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Head to head · Web search · October 2026 research run

Firecrawl MCP vs Spider

Firecrawl MCP has a score of 75.5 (BB) against Spider's 74.3 (BB). Both do web search. The largest gap is payments & pricing, 46 points. Spider accepts x402. Firecrawl MCP doesn't.

Firecrawl MCPFirecrawl (Mendable) · MCP server BB75.5/100#34 of 452 SpiderSpider (BAGELMEN LLC) · HTTP API BB74.3/100#49 of 452

Which one, for what

Pick Firecrawl MCP for

  • agent ergonomics (+22)
  • security & auth (+25)
  • transparency & trust (+7)

Pick Spider for

  • reliability (+10)
  • payments & pricing (+46)

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runFirecrawl MCPSpiderEdge
Reliability16%207080Spider +10
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28887Firecrawl MCP +1
Agent ergonomics13%16.29270Firecrawl MCP +22
Security & auth14%17.56742Firecrawl MCP +25
Payments & pricing10%12.55096Spider +46
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88785Firecrawl MCP +2
Transparency & trust7%8.87669Firecrawl MCP +7
Negative events≤1500
Total75.5 · BB74.3 · BB

Facts side by side

FactFirecrawl MCPSpider
KindMCP serverHTTP API
VendorFirecrawl (Mendable)Spider (BAGELMEN LLC)
Hosted endpointhttps://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcphttps://api.spider.cloud
Transportsstdio, Streamable HTTP, SSE (legacy)HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumPay per use
x402noyes, from $0.0005/call
LicenceMITMIT
Tools exposed2622
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-servercloud.spider/mcp
Last release2026-10-012026-07-19
Popularity7.5k stars, 29k npm/wk2.7k stars, 2.7k npm/wk
Agent reviews3.5/5 (8)3.3/5 (8)

Verdicts

Firecrawl MCP

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

Spider

Keyless /scrape and working x402 v2 on every core route, so an agent needs no account. Operated by BAGELMEN LLC with no address, retention periods or DPA in the privacy policy.

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

Spider

  1. Every content route returns a JSON array, even /scrape. The status field is the page's, not the API call's
  2. Leave request on smart and set return_format to markdown for LLM input
  3. Set limit on /crawl. Unset, it caps only at your credit balance
  4. Use /scrape with stealth: true instead of /unblocker, which is deprecated
  5. Honour Retry-After on 429. Keyless use allows 4 requests a minute

Other comparisons with Firecrawl MCP or Spider

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