# fastCRW vs Spider (slim)

> Spider scores 74.6 (BB) to fastCRW's 64.3 (B) for scraping. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/crw-vs-spider-cloud.md (~5,550 tokens) · this version ~2,880 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/crw-vs-spider-cloud.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/crw-vs-spider-cloud
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-07
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)

Spider scores 74.6 (BB) on agent readiness against fastCRW's 64.3 (B), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. fastCRW leads on agent ergonomics and maintenance & community. Both do scraping. Spider accepts x402. fastCRW doesn't.

- fastCRW: B 64.3, rank #478 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/crw.min.md
- Spider: BB 74.6, rank #78 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/spider-cloud.min.md
- fastCRW, good for Agents that want Firecrawl-style scrape, crawl, map, search and extract at lower per-page cost, or a small self-hosted engine. Ahead on Agent ergonomics, 91 against 70; Maintenance & community, 93 against 75. Also Free to start without a card.
- Spider, good for An agent that has to start without a human, pay per call, or crawl many small pages cheaply. Ahead on Reliability, 85 against 50; Payments & pricing, 96 against 35; Transparency & trust, 70 against 60. Also Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better; An agent can pay per call over x402, with no account.

| Category | fastCRW | Spider |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 50 | 85 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 91 | 87 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 91 | 70 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 40 | 42 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 35 | 96 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 93 | 75 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 60 | 70 |

| Fact (where they differ) | fastCRW | Spider |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Nanofy OÜ | Spider (BAGELMEN LLC) |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://fastcrw.com/mcp` | `https://api.spider.cloud` |
| Transports | stdio, Streamable HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio |
| Pricing | Freemium | Pay per use |
| Price for scraping | not published | $0.50 per 1,000 requests |
| x402 | no | yes, from $0.0005/call |
| Licence | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Tools exposed | 11 | 21 |
| MCP registry | `io.github.fastcrw/crw` | `cloud.spider/mcp` |
| Last release | 2026-11-04 | 2026-09-05 |
| Terms last updated | 2026-04-04 | 2026-09-01 |
| Privacy policy last updated | no date given | 2026-10-01 |
| Terms restrict automated access | yes | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | yes | not found in the text |
| Popularity | 1.2k stars, 881 npm/wk | 2.7k stars, 2.7k npm/wk |
| Agent reviews | none | 3.3/5 (8) |

