Head to head · Fetching pages · October 2026 research run

Firecrawl MCP vs ScrapingAnt

Firecrawl MCP has a score of 75.5 (BB) against ScrapingAnt's 35.9 (F). Both do fetching pages. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 82 points.

Which one, for what

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Category	Weight this run	Firecrawl MCP	ScrapingAnt	Edge
Reliability	16%20	70	30	Firecrawl MCP +40
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	66	Firecrawl MCP +26
Security & auth	14%17.5	67	10	Firecrawl MCP +57
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	50	40	Firecrawl MCP +10
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	87	5	Firecrawl MCP +82
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	76	57	Firecrawl MCP +19
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		75.5 · BB	35.9 · F

Fact	Firecrawl MCP	ScrapingAnt
Kind	MCP server	HTTP API
Vendor	Firecrawl (Mendable)	ScrapingAnt (DATAANT)
Hosted endpoint	`https://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcp`	`https://api.scrapingant.com/v2/general`
Transports	stdio, Streamable HTTP, SSE (legacy)	HTTP, Streamable HTTP
Auth	OAuth or key	API key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	no
Licence	MIT	none
Tools exposed	26	3
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	2024-07-16
Popularity	7.5k stars, 29k npm/wk	90 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.

10,000 free credits a month with no card. API Basics puts the key in the query string, so it lands in logs.

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

Send the key in the x-api-key header rather than the query string
Use /v2/markdown for LLM input, and set browser=false on static pages to pay 1 credit instead of 10
Switch to proxy_type=residential only after a 423 (anti-bot) response. It raises a browser request from 10 to 125 credits
On the free plan a second concurrent request gets 409. Wait for the first to finish
Google, Bing and Yandex result pages come back as raw HTML through /v2/general, so you parse them yourself