Firecrawl alternative: ReefAPI vs Firecrawl
Firecrawl alternative: ReefAPI is a Firecrawl alternative when your targets are known sources and you want fields you can key on — an ASIN, a zpid, a job id — rather than page text you still have to parse. Firecrawl is the better choice when the target is arbitrary: any URL, a whole site to crawl or map, documentation to feed a RAG index, or content you want as clean markdown without writing a parser per source.
ReefAPI vs Firecrawl
| Dimension | ReefAPI | Firecrawl | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you point it at | A named source. Each engine has a parser written and maintained for that site, so the response is fields rather than prose. | Any URL. One general pipeline fetches, renders and converts the page, so a site nobody has ever integrated works on the first call. | Depends |
| What comes back | The same { ok, data, meta, error } envelope with the same typed fields on every call to that endpoint. | Markdown, HTML, links, a screenshot, or JSON against a schema you supply. The JSON path runs an LLM extraction step and costs 4 extra credits per page. | Depends |
| Whole-site crawling | No crawler. Engines are endpoints, and breadth comes from calling more of them rather than from following links. | Crawl and Map are the core of the product: submit a domain, get every reachable page. We do not do this at all. | Alternative |
| Who maintains the parser | We do. When a source changes its markup the fix ships to the endpoint and your code does not move. | You do, in effect. Markdown survives a redesign; the meaning you extract from it may not, and a schema-based extraction prompt is yours to keep working. | ReefAPI |
| Licence of the core | A hosted service. You receive no source code, so no open-source obligation attaches to your product either way. | The core repository is AGPL-3.0 and the SDKs are MIT (verified 2026-08-29). Using the hosted cloud API puts no licence obligation on your code — the copyleft question only arises if you self-host a MODIFIED build and expose it to others over a network. | ReefAPI |
| Self-hosting | Not offered. | Offered, and a real advantage if data residency or air-gapped operation is a requirement — subject to the AGPL condition above. | Alternative |
| Pricing model | One prepaid credit pool shared by every engine. Credits roll over and never expire. | Monthly plans with a credit allowance and a concurrency limit. Extra credits are sold in $5 batches at a rate that varies by tier, and there is no pay-per-use plan. | Depends |
| Failed or blocked calls | Not charged — failed or blocked ReefAPI calls are not charged. | Firecrawl's own two pages disagree about this. Both are quoted in the pricing section below. | ReefAPI |
| AI and MCP | MCP-connected, so an assistant can call any engine directly with one key. | Built for LLM pipelines first — markdown output, an MCP server and framework integrations are the product's centre of gravity. | Alternative |
| Best fit | Known sources where the field matters: price, rating, salary, listing status, review body. | Unknown or long-tail URLs, documentation ingestion, and RAG corpora built from whole sites. | Depends |
What each side actually charges
Both columns are published prices, not quotes. Ours are generated from the same plan file the checkout charges against, so they cannot drift from what you would pay. Firecrawl’s were read off Firecrawl’s own pricing page on and are reproduced with their plan names and their units. Prices change; check the linked page before you commit.
These two credits are not the same credit and the tables must not be read row against row. One Firecrawl credit buys one page of content you still have to interpret: scrape and crawl are 1 credit per page, map is 1 per call, search is 2 credits per 10 results, and asking for structured JSON adds 4 credits per page for the extraction step. One ReefAPI credit buys one call to an endpoint that already returns parsed fields, and a single call routinely returns dozens of rows. Separately, every Firecrawl price above is the billed-yearly rate, which is the only rate their page rendered for us; their month-to-month prices were not readable and we will not derive them. Our column is a true monthly price, so the like-for-like row is our yearly rate rather than our monthly one.
| Plan | Price | Included | Per 1,000 credits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 1,000 credits at signup, no card | — |
| Pro | $15 / mo | 10,000 credits / mo | $1.50 |
| Ultra | $50 / mo | 50,000 credits / mo | $1.00 |
| Mega | $100 / mo | 125,000 credits / mo | $0.80 |
| Enterprise | $200 / mo | 300,000 credits / mo | $0.67 |
| Plan | Price | Included |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 1,000 credits per month, recurring. No card required. |
| Hobby | $16 / mo, billed yearly | 5,000 credits / mo — 5 concurrent browsers; $3.20 per 1,000 credits |
| Standard | $83 / mo, billed yearly | 100,000 credits / mo — 25 concurrent; $0.83 per 1,000 credits |
| Growth | $333 / mo, billed yearly | 500,000 credits / mo — 50 concurrent; $0.67 per 1,000 credits |
| Scale | $599 / mo, billed yearly | 1,000,000 credits / mo — 100 concurrent; $0.60 per 1,000 credits |
| Enterprise | Not published | Custom — Contact sales |
$0.67–$1.50 / 1,000 credits on monthly billing, or $0.33–$0.75 / 1,000 credits paid yearly (−50%). Credits roll over and never expire, failed or blocked calls are not charged, and every engine draws from the same balance. Credits are not requests: measured across 1,124 catalog actions on 2026-08-25, 67% cost one credit, 18% cost two and 5% cost three.
