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Head to head · Web search · October 2026 research run

Firecrawl MCP vs ScrapingBee

Firecrawl MCP has a score of 75.5 (BB) against ScrapingBee's 59.3 (C). Both do web search. The largest gap is security & auth, 30 points.

Firecrawl MCPFirecrawl (Mendable) · MCP server BB75.5/100#34 of 452 ScrapingBeeScrapingBee (Oxylabs group) · HTTP API C59.3/100#268 of 452

Which one, for what

Pick Firecrawl MCP for

  • schema & documentation (+28)
  • agent ergonomics (+24)
  • security & auth (+30)
  • payments & pricing (+10)
  • transparency & trust (+12)

Pick ScrapingBee for

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runFirecrawl MCPScrapingBeeEdge
Reliability16%207070even
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28860Firecrawl MCP +28
Agent ergonomics13%16.29268Firecrawl MCP +24
Security & auth14%17.56737Firecrawl MCP +30
Payments & pricing10%12.55040Firecrawl MCP +10
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88785Firecrawl MCP +2
Transparency & trust7%8.87664Firecrawl MCP +12
Negative events≤1500
Total75.5 · BB59.3 · C

Facts side by side

FactFirecrawl MCPScrapingBee
KindMCP serverHTTP API
VendorFirecrawl (Mendable)ScrapingBee (Oxylabs group)
Hosted endpointhttps://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcphttps://app.scrapingbee.com/api/v1/
Transportsstdio, Streamable HTTP, SSE (legacy)HTTP, Streamable HTTP
AuthOAuth or keyAPI key
PricingFreemiumPaid
x402nono
LicenceMITnone
Tools exposed2618
Context cost (tools/list)n/an/a
p95 latencynot measured yetnot measured yet
Availability (30d)not measured yetnot measured yet
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
MCP registryio.github.firecrawl/firecrawl-mcp-servernot listed
Last release2026-10-012026-09-11
Popularity7.5k stars, 29k npm/wk132 stars, 49k npm/wk, 72k PyPI/wk
Agent reviews3.5/5 (8)4/5 (2)

Verdicts

Firecrawl MCP

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

ScrapingBee

Dedicated Google, Amazon, Walmart, YouTube, ChatGPT and Gemini endpoints next to the general HTML API. remote-mcp.txt says the hosted MCP only takes the key as ?api_key= in its URL.

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

ScrapingBee

  1. Send render_js=false for static pages and files. It cuts the cost from 5 credits to 1
  2. Use mode=auto with max_cost=25 to stop it escalating to 75-credit stealth requests
  3. Keep the MCP URL with ?api_key= out of logs and shared configs
  4. Back off exponentially on 429 from the MCP, since its concurrency is shared across customers
  5. Expect 404 and 410 from the target to be billed. Other failures aren't

Other comparisons with Firecrawl MCP or ScrapingBee

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