By use case · Zyte vs Firecrawl

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

The short answer

Zyte is cheaper per page on easy sites and Firecrawl is easier to forecast. Zyte charges per successful request at a rate set by how hard Zyte rates each website, from $0.13 per 1,000 plain HTTP requests on a Simple site to $16.08 per 1,000 browser requests on an Advanced one. Firecrawl charges one credit a page with rendering included, $0.83 per 1,000 on Standard billed yearly. Zyte wins on volume and on defended sites. Firecrawl wins when the output must be markdown or JSON for a model at one fixed price. If the deliverable is typed records from whole public sites, ClawEngine crawls and extracts them from $99 a month for about 250,000 pages.

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.

Zyte and Firecrawl end up on the same shortlist because both take a URL and return something a program can use. Zyte comes from the scraping-infrastructure side. You send a request, Zyte decides how hard the target is, and that decision, a tier from 1 to 5, sets the price of every request to that site. Firecrawl comes from the LLM side. It renders every page, strips the boilerplate and returns markdown, or JSON against a schema, for one credit a page.

That gives you two very different invoices. A Zyte bill is the number of successful requests times a rate you cannot see until the site has been rated, with a monthly commitment as the floor. A Firecrawl bill is pages times one credit, or five when you ask for typed JSON. The Zyte figures on this page were read on 29 October 2026 from the Zyte pricing page, and the Firecrawl figures from its pricing page and billing documentation. Every workload below is priced from those numbers alone.

For each vendor in full, see our Zyte API pricing guide with every tier and commitment and the Firecrawl pricing breakdown. If a proxy API is the other half of your shortlist, Scrapfly vs Firecrawl prices that pair the same way, and Zyte alternatives and Firecrawl alternatives list the rest of the field.

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 Zyte vs Firecrawl

How hard are your target sites?

On a Simple-tier site Zyte charges $0.13 per 1,000 plain requests pay as you go, against $0.83 on Firecrawl Standard, about six times cheaper. On a Moderate site that becomes $0.44, and a browser request is $4.02, nearly five times the Firecrawl price. Zyte decides the tier, not you, so rate three of your real targets in its estimator before you compare.

How much of the bill can you predict?

Firecrawl is one number: pages times one credit, or five with JSON. Zyte adds a tier per site, a commitment floor and a rate that moves if a site is re-rated. A one-tier move raises that site rate by 60 to 100 percent. Firecrawl is the easier invoice to put in front of a finance team.

Who turns the page into data?

Firecrawl returns JSON against your own schema at 5 credits a page. Zyte sells automatic extraction for fixed page types such as products and articles, billed per data type on top of the request, and you do not supply your own schema. If you need custom fields, Firecrawl or ClawEngine fits better. If you need standard product fields at scale, Zyte can be cheaper.

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 Zyte site tiers change the cost per page
Prices five real workloads on each vendor
Explains the commitment floor and re-rating risk
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

Zyte vs Firecrawl side by side

Zyte figures were read from zyte.com/pricing and Firecrawl figures from firecrawl.dev/pricing on 29 October 2026. ClawEngine is the third column, and it loses the defended-site row outright.

Swipe to compare all columns →

What you are comparing	Zyte	Firecrawl	ClawEngine
What it is	Web scraping API with automatic unblocking, browser rendering and optional automatic data extraction	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	Successful requests, priced by the site tier (1 to 5) and by HTTP or browser rendering	Credits. 1 per page with rendering included, JSON adds 4	Pages on a monthly plan. One page of allowance per page returned
Plans	Pay as you go, or a monthly commitment of $100, $200 or $500 for lower rates, plus Enterprise on request	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 HTTP pages	Simple site $0.13 pay as you go, $0.10 on the $100 commitment, $0.06 on $500. Moderate site $0.44 pay as you go	$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	Simple site $1.01 pay as you go, $0.75 on $100, $0.48 on $500. Moderate site $4.02, Advanced site $16.08 pay as you go	The same $0.83 to $0.60. Rendering is not billed extra	The same per-page price. Rendering is not billed extra
Defended sites	Built for them. Unblocking is automatic and the harder tiers carry the price	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 HTML or browser HTML, with optional automatic extraction for product, article and similar page types	Markdown, HTML, links, screenshots, and JSON against your schema	Markdown or typed JSON against your schema
Typed output against your schema	Automatic extraction is a fixed set of page types billed per data type on top of the request rate. It is not your own schema	JSON format adds 4 credits, 5 per page, about $4.15 per 1,000 on Standard yearly	From Startup, up to 900 model-mapped pages a month, 3,500 on Scale. Pages with schema.org data are mapped without the model
Forecasting the bill	Hard. The tier is assigned per website, new sites start on a temporary tier and tiers are reviewed, so a rate can move	Easy. Pages times one credit, or five with JSON	Easy. A fixed monthly page allowance
Best for	High volumes on easy sites, and hard targets where unblocking is the job	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. Zyte rates are per 1,000 successful responses and Firecrawl shows yearly-billed prices, with Hobby at $19 billed monthly. Zyte figures come from zyte.com/pricing, 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 tier to look up and no per-option math. 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 site tier, no render surcharge, one record per page in your schema.

