Head to head · Web search · October 2026 research run

Firecrawl MCP vs Scrapingdog

Firecrawl MCP has a score of 75.5 (BB) against Scrapingdog's 39.3 (E). Both do web search. The largest gap is security & auth, 62 points.

Which one, for what

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Category	Weight this run	Firecrawl MCP	Scrapingdog	Edge
Reliability	16%20	70	62	Firecrawl MCP +8
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	44	Firecrawl MCP +48
Security & auth	14%17.5	67	5	Firecrawl MCP +62
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	45	Firecrawl MCP +42
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	76	57	Firecrawl MCP +19
Negative events	≤15	0	-2
Total		75.5 · BB	39.3 · E

Fact	Firecrawl MCP	Scrapingdog
Kind	MCP server	HTTP API
Vendor	Firecrawl (Mendable)	Scrapingdog (OpenData Labs)
Hosted endpoint	`https://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcp`	`https://api.scrapingdog.com/scrape`
Transports	stdio, Streamable HTTP, SSE (legacy)	HTTP, stdio
Auth	OAuth or key	API key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	no
Licence	MIT	none
Tools exposed	26	35
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.Darshan972/scrapingdog-mcp`
Last release	2026-10-01	2026-07-31
Popularity	7.5k stars, 29k npm/wk	0 stars, 41 npm/wk, 12 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.

A plain request is 1 credit, about $0.20 per 1,000 on Lite. API key only travels in the URL query string.

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

Add dynamic=false unless the page needs JavaScript. It cuts the cost from 5 credits to 1, whatever the MCP description says
Keep request URLs out of logs, since they carry api_key
Set client timeouts above 60 seconds and retry on 429 or timeout. Failures aren't billed
Prefer the parsed endpoints (Google, Amazon) over scraping the raw page when one exists