Firecrawl vs Crawl4AI: hosted credits or open source?

Published prices compared, with the arithmetic shown. Last checked 2026-10-16. Prices only: we have not tested reliability, speed or output quality.

At a glance

Analysis

Both tools turn web pages into LLM-ready markdown, both document an MCP server, and both give you a free monthly allowance. The difference is the business model: Firecrawl is a hosted, credit-priced service, while Crawl4AI is an Apache-2.0 library you can run yourself for no licence fee, with an optional hosted Cloud that is explicitly in “soft launch” pricing.

What the published numbers say

• Entry price. Firecrawl Hobby is $19/month billed monthly ($16 annual) for 5,000 credits, which is $3.80 per 1,000 pages ($3.20 annual). Crawl4AI Cloud Starter is $10/month for 10,000 credits; a light-level scrape costs 0.5 credit, so $0.50 per 1,000 pages. That is about 7.6x cheaper on paper.
• Around 100k+ pages a month. Firecrawl Standard ($83/month billed annually, 100,000 credits) works out to $0.83 per 1,000. Crawl4AI Cloud Builder ($99/month, 125,000 credits) works out to $0.396 per 1,000 light pages, but it only gets there if the engine classifies your pages as light.
• The multiplier matters. Crawl4AI Cloud multiplies the 0.5-credit base by 2 when a real browser was needed and 4 when a site fought back, so a heavy page on Builder costs $0.792 per 1,000, which is about the same as Firecrawl Standard. Firecrawl's pricing page quotes a flat 1 credit per basic page and, separately, +4 credits per page if you ask for JSON, Question or Highlight formats.
• Free tiers. Firecrawl: 1,000 credits/month (about 1,000 pages). Crawl4AI Cloud: 1,000 credits/month (about 2,000 light pages). Self-hosting Crawl4AI has no usage cap, but you pay for servers, browsers and any proxies.

How to choose

Pick Firecrawl if you want a stable, documented hosted API with crawl, map and search on one credit balance and you value predictable per-page pricing. Pick Crawl4AI if you have the engineering time to run browsers yourself (zero licence cost, full control) or you want to test the cheaper hosted Cloud and can tolerate prices that the vendor says may change. Neither number here measures how often a fetch succeeds on protected sites; run a small test on your own targets before committing.

Price ladders from the data

Effective price per unit at each published plan (monthly spend shown). Overage and assumption-based rows are excluded here; see each vendor page.

Basic page fetch

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What we could not verify

• Firecrawl: Stealth/enhanced proxy credit cost is not stated on the pricing page; not computed.; Monthly-billed prices not shown on the page (only annual-billed).
• Crawl4AI: Depends on your servers/proxies; not computed.; Vendor states cloud prices can change during soft launch.