By use case · Firecrawl vs Tavily

Firecrawl vs Tavily: crawl API vs search API pricing, credits and extraction compared

The short answer

Firecrawl and Tavily solve different halves of the same problem, which is why teams shortlist them together and then find the comparison hard. Firecrawl is crawl-first: you hand it a URL you already know and it maps, renders and returns the whole site as markdown or JSON at 1 credit per page. Tavily is search-first: you hand it a question and it returns ranked, model-ready results at 1 credit per basic search, with extract, map and crawl added around that core. The pricing shapes follow the products. Firecrawl sells credit bundles, so Standard at $99 a month for 100,000 credits works out near $0.99 per 1,000 crawled pages. Tavily sells credits at $0.008 pay as you go and bills extraction at 5 URLs per credit, so a 1,000 page basic crawl costs about 300 credits, roughly $2.40. That reverses on the free tier: Tavily 1,000 free credits stretch to about 3,300 crawled pages against Firecrawl 1,000. Choose by the question you are answering, not by the price. If you know the site, buy the crawler. If you are looking for pages you have never seen, buy the search API. 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 ...

Both of these turn up in the same shortlist because both promise clean, model-ready web content, and both are marketed at people building AI agents. The demos look similar. You send a request, you get back tidy markdown instead of a wall of HTML, and the docs use the same vocabulary.

The products underneath are genuinely different, and the difference is not a feature gap you can close with a plan upgrade. Firecrawl starts from a URL. Its whole design is get me this site, all of it, rendered, deduplicated and converted, and its pricing reflects a per-page cost model. Tavily starts from a query. Its design is find and rank the pages that answer this, then give me just the useful text, and its pricing reflects a per-search cost model with extraction priced in batches of five URLs.

That is why the credit math looks so strange when you put the two pricing pages side by side. Firecrawl charges 1 credit for a page and 2 credits for 10 search results. Tavily charges 1 credit for a search and 1 credit for 5 extracted URLs. Neither is overcharging. They are metering different verbs.

We build a crawling API too, so weigh our recommendation accordingly. ClawEngine sits third in the table below and loses several rows outright: we do not run a search index, we have no free plan, and our pricing is published but not yet open for purchase. If your problem is discovery, Tavily is the correct purchase and we are not in the running. Our column is there for the narrower job of turning a site you already know into typed JSON.

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 decide this comparison

Discovery or retrieval, pick one first

The honest way to choose is to write down whether your agent already knows the URL. If it does, you want a crawler and Tavily search credits are wasted spend. If it does not, no amount of crawl budget will find the page, because a crawler cannot answer a question it was never pointed at.

The credit units are not comparable

Firecrawl meters pages and Tavily meters requests and batches of five URLs. Comparing 100,000 credits against 1,000 credits tells you nothing. Convert both to cost per 1,000 pages for your actual mix of crawling and searching, and the two numbers finally sit on the same axis.

Free tiers rank the opposite way

At volume Firecrawl is the cheaper crawler, near $0.99 per 1,000 pages on Standard against roughly $2.40 at Tavily pay as you go. On the free tier that flips, because Tavily bills extraction at five URLs per credit and 1,000 free credits stretch to about 3,300 pages. Prototype cost and production cost point different ways here.

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 two incompatible credit systems to cost per 1,000 pages
Shows why the free tiers rank the opposite way to the paid tiers
Separates the discovery job from the retrieval job before you buy
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 Tavily, side by side

Every figure below was read from each vendor own pricing page and developer documentation in August 2026, not from a review aggregator. We include ourselves in the third column and we lose several rows.

