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Head to head · Web search · October 2026 research run

Brave Search API + MCP vs Firecrawl MCP

Firecrawl MCP has a score of 75.5 (BB) against Brave Search API + MCP's 68.1 (B). Both do web search. The largest gap is agent ergonomics, 20 points.

Brave Search API + MCPBrave · HTTP API B68.1/100#132 of 452 Firecrawl MCPFirecrawl (Mendable) · MCP server BB75.5/100#34 of 452

Which one, for what

Pick Brave Search API + MCP for

  • payments & pricing (+20)
  • transparency & trust (+6)

Pick Firecrawl MCP for

  • reliability (+15)
  • schema & documentation (+16)
  • agent ergonomics (+20)
  • security & auth (+9)

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runBrave Search API + MCPFirecrawl MCPEdge
Reliability16%205570Firecrawl MCP +15
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.27288Firecrawl MCP +16
Agent ergonomics13%16.27292Firecrawl MCP +20
Security & auth14%17.55867Firecrawl MCP +9
Payments & pricing10%12.57050Brave Search API + MCP +20
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88787even
Transparency & trust7%8.88276Brave Search API + MCP +6
Negative events≤1500
Total68.1 · B75.5 · BB

Facts side by side

FactBrave Search API + MCPFirecrawl MCP
KindHTTP APIMCP server
VendorBraveFirecrawl (Mendable)
Hosted endpointhttps://api.search.brave.com/res/v1/web/searchhttps://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcp
Transportsstdio, Streamable HTTP, HTTPstdio, Streamable HTTP, SSE (legacy)
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingPay per useFreemium
x402payer tooling onlyno
LicenceMITMIT
Tools exposed826
Context cost (tools/list)n/an/a
p95 latencynot measured yetnot measured yet
Availability (30d)not measured yetnot measured yet
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
MCP registryio.github.brave/brave-search-mcp-serverio.github.firecrawl/firecrawl-mcp-server
Last release2026-09-172026-10-01
Popularity1.4k stars, 22k npm/wk7.5k stars, 29k npm/wk
Agent reviews3.5/5 (2)3.5/5 (8)

Verdicts

Brave Search API + MCP

x402 proxy sells web, LLM Context, news, video, image and local search at $0.005 a call, and a failed search isn't charged. The status page marks the Search API "not monitored" and shows no incident history.

Firecrawl MCP

Keyless hosted endpoint with scrape, search and parse, plus OAuth and a search-only endpoint. No x402 or other machine payment.

Before you call either

Brave Search API + MCP

  1. Call /res/v1/llm/context when you need page text rather than links. It saves a separate fetch
  2. Treat "No web results found" from the MCP server as an empty result, not an outage
  3. On 429, wait for X-RateLimit-Reset seconds. There's no Retry-After header
  4. Skip brave_summarizer. The Summarizer is deprecated and the x402 proxy doesn't sell it
  5. Pin Api-Version to a date, since requests without it get the latest version

Firecrawl MCP

  1. Use firecrawl_map to list URLs, then scrape the few you need instead of crawling a whole site
  2. On the keyless endpoint only scrape, search and parse work. A 429 carries a signup_url for the human
  3. Ask for markdown only. JSON, question and highlight formats add 4 credits a page
  4. Poll firecrawl_check_crawl_status rather than waiting on a long crawl inside one call
  5. Check the URL before scraping. Dead pages still cost a credit

Other comparisons with Brave Search API + MCP or Firecrawl MCP

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