Head to head · Web search · October 2026 research run

Firecrawl MCP vs SearchAPI.io

Firecrawl MCP has a score of 75.5 (BB) against SearchAPI.io's 51.4 (D). Both do web search. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 72 points.

Which one, for what

Category	Weight this run	Firecrawl MCP	SearchAPI.io	Edge
Reliability	16%20	70	90	SearchAPI.io +20
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	88	59	Firecrawl MCP +29
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	92	52	Firecrawl MCP +40
Security & auth	14%17.5	67	28	Firecrawl MCP +39
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	50	30	Firecrawl MCP +20
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	87	15	Firecrawl MCP +72
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	76	62	Firecrawl MCP +14
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		75.5 · BB	51.4 · D

Fact	Firecrawl MCP	SearchAPI.io
Kind	MCP server	HTTP API
Vendor	Firecrawl (Mendable)	SearchApi
Hosted endpoint	`https://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcp`	`https://www.searchapi.io/api/v1/search`
Transports	stdio, Streamable HTTP, SSE (legacy)	HTTP, Streamable HTTP
Auth	OAuth or key	OAuth or key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	no
Licence	MIT	none
Tools exposed	26	none
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`	`io.searchapi/mcp`
Last release	2026-10-01	none
Popularity	7.5k stars, 29k npm/wk	none
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.

99.9% SLA on every plan and no incidents on the status page since August. MCP exposes over 100 tools with no toolsets.

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 as Authorization: Bearer, not api_key= in the URL
Connect the MCP through OAuth or the X-MCP-Token header, not the registry's ?token= URL
Call the REST API with engine= when context is tight. The MCP loads over 100 tool definitions
Page Google results with page. num is fixed at 10
Pace bursts. One hour can use at most 20 per cent of the plan's monthly searches