Swipe to compare all columns →

What you are comparing	Firecrawl	Tavily	ClawEngine
What it is	A crawl and scrape API that turns a known URL or whole site into markdown or JSON	A search API for AI agents that finds and ranks pages, with extract and crawl built around it	A crawl API that returns typed JSON matching a schema you supply, in one call
You start from	A URL you already know	A question or query	A URL you already know, plus a schema
Free tier	1,000 credits a month, 2 concurrent browsers	1,000 API credits a month, no card required	No free plan
Published tiers	Hobby $19 (5,000 credits), Standard $99 (100,000), Growth $399 (500,000), Scale $749 (1,000,000), Enterprise by quote. Billed yearly these fall to $16, $83, $333 and $599	Researcher free (1,000 credits), Pay As You Go at $0.008 a credit, Project from 4,000 credits a month on a slider, Enterprise by quote	Hobby $39, Startup $99, Scale $399, Enterprise custom. Published but not yet open for purchase
Cost of one crawled page	1 credit, whether it came from scrape, crawl, map or monitor	About 0.3 credits, from 1 credit per 10 mapped pages plus 1 credit per 5 basic extractions	Counted as one page. Rendering is not metered separately
Cost of 1,000 crawled pages	About $0.99 on Standard, $3.80 on Hobby, $0.75 on Scale	About 300 credits, roughly $2.40 at pay as you go, or about $4.00 with advanced extraction	One page of plan allowance per page
Pages the free tier covers	About 1,000 crawled pages	About 3,300 crawled pages, or 5,000 basic URL extractions	None. There is no free plan
Search	Yes, 2 credits per 10 results, bolted onto a crawler	Yes, and it is the core product. 1 credit basic, 2 advanced, per request	No. We do not run a search index
Extraction billing	Per page, at 1 credit	Per batch, at 5 URLs per credit basic or 5 URLs per 2 credits advanced	Per page fetched successfully
Concurrency at entry	5 concurrent browsers on Hobby, 50 on Standard, 100 on Growth, 150 or more on Scale	Higher rate limits on paid tiers, exact concurrency not published	Concurrency scales with tier
Rate limits	Documented per endpoint: Hobby 100 scrape and 20 crawl a minute, Standard 500 and 100, Growth 5,000 and 1,000	Not published per tier beyond higher rate limits on paid plans	Documented per tier
Credit rollover	No rollover on self-serve plans. Available on Scale and Enterprise only	Pay as you go means unused budget is simply not spent	Monthly allowance, no rollover
Browser interaction	Yes, priced at 2 credits per browser minute	No	No. We render pages, we do not drive them
Typed output to your own schema	Extract endpoint returns structured JSON against a schema	Returns cleaned text and content, not a schema you define	Yes. You pass the schema in the request and get it back typed
Anti-bot handling	Proxy and stealth handling included in the platform	Not the product. Search results come from an index	None. Out of scope by design
Best for	Ingesting documentation, catalogs and known sites at page scale, cheaply	Agents that must find sources they have never seen, then read a handful of them	Turning a permitted site you already know into typed JSON with no parser to maintain
Main gotcha	Credits do not roll over below Scale, so an underused month is money gone	Extraction looks cheap per URL until a deep crawl multiplies the mapping credits too	No free plan, no search, and you cannot buy it yet

Prices are US list prices in USD. Firecrawl publishes both a monthly and a billed-yearly column and the yearly figures are noticeably lower, so compare like for like before quoting either. Tavily Project tier is set with a slider rather than a fixed published price, so the pay as you go rate of $0.008 a credit is the only figure we can state firsthand and the crawl arithmetic above uses it. Run a real sample against your own targets 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 one credit table instead of two

If the site is already known and what you want back is typed JSON rather than markdown you still have to parse, the whole request looks like this. Rendering is part of the call rather than a metered add-on.

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_markdown": "string",
      "updated_at": "string"
    }
  }'

# One page, one unit. No search credits, no batch-of-five arithmetic.
# Rendering is on by default and robots.txt is respected.

Firecrawl vs Tavily: the questions buyers ask

What is the difference between Firecrawl and Tavily?

