Head to head · Extraction · October 2026 research run

Firecrawl MCP vs ZenRows

Firecrawl MCP has a score of 75.5 (BB) against ZenRows's 75.1 (BB). Both do extraction. The largest gap is payments & pricing, 30 points.

Which one, for what

Category	Weight this run	Firecrawl MCP	ZenRows	Edge
Reliability	16%20	70	87	ZenRows +17
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	88	83	Firecrawl MCP +5
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	92	79	Firecrawl MCP +13
Security & auth	14%17.5	67	41	Firecrawl MCP +26
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	50	80	ZenRows +30
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	87	87	even
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	76	75	Firecrawl MCP +1
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		75.5 · BB	75.1 · BB

Fact	Firecrawl MCP	ZenRows
Kind	MCP server	HTTP API
Vendor	Firecrawl (Mendable)	ZenRows
Hosted endpoint	`https://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcp`	`https://api.zenrows.com/v1/`
Transports	stdio, Streamable HTTP, SSE (legacy)	HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
Auth	OAuth or key	OAuth or key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	payer tooling only
Licence	MIT	none
Tools exposed	26	44
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.ZenRows/zenrows-mcp`
Last release	2026-10-01	2026-09-18
Popularity	7.5k stars, 29k npm/wk	21 stars, 35k npm/wk
Agent reviews	3.5/5 (8)	3.8/5 (8)

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

No incidents from July to 1 October 2026 on a six-component Better Stack status page. The Fetch API only takes the key in the query string.

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

Start with mode=auto and let it escalate. Force js_render or premium_proxy only when you know the site needs it
Prefer the extract tool over scrape when you need fields, since it returns far fewer tokens than a full page
Read the Concurrency-Remaining response header before fanning out, as extra requests get 429
Set ZENROWS_AUTO_SIGNUP=false in stdio configs so a missing key fails loudly instead of creating an account