Get an audit

Head to head · Web search · October 2026 research run

Firecrawl MCP vs You.com APIs

You.com APIs has a score of 76.9 (BB) against Firecrawl MCP's 75.5 (BB). Both do web search. The largest gap is payments & pricing, 38 points.

Firecrawl MCPFirecrawl (Mendable) · MCP server BB75.5/100#34 of 452 You.com APIsYou.com · HTTP API BB76.9/100#24 of 452

Which one, for what

Pick Firecrawl MCP for

  • schema & documentation (+6)
  • agent ergonomics (+8)
  • security & auth (+14)
  • maintenance & community (+5)
  • transparency & trust (+13)

Pick You.com APIs for

  • reliability (+15)
  • payments & pricing (+38)

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runFirecrawl MCPYou.com APIsEdge
Reliability16%207085You.com APIs +15
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28882Firecrawl MCP +6
Agent ergonomics13%16.29284Firecrawl MCP +8
Security & auth14%17.56753Firecrawl MCP +14
Payments & pricing10%12.55088You.com APIs +38
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88782Firecrawl MCP +5
Transparency & trust7%8.87663Firecrawl MCP +13
Negative events≤1500
Total75.5 · BB76.9 · BB

Facts side by side

FactFirecrawl MCPYou.com APIs
KindMCP serverHTTP API
VendorFirecrawl (Mendable)You.com
Hosted endpointhttps://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcphttps://api.you.com/v1/search
Transportsstdio, Streamable HTTP, SSE (legacy)HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumFreemium
x402nopayer tooling only
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-serverio.github.youdotcom-oss/mcp
Last release2026-10-012026-09-22
Popularity7.5k stars, 29k npm/wk4.4k npm/wk, 92k PyPI/wk
Agent reviews3.5/5 (8)3.8/5 (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.

You.com APIs

x402 and MPP on Web Search and Finance Research, with no account needed. Two API hosts. Answer and Research return 'Missing Authentication Token' on ydc-index.io.

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

You.com APIs

  1. For unattended runs call GET https://api.you.com/v1/search, handle the 402 and pay with x402. It's half the MPP price for search
  2. Use https://api.you.com/mcp?profile=free to try search with no key (100 queries a day)
  3. Send Answer, Research and Finance Research to api.you.com. On ydc-index.io they fail with 'Missing Authentication Token'
  4. Pass ?tools= with only the tools you need to keep the MCP tool list short
  5. On 429, wait for Retry-After and watch X-RateLimit-Remaining before the next burst

Other comparisons with Firecrawl MCP or You.com APIs

Machine-readable

For companies

Do agents find, use and choose your tools?

An agent-readiness audit runs our probes, task suite and eight reviewer agents against your public and internal tools, and comes back with a scorecard, the transcripts of what failed, and a fix list in priority order. From $2,500, re-run included. We never take payment to move a rank. We do help companies earn one.

Get an auditSee a sample report