Firecrawl is a crawl API and Tavily is a search API, so they answer different questions. You give Firecrawl a URL and it maps, renders and returns that site as markdown or JSON at 1 credit per page. You give Tavily a query and it returns ranked, model-ready results at 1 credit per basic search, with extract and crawl built around that core.

Is Firecrawl or Tavily better for AI agents?

It depends on whether the agent already knows where to look. Tavily is better when the agent must find sources it has never seen, because search is its core product rather than an add-on. Firecrawl is better when the target is known and the job is reading a lot of it, because 1 credit per page is cheaper than paying search prices for bulk ingestion.

How much does Firecrawl cost?

Firecrawl publishes a free tier of 1,000 credits a month, then Hobby at $19 a month for 5,000 credits, Standard at $99 for 100,000, Growth at $399 for 500,000 and Scale at $749 for 1,000,000, with Enterprise by quote. Billed yearly those drop to $16, $83, $333 and $599. Verified from Firecrawl in August 2026.

How much does Tavily cost?

Tavily starts with a free Researcher plan of 1,000 API credits a month with no card required. Beyond that it sells credits pay as you go at $0.008 each, offers a Project tier from 4,000 credits a month priced on a slider rather than a fixed published number, and quotes Enterprise separately. Verified from Tavily in August 2026.

How many credits does a Tavily request cost?

A basic search is 1 credit and an advanced search is 2. Extraction is billed in batches: every 5 successful URL extractions cost 1 credit basic or 2 advanced. Mapping costs 1 credit per 10 pages returned, or 2 with instructions. A crawl combines mapping and extraction, so 10 pages with basic extraction comes to 3 credits.

How many credits does a Firecrawl request cost?

Scrape, crawl, map and monitor all cost 1 credit per page, which makes the arithmetic unusually easy to forecast. Search costs 2 credits per 10 results. Browser interaction costs 2 credits per browser minute. Credits do not roll over on the self-serve plans, so an underused month is spent money rather than banked capacity.

Which is cheaper for crawling a whole website?

Firecrawl, once you are paying. A 1,000 page crawl is 1,000 Firecrawl credits, about $0.99 on the Standard plan, against roughly 300 Tavily credits at $0.008 each, about $2.40. The ranking flips on the free tiers, where 1,000 Tavily credits cover about 3,300 crawled pages and 1,000 Firecrawl credits cover about 1,000.

Can Tavily crawl an entire website?

Yes, Tavily publishes map and crawl endpoints, and they work, but the billing shape tells you what they are for. Mapping is metered per 10 pages and extraction per 5 URLs, which suits reading a handful of pages an agent just found. Aimed at a large site the mapping credits multiply alongside the extraction credits and a per-page crawler becomes cheaper.

Does Firecrawl do web search?

It does, at 2 credits per 10 results, and for a team already on a Firecrawl plan that is often cheap enough to avoid adding a second vendor. It is not a ranked answer engine tuned for agent retrieval in the way Tavily core product is. If search quality is what your agent lives or dies on, evaluate both on your own queries rather than on price.

What is a good alternative to Firecrawl and Tavily?

It depends on which half you need. For discovery at agent scale, Exa and Tavily are the honest shortlist and we are not on it. For crawling a permitted site you already know and getting typed JSON matching your own schema in one call, with no parser to maintain, ClawEngine fits that shape, with no free plan, no search index and pricing published but not yet open for purchase.

Good questions

Questions about Firecrawl vs Tavily

Yes, and for most agent stacks that is the cheapest arrangement rather than a compromise. Let Tavily answer the discovery step, since one basic search costs a single credit and returns ranked candidates, then hand the two or three URLs worth reading in full to a crawler that bills per page. Paying search prices for bulk ingestion, or crawl prices for discovery, is where the budget quietly goes.

Neither enforces it as a default you can rely on, and the legal exposure from a crawl sits with the customer rather than the vendor. Tavily mostly reads pages already in a search index, which changes the practical risk but not the responsibility. 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 you commit either one to a production pipeline.

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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