By use case · ScrapingBee vs Firecrawl

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

The short answer

ScrapingBee is cheaper per page on almost every workload once you are past its $49 plan, and Firecrawl is the better tool when you need whole sites turned into markdown for a model. A JavaScript-rendered page costs 5 ScrapingBee credits, $0.50 per 1,000 on the $99 Startup plan, against 1 Firecrawl credit at $0.83 per 1,000 on Standard billed yearly. Typed JSON flips harder: ScrapingBee AI extraction adds 5 credits, $0.99 per 1,000 on Startup, while Firecrawl JSON adds 4, $4.15 per 1,000. Firecrawl wins on crawl and map endpoints, LLM-tuned markdown and a self-hostable open-source core. ScrapingBee wins on defended sites, with premium and stealth proxy tiers priced in public.

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.

ScrapingBee and Firecrawl show up on the same shortlist because both take a URL and return the page, and both now pitch themselves to teams feeding language models. They come from opposite directions. ScrapingBee is a proxy scraping API: it rotates IPs, renders JavaScript by default, retries for up to 30 seconds and hands back the HTML, with CSS extraction rules and an AI extraction option on top. Firecrawl is a crawler built for models: it renders every page, strips navigation and boilerplate, returns markdown or JSON against your schema, and walks whole domains with crawl and map endpoints.

The price lists follow the same split. ScrapingBee sells large credit buckets and multiplies them by what each request needs: 1 credit for a plain fetch, 5 with rendering, 10 or 25 with premium proxies and 75 with stealth proxies. Firecrawl sells smaller buckets at 1 credit a page with rendering always on, then adds 4 credits when you ask for JSON. So the honest answer to which is cheaper depends on three things you already know about your workload: how many pages need a browser, how many targets fight back, and whether a model or your own code turns the page into data. Below, both price lists are worked into cost per 1,000 pages and five monthly workloads, read from scrapingbee.com and firecrawl.dev on 22 October 2026.

For the full ladder on either side, see our ScrapingBee pricing breakdown and the Firecrawl pricing breakdown. If ScrapingBee is up against another proxy API, ZenRows vs ScrapingBee and ScrapingBee vs ScraperAPI price those pairs, and Firecrawl alternatives lists the rest of the field.

Data engineer comparing two scraping API invoices next to 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 ScrapingBee vs Firecrawl

Do your pages need a browser?

Less than you would think, because ScrapingBee renders by default and still comes out ahead once you pass Freelance. A rendered page is $0.98 per 1,000 on its $49 plan, close to Firecrawl Standard at $0.83 yearly or $0.99 monthly, and $0.50 on the $99 Startup plan. Turn rendering off for server-built pages and ScrapingBee drops to $0.10 per 1,000, which Firecrawl cannot match because it renders everything.

Do you need the site, or a list of URLs?

This is where Firecrawl earns its price. Its crawl and map endpoints discover the pages of a domain for you at 1 credit a page, and the markdown comes back cleaned for a model. ScrapingBee fetches one URL per request, so the queue, deduplication, depth rules and boilerplate removal are your code. If you have no crawler today, price an engineer month against the per-page gap before you pick the cheaper meter.

Who turns the page into data?

Both sell model extraction, and ScrapingBee sells it cheaper: 5 extra credits a page against Firecrawl at 4 extra on a much more expensive credit. On Startup that is $0.99 per 1,000 typed pages on ScrapingBee against $4.15 on Firecrawl Standard yearly. Run the same 50 pages through both with your real schema before you trust either, because extraction quality, not the meter, decides whether the data is usable.

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 why ScrapingBee is cheaper even with rendering
Prices five real workloads on each vendor
Lists the defended-site and failed-request rules
Shows where Firecrawl crawl and markdown win
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

ScrapingBee vs Firecrawl side by side

Every ScrapingBee and Firecrawl figure below was read from the vendor pricing page or documentation on 22 October 2026. ClawEngine is the third column, and it loses the defended-site row outright.

