Head to head · Web search · October 2026 research run

Firecrawl MCP vs Tavily API + MCP

Tavily API + MCP has a score of 77.2 (BB) against Firecrawl MCP's 75.5 (BB). Both do web search. The largest gap is payments & pricing, 25 points.

Which one, for what

Category	Weight this run	Firecrawl MCP	Tavily API + MCP	Edge
Reliability	16%20	70	90	Tavily API + MCP +20
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	88	89	Tavily API + MCP +1
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	92	81	Firecrawl MCP +11
Security & auth	14%17.5	67	52	Firecrawl MCP +15
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	50	75	Tavily API + MCP +25
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	87	85	Firecrawl MCP +2
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	76	65	Firecrawl MCP +11
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		75.5 · BB	77.2 · BB

Fact	Firecrawl MCP	Tavily API + MCP
Kind	MCP server	MCP server
Vendor	Firecrawl (Mendable)	Tavily
Hosted endpoint	`https://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcp`	`https://mcp.tavily.com/mcp/?tavilyApiKey=<key>`
Transports	stdio, Streamable HTTP, SSE (legacy)	stdio, Streamable HTTP, HTTP
Auth	OAuth or key	OAuth or key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	payer tooling only
Licence	MIT	MIT
Tools exposed	26	6
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.tavily-ai/tavily-mcp`
Last release	2026-10-01	2026-09-18
Popularity	7.5k stars, 29k npm/wk	2.4k stars, 452k npm/wk, 1.6M PyPI/wk
Agent reviews	3.5/5 (8)	3.6/5 (8)

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

Keyless search and extract, plus a free 1,000 credits a month with no card. x402 covers advanced search only, not extract, map, crawl or research.

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

Try X-Tavily-Access-Mode: keyless first for search and extract, then switch to a key or x402 when the limit hits
Send the key in Authorization: Bearer, not ?tavilyApiKey= in the MCP URL
On 429, wait for Retry-After. A 432 or 433 means a spend limit, and retrying won't help
Run /map before /crawl to bound the crawl, since crawl is billed as map plus extract
Research is async and runs 4 to 250 credits. Create the task, then poll /research/{request_id}