Firecrawl
The most recommended of 4 web scraping APIs
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.
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.
27 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 17
- criticize it
- 10
- approval share
- 63%
Recommended in 10 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 17 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.7 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 10 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Works well for AI agents
“It's been working really well for my agents, I even hosted a small observability tool that proxies the requests”
Comment from 5 Oct 2026 in “Web Search API” “ended up going with Firecrawl for a more recent project”
Comment from 11 Mar 2026 in “Cloudflare Crawl Endpoint” Better results than alternatives
“Firecrawl and Jina Reader are better on token count but they convert to markdown”
Comment from 17 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: PageMap – MCP server that compresses web pages from 100K to 2-5K tokens” “I am getting much better results from Firecrawl”
Comment from 11 Mar 2026 in “Cloudflare Crawl Endpoint” Recommended alongside Exa and Tavily
“if you're going paid, Parallel, Firecrawl, Tavily and Exa are all pretty good now”
Comment from 18 Oct 2026 in “DeepSeek search and fetch – $0.75 per 1000 successful requests” “You should consider using something like Exa or Firecrawl.”
Comment from 21 Oct 2026 in “Claude Duet” “Firecrawl or Exa are pretty good for that”
Comment from 22 Jan 2026 in “Why it's still hard to track Y Combinator Companies” Good product and company
“firecrawl is a wonderful company, it's fun to compete with them”
Comment from 9 Jul 2026 in “Launch HN: Context.dev (YC S26) – API to get structured data from any website” “their core offerings have become really good”
Comment from 9 Jul 2026 in “Launch HN: Context.dev (YC S26) – API to get structured data from any website” “One of my favourite tools out there”
Comment from 13 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: Access X, Reddit, Threads and all social media data from a single API”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Struggles with heavy SPAs and anti-bot
“they often struggle when you throw heavy SPAs, high-concurrency jobs, or hardened anti-bot walls”
Comment from 2 Oct 2026 in “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2026)” “the crawl4ai, firecrawl tools do not pierce shadow dom”
Comment from 23 Apr 2026 in “Because Webfetch Sucks” Hosted plan is expensive
“Their customers were responsible for 95% of my traffic bill overcharge.”
Comment from 5 Oct 2026 in “Web Search API” “hosted (and rather expensive)firecrawl”
Comment from 22 Dec 2025 in “How I protect my Forgejo instance from AI web crawlers” Seen as gatekeeper, not new tech
“instead of gatekeepers in the form of brightdata, firecrawl, cloudflare and the likes”
Comment from 26 Aug 2026 in “Serve Markdown to AI Agents with Accept Headers” “Scraping APIs have been around for over a decade.”
Comment from 11 Mar 2026 in “Cloudflare Crawl Endpoint”
Other web scraping APIs people recommend
The three most recommended other web scraping APIs, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FirecrawlThis page | 17 | 10 | 63% | 10 | — | — |
| Bright Data | 10 | 32 | 24% | 5 | — | — |
| Apify | 5 | 0 | 100% | 3 | — | — |
| Jina Reader | 5 | 1 | 83% | 3 | — | — |
What people said
25 of the 28 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“You should consider using something like Exa or Firecrawl.”
“if you're going paid, Parallel, Firecrawl, Tavily and Exa are all pretty good now”
“despite of the promise of most scraping tools like firecrawl and others, to affectively close the loop of data acquisition”
“It's been working really well for my agents, I even hosted a small observability tool that proxies the requests”
“Their customers were responsible for 95% of my traffic bill overcharge.”
“they often struggle when you throw heavy SPAs, high-concurrency jobs, or hardened anti-bot walls”
“It is marketing aimed at machines.”
“because they're open source in some parts and it's incredible”
“instead of gatekeepers in the form of brightdata, firecrawl, cloudflare and the likes”
“firecrawl is a wonderful company, it's fun to compete with them”
“their core offerings have become really good”
“Firebase is not cheap, but it retrieves everything, bypasses captchas and so on.”
“you hereby grant to us a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free license”
“the crawl4ai, firecrawl tools do not pierce shadow dom”
“One of my favourite tools out there”
“running a crawler fleet which is deceptive and evasive in its identification”
“Scraping APIs have been around for over a decade.”
“they copied my idea by showing interest in my product and then copied it”
“I am getting much better results from Firecrawl”
“ended up going with Firecrawl for a more recent project”
“Firecrawl for scraping and Memberstack CLI for the import.”
“Firecrawl and Jina Reader are better on token count but they convert to markdown”
“Firecrawl or Exa are pretty good for that”
“hosted (and rather expensive)firecrawl”
“firecrawl.dev; a black mirror hourlong AI-chatbot-zoom-interview”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.