Firecrawl's two pages say opposite things and we are not going to pick the one that flatters either side. The pricing-page FAQ reads "No, we only charge for successful requests." The billing documentation reads that credits are charged whenever the infrastructure processes a request, "even if the target site returns an HTTP error status code such as 403 Forbidden or 404 Not Found." Both read on 2026-08-29. Ask their support which one governs your account before you budget against it. On our side there is one answer: a failed or blocked call is not charged.
Three ways, and the first would decide it for most people still evaluating. Firecrawl's free tier is 1,000 credits EVERY MONTH; ours is 1,000 credits ONCE, at signup. If you want to keep testing for free past the first week, theirs does that and ours does not. Second, on published rates their large tiers are cheaper per credit than our monthly ones — $0.60 per 1,000 on Scale against $0.67 on our Enterprise plan — and although our yearly billing takes 50% off and lands under them, that is our discounted rate against their discounted rate and it is a narrow win rather than a rout. Third, Firecrawl can be self-hosted and we cannot; if your data may not leave your own network, no price we publish is relevant to you.
Firecrawl prices read from firecrawl.dev/pricing on . ReefAPI prices from reefapi.com/pricing, generated at build time.
When ReefAPI is the better fit
- Your targets are known sources and you want typed fields — price, rating, salary, listing status — rather than page text you still have to parse.
- You do not want to own a parser or an extraction prompt per site, and you want somebody else on the hook when a source changes its markup.
- You want failed and blocked calls to be free, with one published answer rather than two that contradict each other.
- You want credits that roll over and never expire, drawn from one pool across every source.
When the alternative is better
- Your targets are arbitrary or long-tail URLs that no vendor has a dedicated endpoint for.
- You need to crawl or map a whole site, which we do not do at all.
- You are building a RAG or documentation index and clean markdown is the format you actually want.
- You need to self-host, for data residency or air-gapped operation.
- You want a free tier that renews every month while you evaluate — theirs does, ours does not.
Real ReefAPI snapshot
ReefAPI captured this live web-extract example on . It is committed in the SEO snapshot store and used as page evidence, not generated copy.
{
"method": "POST",
"url": "https://api.reefapi.com/web-extract/v1/scrape",
"headers": {
"x-api-key": "$REEF_KEY",
"content-type": "application/json"
},
"body": {
"url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping",
"formats": [
"markdown",
"metadata"
]
}
}{
"ok": true,
"meta": {
"api": "web-extract",
"endpoint": "scrape",
"mode": "live",
"latency_ms": 1076.4,
"record_count": 1,
"bytes": 231204,
"cache_hit": false,
"method": "bare_dc_curl_cffi+trafilatura",
"browserless": true,
"ssrf_guarded": true,
"final_url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping",
"formats": [
"markdown",
"metadata"
]
},
"data": {
"final_url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping",
"url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping",
"title": "Web scraping - Wikipedia",
"metadata": {
"title": "Web scraping - Wikipedia",
"description": null,
"canonical": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping",
"lang": "en",
"site_name": "Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.",
"author": "Contributors to Wikimedia projects",
"published_at": "[redacted-phone]T18:57:30Z",
"modified_at": null,
"section": null,
"keywords": [],
"favicon": "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png",
"og": {
"title": "Web scraping - Wikipedia",
"type": "website"
}
},
"extraction": {
"method": "trafilatura",
"rendered": false,
"confidence": "high",
"content_chars": 25663
},
"markdown": "|  | \n\n**Web scraping**, **web harvesting**, or **web data extraction** is [data scraping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_scraping) used for [extracting data](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_extraction) from [websites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website).\n\n[World Wide Web](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web)using the\n\n[Hypertext Transfer Protocol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol)or a web browser. While web scraping can be done manually "
}
}What we found when we called our own endpoints
Every comparison page on the internet will tell you its own product is good. These are numbers we got by calling ReefAPI and writing down what came back, including where the answer went against us. Each one is dated and each one is repeatable against the same endpoint.