Swipe to compare all columns →

What you are comparing	ScrapingBee	Firecrawl	ClawEngine
What it is	Proxy-backed scraping API with JavaScript rendering, extraction rules, AI extraction and dedicated Google, Amazon and Walmart endpoints, proprietary	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	Credits on a monthly plan, multiplied by rendering and proxy type	Credits on a monthly plan. 1 per page with rendering included	Pages on a monthly plan. One page of allowance per page returned
Entry price	Hobby $19/mo for 75,000 credits. No yearly price is published	Hobby $19/mo, or $16 billed yearly, for 5,000 credits	$49/mo Hobby ($24/mo billed yearly)
Free usage	1,000 free credits, no card required	1,000 credits a month at 2 concurrent requests	No free plan
Cost per 1,000 plain HTML pages	1 credit with rendering off. $0.20 on Freelance, $0.10 on Startup, $0.08 on Business	The same as a rendered page. $0.83 on Standard yearly, $0.60 on Scale yearly	$0.98 on Hobby, $0.40 on Startup, $0.27 on Scale
Cost per 1,000 JavaScript-rendered pages	5 credits, rendering is on by default. $0.98 on Freelance, $0.50 on Startup, $0.42 on Business, $0.37 on Business+	1 credit. $0.83 on Standard, $0.67 on Growth, $0.60 on Scale, all billed yearly	The same per-page price. Rendering is not billed extra
Typed JSON against your schema	AI extraction adds 5 credits, 10 a rendered page. $0.99 per 1,000 on Startup	JSON format adds 4 credits, 5 a page. $4.15 per 1,000 on Standard yearly, $3.00 on Scale	From Startup, up to 900 model-mapped pages a month, 3,500 on Scale. Pages with schema.org data are mapped without the model
Defended sites	Premium proxy 10 credits, 25 with rendering. Stealth proxy with rendering 75. Auto mode bills only the tier that worked	No published bypass rate. The price list shows no surcharge for its enhanced proxy	Not supported. We do not defeat anti-bot systems
Whole-site crawl	No crawl endpoint. One request fetches one URL, and link discovery is your code	Yes. Crawl and map endpoints at 1 credit a page	Yes, from a start URL with a page limit you set
Output	HTML by default, JSON through CSS extraction rules or AI extraction, screenshots	Markdown, HTML, links, screenshots, and JSON against your schema	Markdown or typed JSON against your schema
Search results	Dedicated Google Search API billed in credits on every plan	Search endpoint at 2 credits per 10 results, plus 1 credit for each result you scrape	No search endpoint. You give us the URLs
Concurrency	25, 50, 100, 200 and 400 from Hobby to Business+, then 500 to 900 on Enterprise	5, 25, 50 and 100 on Hobby, Standard, Growth and Scale	Managed for you per crawl job
What a failed request costs	Only 200, 404, 410 and 413 are billed. A 403, 429 or 500 is free	A scrape with no result is free. A 403 or 404 page still costs 1 credit	A page we could not process is not counted against the allowance
Biggest plan you can buy without sales	Enterprise 120 at $5,799/mo for 120,000,000 credits, published on the pricing page	Scale at $599/mo billed yearly for 1,000,000 credits, then Enterprise by quote	Enterprise $798/mo for about 3,000,000 pages
Best for	High volumes of rendered or plain HTML, defended targets, Google results	Whole sites and docs turned into clean markdown for a model, with a self-host option	Typed records from whole public sites at a flat per-page price

US list prices in USD, exclusive of VAT on ScrapingBee. ScrapingBee monthly plans are $19, $49, $99, $249 and $599 for 75,000, 250,000, 1,000,000, 3,000,000 and 8,000,000 credits, then Enterprise tiers from $999 for 14,000,000 credits. Firecrawl monthly billing is $19, $99, $399 and $749 for Hobby, Standard, Growth and Scale with 5,000, 100,000, 500,000 and 1,000,000 credits.

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 crawl and typed-records half of this job in one request

When the targets are public sites that do not fight back, there is no proxy tier to pick, no crawler to host and no render multiplier to budget. 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/guides",
    "limit": 100,
    "render": true,
    "format": "structured",
    "schema": {
      "title": "string",
      "section": "string",
      "summary": "string",
      "last_updated": "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 proxy tier, no crawler to host, one record per page in your schema.

ScrapingBee vs Firecrawl, the questions buyers ask

Is ScrapingBee better than Firecrawl?

For fetching known URLs at volume, usually yes. ScrapingBee is cheaper per rendered page from its $99 plan up, far cheaper for plain HTML, publishes premium and stealth proxy rates for defended sites, and does not bill 403 errors. For AI teams that need whole sites discovered and returned as clean markdown, no. Firecrawl crawls and maps domains for you and its output is built for a model.

Is ScrapingBee cheaper than Firecrawl?

On most workloads, yes. A rendered page is $0.50 per 1,000 on ScrapingBee Startup against $0.83 on Firecrawl Standard billed yearly, plain HTML is $0.10 against $0.83, and AI-extracted JSON is $0.99 against $4.15. Firecrawl is cheaper only at the very bottom, where its $16 yearly Hobby plan covers 5,000 pages, and it ties on 100,000 rendered pages.

