By use case · Firecrawl vs Browserbase

Firecrawl vs Browserbase: pricing, cost per page and browser-hour billing compared for AI agents

The short answer

Firecrawl and Browserbase get shortlisted together for AI agent work, but they are not the same kind of product and they do not meter the same thing. Firecrawl is a crawl and scrape API that bills 1 credit per page and hands back markdown. Browserbase is cloud Chromium that bills browser hours and hands back a CDP endpoint you drive with Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium or Stagehand. The arithmetic crosses over at a specific point: Browserbase Startup at $99 for 500 browser hours works out to $0.198 an hour, so 15 seconds of browser time per page costs $0.83 per 1,000 pages, which is exactly what Firecrawl Standard charges at $83 for 100,000 credits. Below 15 seconds a page, browser hours are cheaper. Above it, page credits are cheaper, and a session that sits idle waiting on a model bills the whole time. Buy Firecrawl if your agent only reads pages. Buy Browserbase if your agent has to log in, click and fill forms. All figures verified from both vendors in August 2026.

Clean markdown & JSON · JavaScript rendered · robots.txt respected

Last updated August 2026

Live Extraction

Endpoint · POST /v1/extract

POST

try:

Hit Extract to turn this page into clean, LLM-ready data.

robots.txt respected · public data only

Markdown · JSON · structured fields, from one API call. Crawling, rendering and extracting ...

These two land on the same shortlist because both get described as infrastructure for AI agents that use the web. That description hides the actual decision. Firecrawl is an extraction API: you send a URL, it returns markdown or JSON, and the meter counts pages. Browserbase is a browser: you get a real Chromium session in the cloud with a CDP endpoint, you drive it yourself, and the meter counts wall-clock time.

The meter is the whole comparison. A page meter does not care whether a page took two seconds or two minutes, so your bill is a function of how much you read. An hour meter does not care whether a page was 4 kilobytes or 4 megabytes, so your bill is a function of how long your browser stayed open. Those two functions cross, and knowing where they cross is worth more than any feature list.

Here is where. Browserbase Startup is $99 for 500 browser hours, which is $0.198 an hour, or about $0.000055 a second. Fifteen seconds of browser time therefore costs $0.000825, which is $0.83 per 1,000 pages. Firecrawl Standard is $83 for 100,000 credits at 1 credit a page, which is also $0.83 per 1,000 pages. The two are exactly level at 15 seconds a page. Agents that skim static documentation come in well under that and should be on browser hours if they need a browser at all. Agents that wait on a language model between actions blow straight past it, because idle time bills at the same rate as work.

One cost most people miss on the Firecrawl side: structured output is not the base rate. Scraping a page is 1 credit, but adding the JSON format for LLM extraction is a further 4 credits, so a page you want back as typed fields costs 5 credits rather than 1. On Standard that moves the real number from $0.83 to $4.15 per 1,000 pages.

We build a crawling API too, so weigh our recommendation accordingly. ClawEngine sits third in the table below and loses rows outright: we cannot drive a browser at all, we defeat no anti-bot system, we have no free plan, and our pricing is published but not yet open for purchase. If your agent has to click anything, we are not in this comparison and Browserbase is the honest answer.

CRAWL RENDER JS EXTRACT MARKDOWN JSON

Any URL in LLM-ready data out

robots.txt respected public data only

Why it works

Three things that actually decide this comparison

The crossover is 15 seconds a page

Browserbase Startup is $0.198 a browser hour, which is $0.000055 a second. Multiply by seconds per page and you get the same $0.83 per 1,000 pages that Firecrawl Standard charges at exactly 15 seconds. Time one representative page in your own workload with a stopwatch before you choose. Under 15 seconds and the browser is cheaper, over it and pages are cheaper, and the gap widens fast in both directions.

Idle time is the hidden line item

A page meter stops when the page is delivered. An hour meter keeps running while your agent waits for a model to decide what to click. That waiting is often the largest share of an agent loop, and it bills at the same rate as real work. Before you commit to browser hours, measure the ratio of browser-open time to actually-doing-something time, because that ratio is what you are really buying.

