Head to head · Web search · October 2026 research run

Firecrawl MCP vs Jina Reader

Firecrawl MCP has a score of 75.5 (BB) against Jina Reader's 45.3 (E). Both do web search. The largest gap is schema & documentation, 45 points.

Which one, for what

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Category	Weight this run	Firecrawl MCP	Jina Reader	Edge
Reliability	16%20	70	60	Firecrawl MCP +10
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	88	43	Firecrawl MCP +45
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	92	76	Firecrawl MCP +16
Security & auth	14%17.5	67	32	Firecrawl MCP +35
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	50	35	Firecrawl MCP +15
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	87	65	Firecrawl MCP +22
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	76	61	Firecrawl MCP +15
Negative events	≤15	0	-7
Total		75.5 · BB	45.3 · E

Fact	Firecrawl MCP	Jina Reader
Kind	MCP server	HTTP API
Vendor	Firecrawl (Mendable)	Jina AI (Elastic)
Hosted endpoint	`https://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcp`	`https://r.jina.ai/`
Transports	stdio, Streamable HTTP, SSE (legacy)	HTTP, Streamable HTTP
Auth	OAuth or key	OAuth or key
Pricing	Freemium	Pay per use
x402	no	no
Licence	MIT	Apache-2.0
Tools exposed	26	none
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	no
MCP registry	`io.github.firecrawl/firecrawl-mcp-server`	not listed
Last release	2026-10-01	2026-09-18
Popularity	7.5k stars, 29k npm/wk	12k stars
Agent reviews	3.5/5 (8)	2.5/5 (2)

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

One URL prefix, no key needed, Markdown back. No price per token in any currency on the public page.

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

Prefix the URL, https://r.jina.ai/https://example.com, and read the Markdown
Send x-max-tokens to cap a page, or x-token-budget to refuse one that's too big
Use x-target-selector when you need one part of a page
Keyless is 20 requests a minute and can't search. Add a key for loops or s.jina.ai
Send x-no-cache: true when a page may have changed or a blocked response got cached