What is the difference between ScrapingBee and Firecrawl?

ScrapingBee is a proxy scraping API that fetches one URL per request and returns HTML, with rendering, proxy tiers and extraction rules you control. Firecrawl is a crawler for language models that discovers the pages of a site and returns markdown or JSON. ScrapingBee is stronger on blocked sites, volume and price. Firecrawl is stronger on whole-site crawling and clean output.

Does ScrapingBee have a crawl endpoint like Firecrawl?

No. ScrapingBee bills and runs one request per URL, so following links, deduplicating pages and stopping at a depth limit is code you write and host, usually with Scrapy or a simple queue. Firecrawl crawl and map endpoints do that for 1 credit a page. If you would otherwise build that crawler, its engineering time belongs in the price comparison.

Does ScrapingBee charge for failed requests?

Only some. ScrapingBee bills responses with a 200, 404, 410 or 413 status and does not bill 400, 401, 403, 429 or 500 errors. In auto mode it bills only the proxy configuration that succeeded, or nothing if all of them fail. Firecrawl does not bill a scrape with no result but does bill a 403 or 404 page at 1 credit.

How much does ScrapingBee cost?

ScrapingBee has five self-serve plans: Hobby $19 for 75,000 credits, Freelance $49 for 250,000, Startup $99 for 1,000,000, Business $249 for 3,000,000 and Business+ $599 for 8,000,000, then published Enterprise tiers from $999 for 14,000,000 credits up to $5,799 for 120,000,000. A plain page is 1 credit, a rendered page 5 and stealth proxy 75.

How much does Firecrawl cost?

Firecrawl has a free tier of 1,000 credits a month, then Hobby at $16 a month for 5,000 credits, Standard at $83 for 100,000, Growth at $333 for 500,000 and Scale at $599 for 1,000,000 on yearly billing, or $19, $99, $399 and $749 billed monthly. A page is 1 credit with rendering included, and JSON output adds 4.

Which is better for RAG, ScrapingBee or Firecrawl?

Firecrawl, if you are indexing whole documentation sites or knowledge bases, because it discovers the pages and returns markdown that is ready to chunk. ScrapingBee works for RAG when you already have the URL list and are willing to convert HTML to text yourself, and then it is the cheaper meter. Most teams pick on whether they want to own the crawler.

Is there an alternative to ScrapingBee and Firecrawl for typed data?

If the output you need is typed records from whole public sites, ClawEngine crawls, renders JavaScript and extracts to your schema in one call at a flat per-page price, about 250,000 pages for $99 a month, with up to 900 model-mapped pages on Startup. It does not defeat anti-bot systems, so for defended targets ScrapingBee is still the honest answer.

Good questions

Questions about ScrapingBee vs Firecrawl

On ScrapingBee it fits the Freelance plan with rendering off: 100,000 credits out of 250,000, for $49 a month. On Firecrawl it is the Standard plan, $83 a month billed yearly or $99 monthly, because every page is billed as rendered. ScrapingBee is about $34 to $50 a month cheaper, and it leaves 150,000 credits for rendered or retried pages.

ScrapingBee needs 500,000 credits at 5 a page, which is more than Freelance holds, so it is the Startup plan at $99 a month for 1,000,000. Firecrawl is Standard at $83 billed yearly or $99 monthly. This is the one workload where they tie on a monthly bill and Firecrawl is $16 cheaper on yearly billing, though ScrapingBee leaves half its credits unused.

ScrapingBee needs 2,500,000 credits, which is the Business plan at $249 a month for 3,000,000. Firecrawl is Growth at $333 a month billed yearly or $399 monthly for 500,000 credits. ScrapingBee is $84 to $150 a month cheaper, and the gap keeps widening: 1,000,000 rendered pages is $599 on ScrapingBee Business+ against $599 to $749 on Firecrawl Scale.

With rendering and AI extraction, ScrapingBee bills 10 credits a page, 200,000 credits, which fits Freelance at $49. Firecrawl JSON is 5 credits a page, 100,000 credits, which is Standard at $83 billed yearly or $99 monthly. ClawEngine Startup at $99 maps up to 900 pages a month with the model, so at 20,000 model-mapped pages we are not the cheaper choice unless the sites publish schema.org data.

At 25 credits a page that is 1,250,000 credits, which is the Business plan at $249 a month for 3,000,000. If the targets need the stealth tier at 75 credits, the same 50,000 pages are 3,750,000 credits and need Business+ at $599. Firecrawl bills these pages at 1 credit if it can fetch them, so the real test is the success rate on your own targets.

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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