By use case · Oxylabs vs Firecrawl

Oxylabs vs Firecrawl pricing and cost per 1,000 plain and rendered pages

The short answer

On ordinary public websites Firecrawl is cheaper and easier to forecast, and on defended sites Oxylabs is the only one of the two that can do the job. Oxylabs bills results from one shared balance (Starter $30, Basic $100, Flexible $500 a month) at $1.00 down to $0.75 per 1,000 plain pages and $1.50 down to $1.22 with JavaScript rendering. Firecrawl bills one credit a page with rendering included, $0.83 per 1,000 on Standard billed yearly. For 100,000 rendered pages that is roughly $130 to $140 of Oxylabs balance against $83. Pick Oxylabs for marketplaces, search results and targets that block; pick Firecrawl when the goal is markdown or JSON for a model at a fixed price.

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

Extraction demo

Endpoint: POST /v1/extract · paste a URL, or pick a sample below

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 ... Samples are recorded. Your own URL is crawled live.

Oxylabs and Firecrawl show up on the same shortlist because both take a URL and hand back page content through an API. They come from opposite ends of the market. Oxylabs is an enterprise proxy and unblocking platform that now sells scraping, residential proxies and Web Unblocker from one monthly credit balance. Firecrawl is an LLM-first crawler that renders every page and returns markdown, or JSON against a schema, for one credit.

That gives you two different invoices. An Oxylabs bill is results times a rate that depends on the kind of target and on whether the page needs JavaScript, drawn from a balance that resets each month. A Firecrawl bill is pages times one credit, or five when you ask for typed JSON. The Oxylabs figures below were read on 31 October 2026 from the Oxylabs Web Scraper API pricing page, and the Firecrawl figures from its pricing page and billing documentation. Every workload is priced from those numbers alone.

For each vendor in full, see the Oxylabs pricing breakdown with every product rate and the Firecrawl pricing breakdown. If the other enterprise platform is on your list, Bright Data vs Oxylabs prices that pair, and Zyte vs Firecrawl does the same for a third per-request API.

Backend engineer comparing two monthly usage reports beside a laptop with a request volume chart

CRAWL RENDER JS EXTRACT MARKDOWN JSON

Any URL in LLM-ready data out

robots.txt respected public data only

Why it works

Three questions that settle Oxylabs vs Firecrawl

Are your targets defended?

This decides the whole comparison. If you scrape large marketplaces or search engines, Oxylabs sells the rates and the unblocking for it, with cheaper per-result prices on those targets than on ordinary sites. Firecrawl publishes no bypass rate and ClawEngine does not defeat anti-bot systems. If your pages are docs, blogs, company sites and news, you are paying an enterprise rate for a problem you do not have.

Plain or rendered pages?

Oxylabs charges about 50 percent more when a page needs JavaScript, $1.50 against $1.00 at small volume. Firecrawl charges the same credit either way. At 100,000 pages the plain gap is small, about $90 of Oxylabs balance against $83, but rendered pages cost roughly $130 to $140 against the same $83.

Who turns the page into data?

Oxylabs returns the page and charges $3.00 per 1,000 for AI parsing on top. Firecrawl returns JSON against your schema at 5 credits a page, about $4.15 per 1,000 on Standard yearly. If the deliverable is typed records from whole public sites, ClawEngine fits that job at a flat per-page price.

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 prices read firsthand from both vendors
Shows how target type and rendering change the Oxylabs rate
Prices real workloads on each vendor
Explains the shared balance and monthly expiry
Compares typed output on both sides
States plainly where ClawEngine loses

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

Oxylabs vs Firecrawl side by side

Oxylabs figures were read from oxylabs.io on 31 October 2026 and Firecrawl figures from firecrawl.dev/pricing. ClawEngine is the third column, and it loses the defended-site row outright.