A reported total is not a reachable total, and we print the ceiling instead of hiding it
One popular query reported between 175,556 and 193,895 gigs, the number moving across four calls in the same afternoon — which is how you know it is an estimate and not a count. Paging told a different story: offset 0 with limit 96 returned 96 rows, offset 96 returned 14 more, and offsets 192, 288, 384 and 456 each returned zero with stop_reason page_cap. About 110 rows are reachable per query against a claimed 190,000. The point for this comparison is that a tool which hands you markdown cannot tell you where the wall is. Ours names it in meta.
The response carries its own completeness score, including when the score is bad
500 rows against a reported 8,945 is 5.6%, and completeness_pct is in every result rather than left for you to work out. No strategy we measured gets a heavily-reviewed business anywhere near whole. We would rather publish 5.6% than let you find it in production — and this is the class of fact that page-to-markdown conversion structurally cannot give you, because markdown does not know what it is missing.
Two calls to the same search index, minutes apart, shared 8 URLs out of 20
Measured by running one query through five index settings and three markets within a few minutes. Overlap between the two general web indexes was 2 URLs of 20. Even pinning a single index and calling it twice returned 8 shared URLs of 20. Rank tracking on one sample will read as movement that is not there. Positions also arrive with gaps — 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12 — because ad and feature blocks are stripped and their slots are not renumbered, so position is the true SERP rank and never an array index.
The proof block further down is a captured call, not a rendered example
The request and response shown in the proof section were captured against the live gateway and committed to the snapshot store with their capture timestamp printed beside them. When a snapshot is missing for an engine the page says so rather than inventing one — the same reason the Firecrawl prices above carry the date we read them.
Questions developers ask before switching
Is ReefAPI a Firecrawl alternative?
For known sources, yes: ReefAPI returns parsed fields from maintained per-source endpoints, so you key on an id rather than parse prose. For arbitrary URLs, whole-site crawling and markdown for LLM ingestion, Firecrawl is doing something we do not do, and swapping it for us would be a downgrade.
Does Firecrawl's AGPL licence affect my code?
Not if you use their hosted cloud API — calling a network service is not distribution and puts no obligation on your code. It matters in one specific case: if you self-host Firecrawl, modify it, and let other people reach that instance over a network, AGPL-3.0 section 13 obliges you to offer those users the corresponding source of your modified version. The SDKs are MIT, so client code that only imports an SDK is unaffected. Verified against the repository's LICENSE file and README licensing section on 2026-08-29. Licences change, so check it yourself before it becomes load-bearing, and this is not legal advice.
Can ReefAPI crawl an entire website like Firecrawl?
No. There is no crawler here — no submit-a-domain-and-get-every-page. ReefAPI's Web Extract engine handles individual general pages, and breadth comes from calling more engines rather than from following links. If crawl or map is the job, that is Firecrawl's core feature and the honest answer is to use it.
How do Firecrawl credits compare with ReefAPI credits?
They do not convert cleanly, and anyone offering you a straight ratio is guessing. A Firecrawl credit is roughly one page of content, with structured JSON extraction adding four credits per page on top. A ReefAPI credit is one call to an already-parsed endpoint that often returns dozens of rows. Compare on the job you need done — pages fetched against records returned — rather than on the word credit.
Which one is cheaper?
It depends on volume, and Firecrawl wins part of the range. Their free tier renews monthly and ours does not. On published rates their Scale plan is $0.60 per 1,000 credits against $0.67 on our monthly Enterprise plan; our yearly billing takes 50% off and lands below them, but that is discounted rate against discounted rate. At small volume our entry plan is well below their Hobby tier per credit. All Firecrawl figures are billed-yearly rates read on 2026-08-29.
Source notes and hedges
Competitor pricing, quotas, free tiers and feature limits change. This page uses official public pages for product-positioning claims and keeps unstable commercial details general.
- Firecrawl pricing: Plan names, credit allowances, concurrency limits and the free tier. Read 2026-08-29; the page rendered billed-yearly rates only.
- Firecrawl billing documentation: What one credit buys per operation, the extraction surcharge, and the statement that credits are charged even when the target returns 403 or 404. Read 2026-08-29.
- Firecrawl repository licence: Core licensed AGPL-3.0 and SDKs MIT, per the LICENSE file and the README licensing section. Verified 2026-08-29.
- ReefAPI pricing: Our own plans. The figures on this page are generated from the same file the checkout charges against.
Try the relevant ReefAPI endpoints with 1,000 free credits, or open the docs to inspect params, examples and live proof before wiring them into production.