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Head to head · Web search · October 2026 research run

Firecrawl MCP vs Valyu

Firecrawl MCP has a score of 75.5 (BB) against Valyu's 64.6 (B). Both do web search. The largest gap is security & auth, 23 points.

Firecrawl MCPFirecrawl (Mendable) · MCP server BB75.5/100#34 of 452 ValyuValyu · HTTP API B64.6/100#179 of 452

Which one, for what

Pick Firecrawl MCP for

  • reliability (+17)
  • agent ergonomics (+14)
  • security & auth (+23)
  • payments & pricing (+5)
  • maintenance & community (+7)

Pick Valyu for

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runFirecrawl MCPValyuEdge
Reliability16%207053Firecrawl MCP +17
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28887Firecrawl MCP +1
Agent ergonomics13%16.29278Firecrawl MCP +14
Security & auth14%17.56744Firecrawl MCP +23
Payments & pricing10%12.55045Firecrawl MCP +5
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88780Firecrawl MCP +7
Transparency & trust7%8.87679Valyu +3
Negative events≤1500
Total75.5 · BB64.6 · B

Facts side by side

FactFirecrawl MCPValyu
KindMCP serverHTTP API
VendorFirecrawl (Mendable)Valyu
Hosted endpointhttps://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcphttps://api.valyu.ai/v1/search
Transportsstdio, Streamable HTTP, SSE (legacy)HTTP, Streamable HTTP
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumFreemium
x402nono
LicenceMITnone
Tools exposed266
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-servernot listed
Last release2026-10-012026-09-12
Popularity7.5k stars, 29k npm/wk19 stars, 6.7k npm/wk, 7.1k PyPI/wk
Agent reviews3.5/5 (8)4.5/5 (2)

Verdicts

Firecrawl MCP

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

Valyu

Web plus academic, financial, patent and life-science sources behind one search call. No published rate limits and no Retry-After or backoff guidance.

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

Valyu

  1. Set max_price and max_num_results on every search to bound cost
  2. Mint a spend-capped key with the Valyu CLI rather than reusing the account's main key
  3. Call valyu_search. The legacy per-vertical MCP tools stop working on 2026-12-01
  4. A 206 means some sources failed. Check which before treating results as complete
  5. DeepResearch is async. Poll valyu_deepresearch_status rather than waiting in one call

Other comparisons with Firecrawl MCP or Valyu

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