Firecrawl vs SurfSense

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

Free plan: Both have one
Public API: Both have one
Best fit: Firecrawl: Developers feeding site content into RAG or agent pipelines · SurfSense: Teams that want live-web research agents on their own infrastructure
Platforms: Firecrawl: Web · SurfSense: Web, macOS
Trust score: About even — Firecrawl 89, SurfSense 87

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

FirecrawlWeb data API that searches, scrapes, crawls and interacts with sites, returning clean Markdown or JSON for LLM pipelines.

SurfSenseOpen-source research workspace whose agents pull live data from Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Maps and search

Side by side

Fact	Firecrawl	SurfSense
Category	Web Scraping & Data Extraction	Deep Research Agents
Pricing model	Freemium	Freemium
Starts at	$16/mo	—
Public API	Yes	Yes
Trust score	89 / 100	87 / 100
Platforms	Web, API	Web, macOS, API
Company	SideGuide Technologies, Inc. (d/b/a Firecrawl)	SurfSense
Launched	2024	—
Last verified	Oct 2, 2026	Sep 6, 2026

What our research says

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

SurfSense

The self-host option is the real argument here: the same connectors, agents and MCP server, running on your infrastructure with your own model keys and no vendor in the middle of competitive research. The hosted version's pay-per-item billing is honest but hard to forecast, and there is no named company or country behind the project beyond a single contact address.

Pros

Full platform is open source and self-hostable with your own model keys
Ten connectors each callable as REST or through an MCP server
Scheduled and event-triggered agents write results into Notion, Slack, Linear and Jira
Hosted billing is per item with failed calls explicitly not charged

Cons

No subscription tier means no predictable monthly cost on the hosted plan
No company entity, address or country is published anywhere on the site
Connectors work by scraping platforms, so breakage and TOS exposure are yours

Which one fits

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

Choose SurfSense if you need

Teams that want live-web research agents on their own infrastructure
Agent builders who want social and search connectors exposed over MCP
Competitive and market monitoring that should not sit on a vendor's servers