# 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. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Canonical: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-scrapingbee
- Markdown: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-scrapingbee.md (~2,000 tokens)
- Slim: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-scrapingbee.min.md (~330 tokens, same facts, less prose, for token-sensitive contexts)
- JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-scrapingbee.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
- Updated: 2026-10-05

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 MCP: grade BB, 75.5/100, rank #34 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/firecrawl-mcp.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/firecrawl-mcp.json
- ScrapingBee: grade C, 59.3/100, rank #268 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/scrapingbee.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/scrapingbee.json

## 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 nothing in particular (no category where it leads by five points or more).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Firecrawl MCP | ScrapingBee | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 70 | 70 | even |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 88 | 60 | Firecrawl MCP +28 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 92 | 68 | Firecrawl MCP +24 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 67 | 37 | Firecrawl MCP +30 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 50 | 40 | Firecrawl MCP +10 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 87 | 85 | Firecrawl MCP +2 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 76 | 64 | Firecrawl MCP +12 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **75.5 · BB** | **59.3 · C** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Firecrawl MCP | ScrapingBee |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | MCP server | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Firecrawl (Mendable) | ScrapingBee (Oxylabs group) |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcp` | `https://app.scrapingbee.com/api/v1/` |
| Transports | stdio, Streamable HTTP, SSE (legacy) | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth or key | API key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Paid |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | MIT | none |
| Tools exposed | 26 | 18 |
| 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` | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-10-01 | 2026-09-11 |
| Popularity | 7.5k stars, 29k npm/wk | 132 stars, 49k npm/wk, 72k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 3.5/5 (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

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