Swipe to compare all columns →

What you are comparing	Oxylabs	Firecrawl	ClawEngine
What it is	Enterprise web scraping API, residential proxies and Web Unblocker on one shared credit balance	Scrape, crawl, map and search API that turns sites into markdown or JSON, open source under AGPL	One API that crawls, renders JavaScript and extracts typed fields in a single call
What the meter counts	Results, priced by target category and by JavaScript rendering. Proxies are metered in GB	Credits. 1 per page with rendering included, JSON adds 4	Pages on a monthly plan. One page of allowance per page returned
Plans	Starter $30, Basic $100, Flexible $500 a month, Enterprise from $2,500, after a one-time $5 welcome credit	Hobby $16, Standard $83, Growth $333 and Scale $599 billed yearly for 5,000 to 1,000,000 credits	$49 Hobby, $99 Startup, $399 Scale, $798 Enterprise a month
Cost per 1,000 plain pages, ordinary sites	$1.00 up to 30,000 results, $0.90 up to 111,000, $0.80 up to 625,000, $0.75 beyond 3.33 million	$3.20 on Hobby, $0.83 on Standard, $0.67 on Growth, $0.60 on Scale, all billed yearly	$0.98 on Hobby, $0.40 on Startup, $0.27 on Scale
Cost per 1,000 JavaScript-rendered pages	$1.50 up to 20,000 results, $1.40 up to 71,000, $1.30 up to 384,000, $1.22 beyond 2.05 million	The same $0.83 to $0.60. Rendering is not billed extra	The same per-page price. Rendering is not billed extra
Defended sites and marketplaces	Built for them. Cheapest rates are for e-commerce and search targets, with Web Unblocker and residential proxies for the hard ones	Enhanced proxy is billed as a basic 1-credit request. No published bypass rate	Not supported. We do not defeat anti-bot systems
Output	Raw or parsed HTML per URL. AI parsing is an add-on at $3.00 per 1,000 parsed pages	Markdown, HTML, links, screenshots, and JSON against your schema	Markdown or typed JSON against your schema
Crawling a whole site from one URL	Not the core product. The Scraper API fetches URLs you already have	Yes. Crawl and map endpoints discover pages from a seed	Yes. One request crawls from the start URL
Forecasting the bill	Harder. The rate depends on target and rendering, and unused credit expires each cycle	Easy. Pages times one credit, or five with JSON	Easy. A fixed monthly page allowance
Best for	Defended targets, marketplaces, search results and proxy-scale collection	Known sites and docs turned into clean markdown or JSON for a model at a fixed price per page	Typed records from whole public sites at a flat per-page price

US list prices in USD. Oxylabs self-service purchases are non-refundable and rates fall with volume. Firecrawl shows yearly-billed prices, with Hobby at $19 billed monthly. Oxylabs figures come from oxylabs.io, Firecrawl figures from firecrawl.dev/pricing and docs.firecrawl.dev/billing.

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 typed-records half of this job in one request

When the targets are public sites that do not fight back, there is no target category to look up and no render surcharge. One call crawls from the start URL, renders JavaScript, respects robots.txt and returns one typed record per page.

curl Crawl a documentation section and return typed records per page

curl https://clawengine.ai/v1/crawl \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CLAWENGINE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://docs.example.com/api",
    "limit": 100,
    "render": true,
    "format": "structured",
    "schema": {
      "endpoint": "string",
      "method": "string",
      "description": "string",
      "parameters": "string"
    }
  }'

# The POST answers 202 with the crawl id. Read the pages when it completes:
curl https://clawengine.ai/v1/crawl/<id> \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CLAWENGINE_API_KEY"

# No target category, no render surcharge, one record per page in your schema.

Oxylabs vs Firecrawl, the questions buyers ask

Is Oxylabs better than Firecrawl?

For defended targets and proxy-scale collection, yes, because Firecrawl publishes no bypass rate. For AI pipelines that read ordinary sites, Firecrawl is simpler and usually cheaper: one credit a page, rendering included, and markdown or schema JSON in the same call with no target categories to price.

