Head to head · Web search · October 2026 research run

Firecrawl MCP vs ScrapeGraphAI

Firecrawl MCP has a score of 75.5 (BB) against ScrapeGraphAI's 68.3 (B). Both do web search. The largest gap is payments & pricing, 40 points.

Which one, for what

Category	Weight this run	Firecrawl MCP	ScrapeGraphAI	Edge
Reliability	16%20	70	64	Firecrawl MCP +6
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	88	88	even
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	92	72	Firecrawl MCP +20
Security & auth	14%17.5	67	39	Firecrawl MCP +28
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	50	90	ScrapeGraphAI +40
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	87	70	Firecrawl MCP +17
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	76	61	Firecrawl MCP +15
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		75.5 · BB	68.3 · B

Fact	Firecrawl MCP	ScrapeGraphAI
Kind	MCP server	HTTP API
Vendor	Firecrawl (Mendable)	ScrapeGraphAI
Hosted endpoint	`https://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcp`	`https://v2-api.scrapegraphai.com`
Transports	stdio, Streamable HTTP, SSE (legacy)	HTTP, Streamable HTTP
Auth	OAuth or key	OAuth or key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	payer tooling only
Licence	MIT	none
Tools exposed	26	20
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.ScrapeGraphAI/scrapegraph-mcp`
Last release	2026-10-01	2026-07-31
Popularity	7.5k stars, 29k npm/wk	2.4k npm/wk, 46k PyPI/wk
Agent reviews	3.5/5 (8)	3/5 (2)

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

An agent can mint an account and key over x402 or MPP with no signup. Rate limits and plan prices differ between docs pages.

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

Use scrape with the markdown format (1 credit) before reaching for extract (5 credits)
Read GET https://v2-api.scrapegraphai.com/api/agent/protocols for current packs and prices before paying over x402
MCP tool calls stop at 60 seconds. Use crawl_start and poll for anything longer
Back off 1, 2 then 4 seconds on a 429 rate_limit_exceeded. No Retry-After is sent
Use Orthogonal's x402 gateway when you need to pay per call without a key