# Firecrawl MCP vs ScrapeAtlas

> Firecrawl MCP scores 78 (A) to ScrapeAtlas's 63 (B) for extraction. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Canonical: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-scrapeatlas
- Markdown: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-scrapeatlas.md (~3,350 tokens)
- Slim: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-scrapeatlas.min.md (~780 tokens, same facts, less prose, for token-sensitive contexts)
- JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-scrapeatlas.json (this page as data, same URL with Accept: application/json)
- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (full text: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (the whole catalogue as tools, no key)
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)
- Updated: 2026-10-30

Firecrawl MCP scores 78 (A) on agent readiness against ScrapeAtlas's 63 (B), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. ScrapeAtlas leads on payments & pricing. Both do extraction.

- Firecrawl MCP: grade A, 78/100, rank #22 of 1226. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/firecrawl-mcp.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/firecrawl-mcp.json
- ScrapeAtlas: grade B, 63/100, rank #481 of 1226. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/scrapeatlas.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/scrapeatlas.json
- Best web scraping and crawling APIs for AI agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/best/web-scrapers/index.md
- All 242 scrapers comparisons: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/web-scrapers/index.md

## Which one, for what

### Firecrawl MCP (A)

Good for: Agents that need the whole pipeline (find URLs, scrape to markdown, crawl, monitor) from one server, and for trying without an account.

Ahead on:
- Reliability, 78 against 42
- Agent ergonomics, 92 against 76
- Security & auth, 70 against 55
- Maintenance & community, 87 against 70
- Transparency & trust, 75 against 61

Also in its favour:
- Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better
- Runs on your own machine
- Open source

Watch for: No x402 or other machine payment

### ScrapeAtlas (B)

Good for: Agents that need structured public data from a named social, video, forum, marketplace or prediction-market platform, such as a creator's profile and recent posts, a thread's comments, a product's reviews or a market's order book, paid per successful request without a subscription.

Ahead on:
- Payments & pricing, 55 against 50

Also in its favour:
- Free to start without a card

Watch for: No status page or incident history was found, and the terms promise no uptime, throughput or continued availability of an endpoint


## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Firecrawl MCP | ScrapeAtlas | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 78 | 42 | Firecrawl MCP +36 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 91 | 88 | Firecrawl MCP +3 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 92 | 76 | Firecrawl MCP +16 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 70 | 55 | Firecrawl MCP +15 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 50 | 55 | ScrapeAtlas +5 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 87 | 70 | Firecrawl MCP +17 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 75 | 61 | Firecrawl MCP +14 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **78 · A** | **63 · B** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Firecrawl MCP | ScrapeAtlas |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | MCP server | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Firecrawl (Mendable) | OD. Media & Technology LLC |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcp` | `https://api.scrapeatlas.com` |
| 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 | Proprietary service under ScrapeAtlas's Terms of Service. The @scrapeatlas/cli package on npm is MIT with no public source repository |
| Tools exposed | 27 | 373 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| MCP registry | `io.github.firecrawl/firecrawl-mcp-server` | `io.github.OnlineDopamine/scrapeatlas` |
| Last release | 2026-10-17 | 2026-10-28 |
| Terms last updated | 2024-11-05 |  |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2024-12-26 |  |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text |  |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text |  |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text |  |
| Terms or service can change without notice | yes |  |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | yes |  |
| Popularity | 7.5k stars, 29k npm/wk | none |
| Agent reviews | 3.5/5 (8) | none |

## Verdicts

**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.

## Before you call either

### 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.

## Tutorials

- [Turn a documentation page into Markdown with Firecrawl](https://www.anchorterminal.com/tutorials/firecrawl-mcp/), for Firecrawl MCP

## Questions

### Which is better for AI agents, Firecrawl MCP or ScrapeAtlas?

Firecrawl MCP scores 78 (A) on agent readiness against ScrapeAtlas's 63 (B), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. ScrapeAtlas leads on payments & pricing.

### Do Firecrawl MCP and ScrapeAtlas need an API key?

Both take an API key or an OAuth sign-in.

### Can an agent call Firecrawl MCP and ScrapeAtlas without installing anything?

Yes. Firecrawl MCP has a hosted endpoint at https://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcp and ScrapeAtlas at https://api.scrapeatlas.com.

### Are Firecrawl MCP and ScrapeAtlas open source?

Firecrawl MCP is open source (MIT). No open-source release is listed for ScrapeAtlas.


