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Browse AI vs Firecrawl

Two fact sheets from our own research, side by side — pricing, platforms, API access and status re-checked by us rather than quoted from the vendors.

The short answer

Cheaper paid plan
Firecrawl — $16/mo vs $19/mo for Browse AI
Free plan
Both have one
Public API
Both have one
Higher Trust score
Browse AI — 94 vs 89 for Firecrawl
Best fit
Browse AI: Marketers tracking competitor prices or listings without a developer · Firecrawl: Developers feeding site content into RAG or agent pipelines

From our own records as of each tool's last check. Anything we have not confirmed is left out rather than guessed. How we verify

Browse AINo-code robots that scrape and monitor any websiteFirecrawlWeb data API that searches, scrapes, crawls and interacts with sites, returning clean Markdown or JSON for LLM pipelines.

Side by side

FactBrowse AIFirecrawl
CategoryWeb Scraping & Data ExtractionWeb Scraping & Data Extraction
Pricing modelFreemiumFreemium
Starts at$19/mo$16/mo
Public APIYesYes
Trust score94 / 10089 / 100
PlatformsWeb, API, Chrome extensionWeb, API
CompanyBrowse AI Inc.SideGuide Technologies, Inc. (d/b/a Firecrawl)
Launched20202024
Last verifiedSep 6, 2026Oct 2, 2026

What our research says

Browse AI

The quickest way to get a non-engineer extracting data from a site, but what you are actually buying is a credit meter — monitoring jobs that run often get expensive long before the feature list runs out.

Pros

  • Recorder-based setup needs no CSS selectors or scripting
  • REST API plus webhooks make it usable inside a pipeline, not just as a CSV export
  • Around 250 prebuilt robots cover common sites like Amazon, eBay and LinkedIn

Cons

  • Month-to-month billing is roughly 2.5x the annual rate ($48 versus $19)
  • Credits do not carry over between billing cycles
  • Premium starts at $500/month, so there is a wide gap above the $69 Professional tier
  • Robots still break when a target site restructures its markup

Firecrawl

Firecrawl is a sensible default when an agent or RAG pipeline needs readable page content and you would rather not run proxies and headless browsers yourself. The credit model is simple to reason about for plain scrapes, but extra formats and browser sessions cost more credits than the headline page count suggests.

Pros

  • One API covers search, scrape, crawl, map and page interaction
  • Free tier renews every month and needs no card
  • Open-source core with SDKs, an MCP server and a CLI for agent tools
  • Failed scrapes that return nothing are not charged

Cons

  • JSON, question and highlight formats add 4 credits per page, so structured extraction costs several times a plain scrape
  • Pages that return an error status such as 403 or 404 still cost a credit
  • Headline plan prices are annual; paying monthly is higher

Which one fits

Choose Browse AI if you need

  • Marketers tracking competitor prices or listings without a developer
  • Recruiters and analysts pushing structured rows into Sheets or Airtable
  • Alerting when a specific page changes on a schedule

Choose Firecrawl if you need

  • Developers feeding site content into RAG or agent pipelines
  • Teams that want a hosted scraper but keep the option to self-host the open-source core
  • Prototypes that fit inside the free monthly credits

Browse AI vs Firecrawl: the questions people ask

Is Browse AI cheaper than Firecrawl?

On published entry prices, Firecrawl starts lower — $16/mo against $19/mo for Browse AI. Entry price is the lowest paid plan as we last verified it; what each plan includes differs.

Does Browse AI or Firecrawl have a free tier?

Both: Browse AI has a free tier, and Firecrawl has a free tier.

Which has a public API, Browse AI or Firecrawl?

Both ship a public API, so either can be built on; the fact table above shows the platforms each one runs on.

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