other agents
The hosted ScrapingAnt MCP server gives your agent three tools: a page as Markdown, HTML or plain text. Each takes url, browser, proxy_type and proxy_country, and spends credits at the API rates, so the agent reads a page without a browser for 1 credit.
There is nothing to host. In Claude Code it is one command, and the same URL works in Cursor and other clients that support remote MCP servers.
MCP server docs →Move one URL pattern, compare the output, then move the queue
Firecrawl takes a JSON body and a Bearer token. ScrapingAnt takes query parameters, with x-api-key as one of them. Export the key variable first; each command spends credits on one request.
# One page as Markdown.
curl -X POST 'https://api.firecrawl.dev/v2/scrape' \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $FIRECRAWL_API_KEY" \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{"url": "https://example.com/docs", "formats": ["markdown"]}'
# → {"success": true, "data": {"markdown": "…", "metadata": {…}}}# Same page as Markdown, no browser: 1 credit.
curl --get 'https://api.scrapingant.com/v2/markdown' \
--data-urlencode "x-api-key=$SCRAPINGANT_API_KEY" \
--data-urlencode 'url=https://example.com/docs' \
--data-urlencode 'browser=false'
# → {"url": "https://example.com/docs", "markdown": "…"}
# Pages that need JavaScript: browser=true (10 credits).# Captured from our URL-to-Markdown test packet (2026-09-24): a static article,
# same Markdown with browser=false (1 credit) and browser=true (10 credits).
# Navigation links above the title trimmed here.
# Ant Farm Deluxe review
The Ant Farm Deluxe is a two-chamber acrylic habitat for harvester ants that
ships with a sand block, a feeding tray and a magnifier, …
## What is in the box
* Two acrylic chambers connected by a 12 cm tube
* One sand block (blue, 400 g)
* Feeding tray, water dropper and a 3x magnifierPick the mode per URL pattern
Firecrawl charges the same for every page; ScrapingAnt charges by mode. Try
browser=falsefirst and switch a pattern tobrowser=trueonly when the Markdown comes back empty or incomplete.Compare the Markdown
Read
markdowninstead ofdata.markdown, and check whether your chunker needs navigation and footers removed.Start with a canary
Move a small batch with a fixed retry budget, log
Ant-credits-costper page, and keep the Firecrawl adapter for rollback.
Move the page fetching first, keep what you still need
The easy part to move is fetching known URLs as Markdown or HTML, especially pages that don’t need a browser. Headless Chrome rendering, wait_for_selector, in-page JavaScript, residential proxies and 24 proxy countries are available too, each at its own credit cost.
Feeding an AI agent? The ScrapingAnt MCP server fetches pages as HTML, Markdown or text. Looking at other Firecrawl alternatives too? See how we compare with ScrapingBee, ZenRows and ScraperAPI.
Keep these on Firecrawl
- Site crawling, URL maps and web search:
/crawl,/map,/search - Main-content filtering with
onlyMainContent - Schema-based JSON extraction at 4 extra credits per page
- Browser sessions with
/interactand the agent endpoint - Rendered pages through the enhanced proxy at no extra cost
What customers say
Reviews from developers who use ScrapingAnt, published on Capterra.
Read reviews on Capterra →★★★★★“Onboarding and API integration was smooth and clear. Everything works great. The support was excellent.”
★★★★★“Great communication with co-founders helped me to get the job done. Great proxy diversity and good price.”
★★★★★“This product helps me to scale and extend my business. The setup is easy and support is really good.”
Pricing
Industry leading pricing that scales with your business.
|
Plans
|
Enthusiast
100K credits / mo
$19/mo
|
★ Most Popular
Startup
500K credits / mo
$49/mo
|
Business
3M credits / mo
$249/mo
|
Business Pro
8M credits / mo
$599/mo
|
Custom
10M+ credits / mo
$699+/mo
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly API credits | 100,000 | 500,000 | 3,000,000 | 8,000,000 | 10M+ |
| Support channel | Priority email | Priority email | Priority email | Priority + dedicated | |
| Integration help | Docs only | Custom code snippets | Debug sessions | Priority debug sessions | Full enterprise onboarding |
| Expert assistance | — |  |
|
|
|
| Custom proxy pools | — | — | |
|
|
| Custom anti-bot avoidances | — | — | |
|
|
| Dedicated account manager | — | — | |
|
|
| Start Free | Start Free → | Start Free | Start Free | Talk to Sales |
Is ScrapingAnt cheaper than Firecrawl?
Yes for Markdown and HTML that don’t need a browser: about a tenth of the price per page. At $19/month Firecrawl Hobby covers 5,000 pages and ScrapingAnt Enthusiast covers 100,000. Rendered pages cost about the same per page, $0.98 per 1,000 on the $49 Startup plan against $0.99 on the $99 Firecrawl Standard plan. At high rendered volume Firecrawl Growth is slightly cheaper, and on hard targets its enhanced proxy costs no extra credits.
Will the Markdown look the same?
No. Firecrawl returns only the main content by default (onlyMainContent is on), so navigation, headers and footers are removed. ScrapingAnt removes scripts and converts the whole page, navigation and footer included. If you rely on that filtering, strip the elements yourself after conversion, or remove them with js_snippet before conversion when browser=true.
How many requests can I run in parallel?
Firecrawl plans allow 5, 25, 50 or 100 concurrent browsers, and jobs beyond that wait in a queue. Paid ScrapingAnt plans have no concurrency limit, so the worker count is up to you and your targets. The ScrapingAnt free plan allows one request at a time.
Can I crawl a whole site or search the web like with Firecrawl?
Not with one call. ScrapingAnt fetches the URLs you send. Firecrawl’s /crawl, /map and /search have no ScrapingAnt equivalent, so keep them, or generate the URL list yourself (from a sitemap, for example) and send the pages to ScrapingAnt.
What about JSON extraction?
Firecrawl’s JSON format adds 4 credits per page. ScrapingAnt’s /v2/extract charges 1 credit per 30 characters of page Markdown and output, plus the request, so it costs more on long pages. For large structured jobs, fetch HTML or Markdown and parse it yourself, or keep Firecrawl’s JSON mode.
Is there a Firecrawl MCP alternative?
Yes. The hosted ScrapingAnt MCP server works in Claude Code, Cursor and other MCP clients and exposes three tools, get_web_page_html, get_web_page_markdown and get_web_page_text, with url, browser, proxy_type and proxy_country. It spends credits at the API rates, so a page as Markdown without a browser costs 1 credit. It fetches pages; it doesn’t crawl, search or extract JSON.
How do the free plans compare?
ScrapingAnt gives 10,000 API credits every month, with one concurrent request and domain restrictions. Firecrawl gives 1,000 credits a month with two concurrent browsers. Neither asks for a card.
Run your Firecrawl URLs on the free plan
Fetch a sample of your current URLs with browser=false, compare the Markdown with what Firecrawl returns, then move the patterns that work.
No card needed. The free plan has domain restrictions and one concurrent request.