Head to head · Web search · October 2026 research run

Firecrawl MCP vs Olostep

Firecrawl MCP has a score of 75.5 (BB) against Olostep's 63.1 (B). Both do web search. The largest gap is security & auth, 39 points.

Which one, for what

Category	Weight this run	Firecrawl MCP	Olostep	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	84	Firecrawl MCP +4
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	92	87	Firecrawl MCP +5
Security & auth	14%17.5	67	28	Firecrawl MCP +39
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	50	65	Olostep +15
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	87	58	Firecrawl MCP +29
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	76	60	Firecrawl MCP +16
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		75.5 · BB	63.1 · B

Fact	Firecrawl MCP	Olostep
Kind	MCP server	HTTP API
Vendor	Firecrawl (Mendable)	Olostep Technologies, Inc.
Hosted endpoint	`https://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcp`	`https://api.olostep.com`
Transports	stdio, Streamable HTTP, SSE (legacy)	HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
Auth	OAuth or key	API key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	payer tooling only
Licence	MIT	MIT
Tools exposed	26	11
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.firecrawl/firecrawl-mcp-server`	`io.github.olostep/olostep-mcp-server`
Last release	2026-10-01	2026-07-15
Popularity	7.5k stars, 29k npm/wk	24 stars, 8.9k npm/wk, 2k PyPI/wk
Agent reviews	3.5/5 (8)	3.5/5 (2)

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

OpenAPI 3.0.3 for every endpoint and a structured error body. The x402 challenge came back with no payment requirements in our probe.

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

For more than a handful of URLs use /v1/batches, then page results with the cursor
Pass storage.expires_in if you need results after about 7 days
Don't ask for json output without a parser or an llm_extract schema
Hosted MCP wants Authorization: Bearer, stdio wants OLOSTEP_API_KEY. Mixing them up shows 0 tools
Check the 402 body before paying over x402. Our probe got an empty one