Read-only work does not need a browser at all

Most agent steps are reads: fetch a docs page, pull a spec table, check a listing. Renting a stateful Chromium session for a read is paying for capability you never use. That is why Browserbase sells Fetch separately at $0.50 to $1 per 1,000 calls, and why a crawl API exists. Sort your agent steps into reads and actions first, then price each group on the meter that suits it.

What it handles

Any URL in, clean structured data out

Point ClawEngine at a public page and it crawls, renders the JavaScript and extracts clean markdown or typed JSON in one call. Define a schema for structured fields, and respect robots.txt and Terms of Service by default.

Compares August 2026 pricing verified from both vendors directly
Converts browser hours and page credits to one number you can compare
Shows the exact seconds-per-page where the cheaper option flips
Prices Firecrawl structured JSON at its real 5-credit rate, not the headline 1
Names the jobs where each tool is the wrong purchase
States plainly where ClawEngine loses to both

POST /v1/extract extraction result

200 · JSON

{
  "url": "https://example.com/products/atlas",
  "title": "Atlas Field Notebook",
  "markdown": "# Atlas Field Notebook\n\nDurable...",
  "data": {
    "name": "Atlas Field Notebook",
    "price": 24.00,
    "currency": "USD",
    "rating": 4.7
  },
  "links": [ "/products", "/cart" ],
  "metadata": { "rendered": true }
}

JS rendered · boilerplate stripped ✓ robots.txt respected

Head to head

Firecrawl vs Browserbase, side by side

Every price, credit cost and rate below was read from each vendor own pricing page and developer documentation in August 2026, never from a review aggregator. We include ourselves in the third column and we lose several rows outright.

Swipe to compare all columns →

What you are comparing	Firecrawl	Browserbase	ClawEngine
What it is	A crawl and scrape API that returns markdown or structured JSON from a URL	Cloud Chromium sessions you connect to over CDP and drive yourself	A crawl API that returns typed JSON matching a schema you supply, in one call
What the meter counts	Pages, in credits. One scrape or one crawled page is 1 credit	Browser hours of wall-clock session time, plus proxy bandwidth	Pages. One page of plan allowance per page
Free tier	1,000 credits a month, 2 concurrent requests	1 browser hour, 3 concurrent browsers, 15 minute session cap, no proxy bandwidth	No free plan
Published tiers	Hobby $16 (5,000 credits), Standard $83 (100,000), Growth $333 (500,000), Scale $599 (1M), Enterprise by quote. These are the billed-yearly rates	Developer $20 (100 browser hours), Startup $99 (500 hours), Scale custom (500+ hours)	Hobby $39, Startup $99, Scale $399, Enterprise custom. Published but not yet open for purchase
Concurrency ladder	2 free, 5 Hobby, 25 Standard, 50 Growth, 100 Scale	3 free, 25 Developer, 100 Startup, 250+ Scale. Browserbase reports customers running 6,000+ concurrent sessions	Concurrency scales with tier
Cost per 1,000 plain pages	$3.20 on Hobby, $0.83 on Standard, $0.67 on Growth, $0.60 on Scale	Depends entirely on seconds per page. At Startup rates: $0.33 at 6s, $0.83 at 15s, $1.65 at 30s, $3.30 at 60s	One page of plan allowance per page
Cost per 1,000 pages as structured JSON	$4.15 on Standard, $3.33 on Growth, $3.00 on Scale. The JSON format adds 4 credits on top of the 1-credit scrape	Not a billing line. Stagehand extract runs inside the session, so you pay the browser time it takes	One page of plan allowance per page. Schema output is not metered separately
Plain fetch without a browser	The 1-credit scrape is the plain fetch	Fetch is a separate cheaper product: $1 per 1,000 on Developer, $0.50 per 1,000 on Startup, $4 per 1,000 with proxies	Counted as one page
Browser time rate	Interact is 2 to 7 credits a browser minute depending on session type, about $0.10 to $0.35 an hour on Standard	$0.198 an hour inside the Startup allowance, then $0.10 overage. $0.20 an hour on Developer, then $0.12 overage	Not offered. We render pages, we do not drive them
Drive the browser yourself	No. Interact exposes bounded actions, not a session you attach a driver to	Yes. A CDP endpoint you connect with Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium or Stagehand	No
Logged-in and multi-step flows	Limited. Built around fetching and extracting, not stateful sessions	Yes. This is the core product, with session replay, live view and log traces	No. Out of scope by design
Anti-bot and CAPTCHA	Handled inside the service, with no published multiplier for it in the current billing docs	Agent Identity, built on partnerships with Cloudflare and Fingerprint among others	Out of scope by design. We defeat no anti-bot system
Whole-site crawling	Yes. Crawl is a first-class endpoint at 1 credit a page, and Map lists URLs for 1 credit a call	No. You write the crawl loop and pay for the browser time it runs in	Yes, crawl scope and depth are request parameters
Output you get back	Markdown tuned for token efficiency, HTML, or JSON against a schema for 4 extra credits	Whatever you pull out of the page yourself, or Stagehand extract inside the session	Typed JSON matching the schema you passed in the request
Proxy bandwidth	Not billed as a separate line in the published credit table	Billed separately: 1GB then $12/GB on Developer, 5GB then $10/GB on Startup	Not offered
Self-host option	Yes, the open-source project is a genuine option	No	No
Best for	Agents and pipelines that read a lot of pages and want markdown or JSON without running a browser	Agents that must log in, click, fill forms and hold state across steps	Turning a permitted site you already know into typed JSON with no parser to maintain
Main gotcha	Structured JSON is 5 credits a page, not 1, and credits are charged whenever the request is processed regardless of what the target returns	Idle browser time bills at the full rate, so an agent waiting on a model is paying for a browser doing nothing	No free plan, no anti-bot handling, no browser driving, and you cannot buy it yet

