Firecrawl vs Scrapfly: flat credit or request-based multipliers?

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

These two are priced very differently. Firecrawl charges one credit per page across a small set of endpoints; Scrapfly charges credits that scale with what each request needs (1 for plain HTTP, 5 for JS rendering or the Unblocker, 25 with residential proxies).

Cost per 1,000 pages

• Plain pages. Scrapfly Pro ($100/month, 1,000,000 credits) = $0.10 per 1,000. Firecrawl Standard ($83/month annual, 100,000 credits) = $0.83. Scrapfly is about 8.3x cheaper when a page needs nothing special.
• JS-rendered pages. Scrapfly at 5 credits = $0.50 per 1,000 on Pro, still below Firecrawl's $0.83. Firecrawl's page quotes 1 credit per basic scrape and lists no separate rendering surcharge, so we treat 1 credit as covering it; confirm on your targets.
• Hardest pages. Scrapfly with residential proxies at 25 credits = $2.50 per 1,000 on Pro, which is above Firecrawl's flat credit. Firecrawl does not publish a distinct price for protected sites, so this comparison is only about published credit rates, not about whether each tool gets through.
• Output format. Firecrawl returns markdown/JSON suited to LLMs. Scrapfly's base scrape returns the page content and has a separate extraction API; Firecrawl's JSON, Question and Highlight formats add 4 credits per page.

Spend and flexibility

Scrapfly's Pro plan has published overage at $0.35 per 1,000 credits; Firecrawl's extra credits are $2.50 per 1,000 pages on Standard. Scrapfly's free tier is a one-time 1,000 credits; Firecrawl's is 1,000 credits every month.

Verdict

If most of your fetches are ordinary or JS-heavy pages and you can handle HTML yourself, Scrapfly's credit math is cheaper. If your priority is LLM-ready output plus crawl/search on one meter and you rarely hit hard bot protection, Firecrawl is simpler to reason about. Both document MCP servers.

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

JavaScript-rendered page

Protected / anti-bot page

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).
• Scrapfly: The Unblocker's credit cost depends on the target; this site shows 5 and 25 credit reference points.