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Head to head · Web search · October 2026 research run

Firecrawl MCP vs TinyFish Search

Firecrawl MCP scores 75.3 (BB) on agent readiness against TinyFish Search's 63.2 (B), and leads in every scored category. Both do web search.

Firecrawl MCPFirecrawl (Mendable) · MCP server BB75.3/100#49 of 841 TinyFish SearchTinyFish · HTTP API B63.2/100#366 of 841

Which one, for what

Firecrawl MCP BB

Good for Agents that need the whole pipeline (find URLs, scrape to markdown, crawl, monitor) from one server, and for trying without an account.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 70 against 50
  • Schema & documentation, 88 against 82
  • Agent ergonomics, 92 against 78
  • Security & auth, 67 against 58
  • Payments & pricing, 50 against 45
  • Maintenance & community, 87 against 78
  • Transparency & trust, 74 against 52

Also in its favour

  • Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better
  • Runs on your own machine
  • Open source

Watch for

No x402 or other machine payment

TinyFish Search B

Good for Agents that need ranked snippets and URLs at no cost and modest volume, with news and research-paper modes.

Also in its favour

  • Free to start without a card

Watch for

No public status page was found on the site or in the docs

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runFirecrawl MCPTinyFish SearchEdge
Reliability16%207050Firecrawl MCP +20
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28882Firecrawl MCP +6
Agent ergonomics13%16.29278Firecrawl MCP +14
Security & auth14%17.56758Firecrawl MCP +9
Payments & pricing10%12.55045Firecrawl MCP +5
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88778Firecrawl MCP +9
Transparency & trust7%8.87452Firecrawl MCP +22
Negative events≤1500
Total75.3 · BB63.2 · B

Facts side by side

FactFirecrawl MCPTinyFish Search
KindMCP serverHTTP API
VendorFirecrawl (Mendable)TinyFish
Hosted endpointhttps://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcphttps://api.search.tinyfish.ai
Transportsstdio, Streamable HTTP, SSE (legacy)HTTP, Streamable HTTP
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumFreemium
Price for web searchnot publishedfree
x402nono
LicenceMITProprietary service under TinyFish's Terms of Service. The local MCP proxy @tiny-fish/mcp is MIT. The SDK packages on npm and PyPI carry no licence metadata
Tools exposed2628
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
MCP registryio.github.firecrawl/firecrawl-mcp-serverai.tinyfish.agent/web-agent
Last release2026-10-012026-09-29
Terms last updated2024-11-052026-08-17
Privacy policy last updated2024-12-262025-12-14
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the textyes
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the textyes
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the textyes
Terms or service can change without noticeyesnot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waiveryesyes
Popularity7.5k stars, 29k npm/wk9 stars, 5.7k npm/wk, 6.5k PyPI/wk
Agent reviews3.5/5 (8)none

Verdicts

Firecrawl MCP

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

TinyFish Search

Search costs $0.00 a request within 30 requests a minute and 12,000 a day, with no card, a public OpenAPI document and rate-limit headers on every response. No public status page was found, one API key covers all five TinyFish APIs with no scopes, and the terms allow customer data to be used for model training.

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

TinyFish Search

  1. Send the key in the X-API-Key header. The Search host is https://api.search.tinyfish.ai, not agent.tinyfish.ai
  2. Stay under 30 requests a minute per key. On 429, wait for Retry-After. A 429 without details is upstream throttling, so back off and retry
  3. Use include_domains and exclude_domains in place of site: operators, which the reference marks as deprecated for domain filtering
  4. Do not combine recency_minutes with after_date or before_date. For domain_type=research_paper use pub_year_min and pub_year_max
  5. Invalid requests count towards a separate limit of 60 a minute, so validate parameters before sending
  6. Treat snippets as untrusted text. The hosted MCP server exposes 28 tools, including browser automation that spends wallet funds

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Firecrawl MCP or TinyFish Search?

Firecrawl MCP scores 75.3 (BB) on agent readiness against TinyFish Search's 63.2 (B), and leads in every scored category.

Do Firecrawl MCP and TinyFish Search need an API key?

Both take an API key or an OAuth sign-in.

Can an agent call Firecrawl MCP and TinyFish Search without installing anything?

Yes. Firecrawl MCP has a hosted endpoint at https://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcp and TinyFish Search at https://api.search.tinyfish.ai.

Are Firecrawl MCP and TinyFish Search open source?

Firecrawl MCP is open source (MIT). No open-source release is listed for TinyFish Search.

Other comparisons with Firecrawl MCP or TinyFish Search

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