# Firecrawl

17 Hacker News commenters recommended Firecrawl and 10 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 10 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Recommended for reliable scraping that gives agents clean data, with better results than many rivals. Critics say it struggles with heavy SPAs and hardened anti-bot walls.

## Why people recommend it

- Works well for AI agents (2 comments): "It's been working really well for my agents, I even hosted a small observability tool that proxies the requests" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49968986)) "ended up going with Firecrawl for a more recent project" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47330759))
- Better results than alternatives (2 comments): "Firecrawl and Jina Reader are better on token count but they convert to markdown" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47048097)) "I am getting much better results from Firecrawl" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47335513))
- Recommended alongside Exa and Tavily (3 comments): "if you're going paid, Parallel, Firecrawl, Tavily and Exa are all pretty good now" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50144703)) "You should consider using something like Exa or Firecrawl." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50188805)) "Firecrawl or Exa are pretty good for that" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46724604))
- Good product and company (3 comments): "firecrawl is a wonderful company, it's fun to compete with them" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48848110)) "their core offerings have become really good" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48848008)) "One of my favourite tools out there" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47755119))

## What people warn about

- Struggles with heavy SPAs and anti-bot (2 comments): "they often struggle when you throw heavy SPAs, high-concurrency jobs, or hardened anti-bot walls" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49928677)) "the crawl4ai, firecrawl tools do not pierce shadow dom" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47874774))
- Hosted plan is expensive (2 comments): "Their customers were responsible for 95% of my traffic bill overcharge." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49967498)) "hosted (and rather expensive)firecrawl" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46353048))
- Seen as gatekeeper, not new tech (2 comments): "instead of gatekeepers in the form of brightdata, firecrawl, cloudflare and the likes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49455839)) "Scraping APIs have been around for over a decade." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47336543))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Bright Data](https://hackerapproved.com/p/bright-data.md): 10 recommend
- [Apify](https://hackerapproved.com/p/apify.md): 5 recommend
- [Jina Reader](https://hackerapproved.com/p/jina-reader.md): 5 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://www.firecrawl.dev/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Firecrawl", https://hackerapproved.com/p/firecrawl/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).