Zyte vs Firecrawl, the questions buyers ask

Is Zyte better than Firecrawl?

For high volumes and defended sites, usually yes. Zyte unblocks automatically and a plain request on an easy site costs about an eighth of a Firecrawl page. For AI pipelines that read known sites, Firecrawl is simpler: one credit a page, rendering included, and markdown or schema JSON in the same call with no tier math.

Is Zyte cheaper than Firecrawl?

Per page on easy sites, yes. Plain HTTP is $0.13 per 1,000 on Zyte pay as you go against $0.83 on Firecrawl Standard. On rendered pages the two are close on Simple-tier sites, and Firecrawl is cheaper once Zyte rates a site Moderate or harder, where browser requests start at $4.02 per 1,000.

What is the difference between Zyte and Firecrawl?

Zyte is a scraping API that prices each request by how hard the target site is and handles unblocking for you. Firecrawl is a crawler built for language models that renders every page and returns markdown or JSON at one credit a page. Zyte is stronger on blocked sites and volume. Firecrawl is stronger on clean output and a predictable bill.

How much does Zyte cost?

Zyte API is pay as you go or on a monthly commitment of $100, $200 or $500 for lower rates. A plain HTTP request is $0.13 to $1.27 per 1,000 depending on the site tier, and a browser request is $1.01 to $16.08 per 1,000 pay as you go. Enterprise pricing is available on request.

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, all billed yearly. A page is 1 credit with rendering included, JSON output adds 4 credits and PDF parsing adds 1 per PDF page.

Does Zyte return markdown for LLMs?

Zyte returns HTML, browser-rendered HTML and automatic extraction fields, and you convert to markdown yourself or with another tool. Firecrawl returns markdown directly. If your pipeline feeds a model, that extra conversion step is part of the real cost of a cheap Zyte request, so count your own engineering time.

Which is better for scraping protected sites, Zyte or Firecrawl?

Zyte, on the evidence each vendor publishes. Automatic unblocking is the core of its product and the harder tiers exist to price it. Firecrawl offers an enhanced proxy but publishes no bypass rate. Test a sample of your real targets on both before you commit to a plan.

Is there an alternative to Zyte 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 from $99 a month, with up to 900 model-mapped pages on Startup. It does not defeat anti-bot systems, so for defended targets Zyte is the honest answer.

Good questions

Questions about Zyte vs Firecrawl

On a Simple-tier site Zyte charges $13 pay as you go, since $0.13 per 1,000 times 100 comes to $13. A $100 commitment would only make sense at much higher volume. On Firecrawl it is the Standard plan at $83 a month billed yearly. On a Moderate-tier site the Zyte figure is $44, still about half the Firecrawl price.

On a Simple-tier site Zyte browser requests are $1.01 per 1,000 pay as you go, $101 for 100,000, or $100 on the $100 commitment, which covers about 133,000 requests at $0.75. Firecrawl Standard is $83 yearly, so Firecrawl is slightly cheaper here. On a Moderate-tier site Zyte is about $240 on the $200 commitment rate.

On Simple-tier sites the $100 Zyte commitment at $0.10 per 1,000 covers exactly 1,000,000 requests, so $100, or $130 pay as you go. Firecrawl needs the Scale plan at $599 a month billed yearly for 1,000,000 credits. Zyte is about six times cheaper, and this is the main reason high-volume teams pick it.

Firecrawl bills 5 credits for a page with JSON against your schema, about $4.15 per 1,000 on Standard billed yearly. Zyte bills the request plus a per-data-type charge for automatic extraction, but only for its own page types such as products and articles. ClawEngine maps up to 900 pages a month with the model on Startup and 3,500 on Scale.

The rate for that site changes at the next review, with notice from Zyte. A move from Moderate to Complex lifts HTTP from $0.44 to $0.70 per 1,000, and browser from $4.02 to $8.04. Your commitment stays the same, so a re-rating shows up as a bigger bill or a smaller number of requests.

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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