Prices are US list prices in USD, read from firecrawl.dev/pricing, docs.firecrawl.dev/billing, browserbase.com/pricing and the Browserbase documentation in August 2026. Firecrawl figures are the billed-yearly rates the pricing page shows by default, so monthly billing costs more. Cost per 1,000 pages at Firecrawl is plan price divided by plan credits, times credits per page. Cost per 1,000 pages at Browserbase is the plan hourly rate divided by 3,600, times seconds of browser time per page, times 1,000, and it assumes your concurrency is packed with no idle sessions. Run a real sample against your own URLs before committing, because a page count from any table, including this one, is an estimate of your bill and not a quote.

Why ClawEngine

One API that crawls, renders and extracts

Not a raw HTML dump, not a headless browser fleet to run, and not a brittle parser to maintain. One call crawls a public page, renders its JavaScript and returns clean markdown or typed JSON, built for RAG pipelines and AI agents.

LLM-ready output

Clean markdown or typed JSON with the boilerplate stripped, so the data drops straight into a vector store, a prompt or an agent without a cleanup step.

JavaScript rendered

Each page loads in a real browser environment before extraction, so single-page apps and client-rendered content come back complete, not as an empty shell.

Compliance-first

ClawEngine works on public, permitted data only. It respects robots.txt and site Terms of Service and honors crawl-delay, so responsible scraping is the default.

Code examples

The version of this job with no browser-hour meter and no extraction surcharge

If your agent only reads pages, and what you want back is typed JSON rather than markdown you still have to parse or a browser you still have to drive, the whole request looks like this. Structured output is part of the call rather than a 4-credit add-on, and the crawl loop is a parameter rather than code you maintain inside a billed session.

curl Crawl a documentation site and return typed JSON

curl https://api.clawengine.ai/v1/crawl \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CLAWENGINE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://example.com/docs",
    "path_prefix": "/docs/",
    "max_pages": 500,
    "render": true,
    "schema": {
      "title": "string",
      "section": "string",
      "body": "string",
      "updated_at": "string"
    }
  }'

# One page, one unit. No browser-hour meter, no idle time,
# and no extra credits for asking for structured output.
# Rendering is on by default and robots.txt is respected.

Firecrawl vs Browserbase: the questions buyers ask

What is the difference between Firecrawl and Browserbase?

Firecrawl is an extraction API that bills per page and returns markdown or JSON from a URL. Browserbase is cloud Chromium that bills per browser hour and returns a CDP endpoint you drive with Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium or Stagehand. Firecrawl reads pages for you. Browserbase lets your code operate a real browser, including logged-in and multi-step flows.