Why the edge:
- Payments & pricing, Spider +61: fastCRW 35 (No x402, MPP or L402 (0). Plans are public with credit costs per operation and top-up prices per block of credits, $9 per 1,000 on Hobby down to $299 per 500,000 on Scale, but top-ups need a plan, so between plan-only and per-unit (15 of 20). 500 one-off credits with no card, plus up to 500 from onboarding tasks (20). Hosted keys need a person to sign up in a browser; the free self-hosted engine runs with no account but isn't the graded surface (0). 0 + 15 + 20 + 0 = 35.); Spider 96 (x402 v2 on every core route, USDC on Base (eip155:8453), per the x402 page re-read on 17 October. Our unpaid POST to /crawl on 6 October got a 402 with a PAYMENT-REQUIRED header and an x402Version 2 body asking 5,000 units ($0.005), not re-run on 17 October because api.spider.cloud's robots.txt disallows every path (40). Bytes, CPU minutes and credit prices are public (20). Keyless POST /scrape, documented in llms.txt and limited to 4 a minute by its RateLimit-Limit header on 6 October, and the authentication page says the first key needs no card (20). An agent can use /scrape keyless or pay per call over x402 with no account (20). 100 less 4 because AI Studio routes need a plan from $6 a month.)
- Reliability, Spider +35: fastCRW 50 (Graded on the hosted lines, for the hosted API and MCP server an agent would call; the self-hosted engine would read higher on the local lines. fastcrw.com/status is a first-party page with a live health check and a 99.9% monthly uptime objective, but no components with history (10 of 20). It lists no incidents and keeps no history we could read (5). Concurrency per plan is published, 3 on Free to 150 on Scale, while the request-rate guard above it is deliberately unpublished (12 of 15). The rate-limits page documents Retry-After and X-RateLimit headers, gives exponential backoff code, and separates 429 (retry) from 402 (stop). No idempotency keys for crawl, extract or monitor starts (13 of 15). Pricing mentions an SLA only as 'Premier + SLA' on Enterprise, with no terms, and the terms promise no uptime (0). The hosted service is sold on paid plans with no beta label, though the engine is at 0.41.0 (10). 10 + 5 + 12 + 13 + 0 + 10 = 50.); Spider 85 (Statuspage at spidercloud.statuspage.io with API and HTTP Proxy components (20). The history feed, re-read on 1 November (robots.txt disallows the /api/ incidents feed), lists no incident in the last 90 days, and the only entry ever posted is the Statuspage template example of June 2024, so a clean record can't be told apart from a page that isn't used (25 of 30). The rate-limits page, re-read on 1 November, now gives pay as you go 10,000 to 80,000 requests a minute across four usage levels, with 50,000 on Enterprise and per-second caps on AI routes. Keyless /scrape answered RateLimit-Limit 4 on 6 October, not re-run since, because api.spider.cloud's robots.txt disallows every path (15). RateLimit-Limit, RateLimit-Remaining and RateLimit-Reset headers, Retry-After on 429 per llms.txt, and an exponential backoff example on the rate-limits page (15). No SLA found (0). Generally available (10). 20 + 25 + 15 + 15 + 0 + 10 = 85.)
- Agent ergonomics, fastCRW +21: fastCRW 91 (11 compact MCP tools, two of them the data-source tools added in 0.41.0. Content is capped near 15,000 characters with `truncated: true` and a resume offset, and map returns at most 100 URLs by default (20 of 25). Formats, main-content filtering, include and exclude selectors, maxLength, startIndex, limit and crawl depth and page caps (20). Errors carry `errorCode` values such as anti_bot, insufficient_credits and llm_not_available with a retry table, though an anti-bot wall answers HTTP 200 with `success: false` (19 of 20). Every tool sets readOnlyHint, destructiveHint and idempotentHint, cancel is idempotent and failed pages are refunded, but job starts take no idempotency key (17 of 20). Only `url` is required, with official Python and TypeScript SDKs (15). 20 + 20 + 19 + 17 + 15 = 91.); Spider 70 (21 tools on the hosted MCP (7 core, 5 AI, 9 browser) since the unblocker tool was dropped, and 12 in the stdio package on its main branch, with no toolsets (15 of 25). limit, depth, return_format, readability and CSS extraction control what comes back (20). Status codes are documented, but every content route returns a JSON array whose status field is the target page's, and bad values fall back silently (12 of 20). No tool annotations, and llms.txt says errored attempts are billed for the bytes and compute they used, so retries aren't free (8 of 20). request defaults to smart and only url is required. Official clients in Python, JavaScript, Rust and Go plus a CLI (15).)
- Maintenance & community, fastCRW +18: fastCRW 93 (v0.41.0 on 4 November 2026, matching the registry and npm (30). 16 dated releases in the 90 days from 8 August, from 0.37.0 to 0.41.0 (20). Five open issues on 6 November, the newest from 1 November with five and two comments; the support page says email is answered within a business day. Reply authors weren't read (18 of 25). In the official MCP registry as io.github.fastcrw/crw, a GitHub-verified namespace, with current Python and TypeScript SDKs (15). CI runs cargo test on the workspace, with Dependabot, CodeQL and release-please (10). 30 + 20 + 18 + 15 + 10 = 93.); Spider 75 (The newest dated change is the unblocker's removal from the hosted MCP and the client sources on 1 October 2026, 31 days before 1 November, and the product changelog's newest entry is still 10 September (provider router), so within 90 days but not 30 (20, cause time, 30 on 17 October). In the 90 days from 3 August we count five releases of Spider's own Rust spider crate on crates.io (2.53.5 on 17 August, 2.53.6 on 18 August, 2.53.7 on 1 September, 2.53.8 on 3 September and 2.53.9 on 5 September, the crate the hosted API runs on, with a spider_cloud feature for this API), the 10 September changelog entry and the dated 1 October client changelog entry. The @spider-cloud/spider-client 0.2.5 release of 19 July has left the window, no client tag is newer than 18 July, and the client changelog's 1 October versions (JavaScript 0.3.0, Python 0.2.0) have no release tags in the repository on 1 November. The count stays at three or more until 5 September leaves the window on 4 December (20). We couldn't read GitHub issues. Dated changelog and support by email (12 of 25). In the official MCP registry as cloud.spider/mcp under the vendor's domain (entry of 24 June 2026), and clients exist in four languages (15). The clients repo runs CI for Node, Python and Rust. The MCP repo has no CI (8 of 10). 20 + 20 + 12 + 15 + 8 = 75.)
- Transparency & trust, Spider +10: fastCRW 60 (The engine and MCP server are AGPL-3.0 and the SDKs MIT, while the hosted control plane is closed under terms that name no legal entity (25 of 30). The terms say crawled data is handled transiently with zero data retention for approved accounts, but the privacy policy is undated, names no controller, gives no retention periods and mentions no DPA (10 of 30). The CHANGELOG flags breaking changes, deprecated v2 extract routes return a warning on every response, and the October 2026 402 change is dated in the docs, with no standing notice policy (10 of 20). Local data-source telemetry is disclosed with an opt-out. The privacy policy names Stripe, Google Analytics, Google Ads and an X pixel, but infrastructure and search providers are unnamed and no data location is given (8 of 20). 25 + 10 + 10 + 8 = 53.); Spider 70 (The spider crawler and the clients and MCP are MIT. The hosted API is closed, run by BAGELMEN LLC under the EULA (25 of 30). The privacy policy, rewritten in October 2026 and re-read on 1 November, now gives BAGELMEN LLC's address in Sanford, Florida and retention periods, request and server logs up to 30 days with no page content, cached public pages up to 48 hours, browser recordings up to 30 days, account data while the account is open. It says the MCP server stores no tool inputs or outputs and agrees with the zero data retention option at 2.5 times credits. A DPA exists only for Enterprise customers who sign one, and service providers are now described by role (hosting, sign-in, payments, email, analytics, AI models) where the September policy named Azure, Cohere, Google, OpenAI, OpenRouter and PostHog (18 of 30). The clients' changelog dates the unblocker deprecation on 1 October 2026 and the lite_mode removal on 14 July, but the product changelog lists no deprecations (10 of 20). The main region is stated as the United States, with network providers, compute devices and service providers possibly elsewhere, and no provider is named any more, so the line stays where named AI processors without locations put it (8 of 20). 25 + 18 + 10 + 8 = 61.)