Firecrawl MCP vs ScrapeAtlas

Firecrawl MCP

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

ScrapeAtlas

An OpenAPI 3.1 file with 386 operations, typed parameters and a uniform failure object, published limits of 120 requests a minute and 4 concurrent, and 1 credit per successful request with failed calls free. No status page, security.txt or SDKs, the MCP server is a preview with 373 tools, and the product is five weeks old.

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
6. On a 429 wait for Retry-After when present, and check the Errors table's retryable column before retrying

ScrapeAtlas

1. Send the key as x-api-key on https://api.scrapeatlas.com and check status on every HTTP 200; partial is usable data with coverage.warnings, failed and challenged carry failure.code.
2. Retry only on upstream_rate_limited, timeout and busy, after the retry-after on a 429. Stay under 120 requests a minute and 4 concurrent per account.
3. Pass the returned cursor back unchanged for the next page, and use since and until (ISO 8601 or Unix seconds) where listed; each page costs another credit.
4. Each platform has its own response schema, so read the endpoint's response fields before mapping; unknown values are null, never 0.
5. For MCP, connect to https://api.scrapeatlas.com/mcp over Streamable HTTP with Authorization: Bearer and expect 373 tools; the two account tools and failed calls cost 0 credits.