Firecrawl vs ZenRows: credit math at similar spend

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 vendors sell one shared credit balance across several tools and both document MCP servers, so the comparison is mostly about credit multipliers and billing cadence.

Numbers at similar spend

• Around $70-$100 a month. ZenRows Launch is $69/month billed monthly ($58 annual) for 250,000 credits: $0.276 per 1,000 standard pages, $1.38 with JS rendering (5 credits) and $6.90 with JS plus premium proxies (25 credits). Firecrawl Standard is $83/month billed annually for 100,000 credits: $0.83 per 1,000 pages.
• The honest reading. For plain pages ZenRows is cheaper (3.0x less per 1,000 at Launch). For JS-rendered pages Firecrawl is cheaper if its single credit covers rendering, which its page implies but does not spell out. For hard targets ZenRows is expensive at $6.90 per 1,000 on Launch.
• Billing cadence. ZenRows states both monthly and annual prices ($0.232 annual for plain pages on Launch). Firecrawl's page shows annual-billed prices for Standard and above and a monthly price only for Hobby ($19), so a perfect like-for-like at higher tiers is not possible from published data.
• Free tiers. ZenRows: 5,000 credits/month (5,000 plain pages or 1,000 JS pages). Firecrawl: 1,000 credits/month.

Overage

Firecrawl publishes extra-credit prices ($5.00, $2.50 and $1.00 per 1,000 on Hobby, Standard and Scale). ZenRows offers top-ups but does not publish the top-up price on its pricing page, so you cannot cost a spike in advance.

Verdict

Choose ZenRows when your workload is mostly simple pages or you want a transparent credit-multiplier chart; choose Firecrawl when you want markdown/JSON, crawl and search under one flat per-page credit and published overage. If you expect mostly protected sites, neither is a bargain on published credit math; test success rates on real targets.

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

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).
• ZenRows: Top-ups (up to 10x per period) are offered but their price is not published on the pricing page.