Is Firecrawl or Browserbase cheaper?

It depends on seconds of browser time per page. Browserbase Startup is $0.198 an hour, so at 6 seconds a page it is $0.33 per 1,000 pages against Firecrawl Standard at $0.83. The two are level at 15 seconds. At 30 seconds Browserbase is $1.65 and at 60 seconds $3.30, both well above Firecrawl. Time your own pages before choosing.

How much does Firecrawl cost?

Firecrawl publishes 1,000 free credits a month at 2 concurrent requests, then Hobby at $16 for 5,000 credits, Standard at $83 for 100,000, Growth at $333 for 500,000 and Scale at $599 for 1 million, with Enterprise by quote. Those are the billed-yearly rates. Concurrency runs 5, 25, 50 and 100 across the paid tiers. Verified from Firecrawl in August 2026.

How much does Browserbase cost?

Browserbase offers a free tier of 1 browser hour with 3 concurrent browsers and a 15 minute session cap, then Developer at $20 for 100 browser hours with 25 concurrent browsers and 1GB of proxy bandwidth, and Startup at $99 for 500 hours with 100 concurrent browsers and 5GB. Scale is custom. Verified from Browserbase in August 2026.

How many credits does a Firecrawl request cost?

A scrape is 1 credit per page and a crawled page is also 1 credit. Map costs 1 credit a call and Search is 2 credits per 10 results. The JSON format for LLM extraction adds 4 credits a page, PDF parsing adds 1 per PDF page, a prompt injection check adds 4, and zero data retention adds 1. Interact is 2 to 7 credits a browser minute.

What does Browserbase charge per browser hour?

Inside the plan allowance, Developer works out to $0.20 an hour at $20 for 100 hours and Startup to about $0.198 at $99 for 500 hours. Past the allowance the overage rate is $0.12 an hour on Developer and $0.10 on Startup. Proxy bandwidth is billed separately at $12 per GB on Developer and $10 per GB on Startup.

Can Firecrawl log into a website?

Not in the way a browser automation tool can. Firecrawl is built around fetching and extracting rather than holding a stateful session, and its Interact feature exposes bounded actions rather than a browser you attach a driver to. If your workflow depends on authenticating, clicking through several screens and carrying state, that is what Browserbase sells and Firecrawl does not.

Does Browserbase extract clean content or markdown?

Not as a billing line the way an extraction API does. You get a real browser, so pulling content out of the page is your code, or Stagehand extract running inside the session and costing the browser time it takes. If what you want is a URL in and clean markdown out, that is the job an extraction API does, and paying browser hours for it is the expensive route.

Which is better for AI agents that browse the web?

Split your agent steps first. Steps that only read a page are cheaper and more predictable on a page-metered API, because a browser adds capability you do not use and time you still pay for. Steps that log in, click or fill forms need a real browser and Browserbase is built for exactly that, including session replay and live view for debugging.

What is the best Browserbase alternative?

It depends which half you use. If you rely on driving a real browser through CDP, the honest shortlist is other cloud browser providers and self-hosted Playwright on your own infrastructure, and we are not on it. If you mostly use it to read pages your agent never interacts with, that is an extraction or crawl API job, which is a different and cheaper product shape.

Good questions

Questions about Firecrawl vs Browserbase

Yes, and for most agent workloads that is the cheaper design. Send read-only steps to a page-metered API and reserve browser sessions for the steps that genuinely need to click, log in or fill something. Teams that route everything through a browser because a few steps need one usually find the read traffic is the majority of the bill. The cost is a second integration and a second key to rotate.

Treat it as your responsibility rather than theirs. Browserbase sells Agent Identity for getting through anti-bot systems, which by definition means loading pages a site has tried to refuse, and Firecrawl gives you the fetch without making crawl policy your default. If you need robots.txt and crawl-delay honored as policy rather than as a flag somebody remembered to set, confirm the behavior explicitly before either goes into production.

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Point ClawEngine at a public page and one call crawls, renders the JavaScript and extracts clean markdown or typed JSON, ready for your RAG pipeline or AI agent. Public, permitted data only.

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Crawl · render JS · extract markdown & JSON · robots.txt respected, public data only