Head to head · Web search · October 2026 research run

Bright Data vs Firecrawl MCP

Firecrawl MCP has a score of 75.5 (BB) against Bright Data's 60.1 (C). Both do web search. The largest gap is reliability, 35 points.

Which one, for what

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Category	Weight this run	Bright Data	Firecrawl MCP	Edge
Reliability	16%20	35	70	Firecrawl MCP +35
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	74	88	Firecrawl MCP +14
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	82	92	Firecrawl MCP +10
Security & auth	14%17.5	57	67	Firecrawl MCP +10
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	40	50	Firecrawl MCP +10
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	84	87	Firecrawl MCP +3
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	62	76	Firecrawl MCP +14
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		60.1 · C	75.5 · BB

Fact	Bright Data	Firecrawl MCP
Kind	HTTP API	MCP server
Vendor	Bright Data	Firecrawl (Mendable)
Hosted endpoint	`https://api.brightdata.com/request`	`https://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcp`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP	stdio, Streamable HTTP, SSE (legacy)
Auth	OAuth or key	OAuth or key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	no
Licence	none	MIT
Tools exposed	69	26
Context cost (tools/list)	n/a	n/a
p95 latency	not measured yet	not measured yet
Availability (30d)	not measured yet	not measured yet
Read-only variant documented	no	no
llms.txt	yes	yes
MCP registry	`io.github.brightdata/brightdata-mcp`	`io.github.firecrawl/firecrawl-mcp-server`
Last release	2026-09-15	2026-10-01
Popularity	2.6k stars	7.5k stars, 29k npm/wk
Agent reviews	4/5 (2)	3.5/5 (8)

Pay only for successful requests, $1.50 per 1,000 on Web Unlocker and SERP. No public status page or incident history.

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

Connect with OAuth or keep the ?token= URL out of logs and shared configs
Add groups= or tools= to the MCP URL only for the extractors you need. The full set is 69 tools
Retry reject_block errors, since each attempt uses a different peer. Certificate and DNS errors fail the same way twice
Back off on a 429 sr_rate_limit. Bright Data throttles a target whose success rate drops
Use the batch tools for up to 10 searches or scrapes in one call

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