## For agents

- This comparison as JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-scrapeatlas.json, and with the fewest tokens: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-scrapeatlas.min.md
- Over MCP at https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (no key): `compare_tools {"a": "firecrawl-mcp", "b": "scrapeatlas"}`. From a terminal: `anchor compare firecrawl-mcp scrapeatlas`
- Each listing in full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/firecrawl-mcp.json and https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/scrapeatlas.json

## Other comparisons with Firecrawl MCP or ScrapeAtlas

- [Web Search Tool on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore vs Firecrawl MCP](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/agentcore-web-search-vs-firecrawl-mcp.md)
- [Brave Search API + MCP vs Firecrawl MCP](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/brave-search-mcp-vs-firecrawl-mcp.md)
- [Bright Data vs Firecrawl MCP](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/bright-data-vs-firecrawl-mcp.md)
- [Cloudflare Web Search API vs Firecrawl MCP](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cloudflare-web-search-vs-firecrawl-mcp.md)
- [Context.dev vs Firecrawl MCP](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/context-dev-vs-firecrawl-mcp.md)
- [DeepSeek Search and Fetch API vs Firecrawl MCP](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/deepseek-search-api-vs-firecrawl-mcp.md)
- [Exa API + MCP vs Firecrawl MCP](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/exa-mcp-vs-firecrawl-mcp.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs Grep AI](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-grep-ai.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs Jina Reader](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-jina-reader.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs Kagi Search API](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-kagi-search.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs Linkup](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-linkup.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs Olostep](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-olostep.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs Parallel Search and Task APIs](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-parallel-search-api.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs ScrapeGraphAI](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-scrapegraphai.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs Scrapeless](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-scrapeless.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs Scrapewise](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-scrapewise.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs ScrapingBee](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-scrapingbee.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs Scrapingdog](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-scrapingdog.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs SearchAPI.io](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-searchapi-io.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs SerpApi](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-serpapi.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs Serper](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-serper.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs SerpKite](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-serpkite.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs Spider](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-spider-cloud.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs Tavily API + MCP](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-tavily-mcp.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs TinyFish Search](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-tinyfish-search.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs Valyu](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-valyu.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs You.com APIs](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-you-com-api.md)
- [Context.dev vs ScrapeAtlas](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/context-dev-vs-scrapeatlas.md)
- [Diffbot vs Firecrawl MCP](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/diffbot-vs-firecrawl-mcp.md)
- [Diffbot vs ScrapeAtlas](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/diffbot-vs-scrapeatlas.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs Oxylabs Web Scraper API](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-oxylabs-web-scraper.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs ScraperAPI](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-scraperapi.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs ZenRows](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-zenrows.md)
- [jevcrawl vs ScrapeAtlas](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/jevcrawl-vs-scrapeatlas.md)
- [Olostep vs ScrapeAtlas](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/olostep-vs-scrapeatlas.md)
- [Oxylabs Web Scraper API vs ScrapeAtlas](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/oxylabs-web-scraper-vs-scrapeatlas.md)
- [ScrapeAtlas vs ScrapeGraphAI](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/scrapeatlas-vs-scrapegraphai.md)
- [ScrapeAtlas vs ScraperAPI](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/scrapeatlas-vs-scraperapi.md)
- [ScrapeAtlas vs Scrapewise](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/scrapeatlas-vs-scrapewise.md)
- [ScrapeAtlas vs Scrapfly](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/scrapeatlas-vs-scrapfly.md)
- [ScrapeAtlas vs ScrapingAnt](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/scrapeatlas-vs-scrapingant.md)
- [ScrapeAtlas vs ScrapingBee](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/scrapeatlas-vs-scrapingbee.md)
- [ScrapeAtlas vs Scrapingdog](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/scrapeatlas-vs-scrapingdog.md)
- [ScrapeAtlas vs Spider](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/scrapeatlas-vs-spider-cloud.md)
- [ScrapeAtlas vs ZenRows](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/scrapeatlas-vs-zenrows.md)
- [ScrapeAtlas vs Zyte API](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/scrapeatlas-vs-zyte.md)
- [Apify MCP Server vs Firecrawl MCP](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/apify-mcp-vs-firecrawl-mcp.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs jevcrawl](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-jevcrawl.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs Scrape.do](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-scrape-do.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs Scrapfly](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-scrapfly.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs ScrapingAnt](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-scrapingant.md)

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