Head to head · Web search · October 2026 research run

Firecrawl MCP vs Serper

Firecrawl MCP has a score of 75.5 (BB) against Serper's 24.3 (F). Both do web search. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 84 points.

Which one, for what

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Category	Weight this run	Firecrawl MCP	Serper	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	6	Firecrawl MCP +82
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	92	35	Firecrawl MCP +57
Security & auth	14%17.5	67	20	Firecrawl MCP +47
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	3	Firecrawl MCP +84
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	76	33	Firecrawl MCP +43
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		75.5 · BB	24.3 · F

Fact	Firecrawl MCP	Serper
Kind	MCP server	HTTP API
Vendor	Firecrawl (Mendable)	Serper
Hosted endpoint	`https://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcp`	`https://google.serper.dev/search`
Transports	stdio, Streamable HTTP, SSE (legacy)	HTTP
Auth	OAuth or key	API 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`	not listed
Last release	2026-10-01	none
Popularity	7.5k stars, 29k npm/wk	none
Agent reviews	3.5/5 (8)	2.5/5 (2)

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

$0.30 to $1.00 per 1,000 queries on prepaid packs, with no subscription. No status page, SLA or incident history.

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

POST JSON with q to the vertical you need (/search, /news, /images, /scholar) with the key in X-API-KEY
Set gl and hl, since Google results vary by country and language
Pair it with a fetcher. Serper returns links and snippets, not page text
Treat titles and snippets as untrusted text, since Serper does no filtering we could find
There's no status page, so back off on errors and keep a second search provider