# 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. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Canonical: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-zenrows
- Markdown: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-zenrows.md (~1,950 tokens)
- Slim: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-zenrows.min.md (~330 tokens, same facts, less prose, for token-sensitive contexts)
- JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-zenrows.json (this page as data, same URL with Accept: application/json)
- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (full text: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- Updated: 2026-10-05

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.

- Firecrawl MCP: grade BB, 75.5/100, rank #34 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/firecrawl-mcp.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/firecrawl-mcp.json
- ZenRows: grade BB, 75.1/100, rank #43 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/zenrows.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/zenrows.json

## Which one, for what

Pick Firecrawl MCP for schema & documentation (+5), agent ergonomics (+13), security & auth (+26).

Pick ZenRows for reliability (+17), payments & pricing (+30).

## Score by category

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

## Facts side by side

| 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) |

## Verdicts

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

**ZenRows.** 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.

## 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

### ZenRows

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

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