Is Oxylabs cheaper than Firecrawl?

Only on special targets and plain pages at very high volume. Oxylabs lists e-commerce and search targets from $0.25 to $0.50 per 1,000, below Firecrawl. On ordinary sites it is $0.75 to $1.00 plain and $1.22 to $1.50 rendered, against $0.60 to $0.83 on Firecrawl yearly plans.

How much does Oxylabs cost compared with Firecrawl?

Oxylabs starts at $30 a month on a shared balance and runs to $500 on Flexible, with Enterprise from $2,500. Firecrawl runs from $16 for 5,000 credits to $599 for 1,000,000, billed yearly. The cheapest Oxylabs plan buys roughly 30,000 plain pages from ordinary sites, and Firecrawl Hobby buys 5,000.

Can Firecrawl replace Oxylabs?

For documentation, blogs, company sites and news, usually yes. For large marketplaces, search results or any site that blocks automated clients, no, because Oxylabs sells the unblocking and residential proxies that Firecrawl does not publish a rate for. Test three of your real targets on each before moving a pipeline.

Does Oxylabs crawl a whole site like Firecrawl does?

Not with the Web Scraper API alone. It fetches URLs you already have, so discovering pages is your job or a separate purchase. Firecrawl crawl and map endpoints start from a seed URL and walk the site, which is the main reason AI teams choose it for documentation and knowledge bases.

Does Oxylabs have a free trial?

Oxylabs gives a one-time $5 welcome credit on a new account, usable on any product. Firecrawl has a free tier of 1,000 credits. Use either to run the exact sites you plan to scrape, then divide your monthly budget by the rate you actually observed.

Which is better for feeding an LLM or RAG pipeline?

Firecrawl, in most cases. It returns markdown or schema JSON directly, so there is no parsing step and one credit covers a rendered page. Oxylabs returns the page and charges $3.00 per 1,000 extra for AI parsing. Oxylabs only wins if the source sites block ordinary crawlers.

Why is my Oxylabs bill higher than the plan price?

Usually because your targets are not the cheapest category. The result counts on plan cards assume that category, and JavaScript rendering raises ordinary-site rates by about 50 percent. Proxy traffic also draws on the same balance, and unused credit expires at the end of each monthly cycle.

Good questions

Questions about Oxylabs vs Firecrawl

On Oxylabs, ordinary sites run $0.90 per 1,000 in the tier up to 111,000 results, so about $90 of balance, which in practice means the $100 Basic plan. On Firecrawl it is the Standard plan at $83 a month billed yearly for 100,000 credits. The two are close here, and the Firecrawl invoice is the one you can predict.

Oxylabs charges $1.40 per 1,000 up to 71,000 results and $1.30 up to 384,000, so 100,000 rendered pages draw about $130 to $140 of balance, more than the $100 Basic plan holds. Firecrawl Standard is $83 for the same 100,000 pages because rendering is not billed extra. Firecrawl is about 40 percent cheaper here.

Oxylabs bills $0.80 per 1,000 up to 625,000 results, so about $400 of balance, which fits inside the $500 Flexible plan. Firecrawl Growth is $333 a month billed yearly for 500,000 credits. Firecrawl is cheaper by about $67 a month, and the gap grows if the same pages need rendering.

Oxylabs counts responses with 2xx or 4xx status codes as successful per its billing documentation, so a 404 on a stale link is billed, while 5xx failures are free. Firecrawl bills 1 credit for a 403 or 404 as well. On either vendor, clean your URL list before a large run so you do not pay for empty results.

Firecrawl bills 5 credits for a page with JSON against your schema, about $4.15 per 1,000 on Standard billed yearly. Oxylabs adds $3.00 per 1,000 for AI parsing on top of the scraping rate, so a plain ordinary page with parsing lands near $3.90. ClawEngine maps up to 900 pages a month with the model on Startup and 3,500 on Scale.

Read every web scraping question

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Stop wrangling raw HTML. Get LLM-ready data.

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