head to head · open source
crawlee vs firecrawl-mcp-server
crawlee has 26,317 GitHub stars, 1,740 forks, 135 open issues and last shipped yesterday. firecrawl-mcp-server has 7,751 stars, 926 forks, 136 open issues and last shipped yesterday. crawlee leads on adoption by 240% (26,317 vs 7,751 stars). crawlee is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; firecrawl-mcp-server is written in JavaScript under MIT. crawlee has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, firecrawl-mcp-server 12%. crawlee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| crawlee | firecrawl-mcp-server | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 26K | ★ 7.8K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 926 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick crawlee if
- You weight community size — 26K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick firecrawl-mcp-server if
- You want the firecrawl-mcp-server feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and firecrawl-mcp-server fits your workflow better
About crawlee
A web scraping and browser automation library Crawlee covers your crawling and scraping end to end and helps you build reliable scrapers. Fast. Your crawlers will appear human like and fly under the radar of modern bot protections even with the default configuration. Crawlee gives you the tools to crawl the web for links, scrape data, and store it to disk or cloud while staying configurable to suit your project's needs. Crawlee is available as the crawlee NPM package. 👉 View full documentation, guides and examples on the Crawlee project website 👈 Do you prefer 🐍 Python instead of JavaScript? 👉 Checkout…
read the full crawlee overview →
About firecrawl-mcp-server
Firecrawl MCP Server A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that brings Firecrawl to MCP compatible AI agents — search, scrape, and interact with the live web for clean, agent ready context. Big thanks to @vrknetha, @knacklabs for the initial implementation! Features Search the web and get full page content Search an index built for coding agents: GitHub issues, merged pull requests, READMEs, and docs Scrape any URL into clean, structured data Interact with pages — click, navigate, and operate Deep research with autonomous agent Automatic retries and rate limiting Cloud and self hosted support SSE support Play…
read the full firecrawl-mcp-server overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee or firecrawl-mcp-server more popular?
crawlee has 26,317 GitHub stars and firecrawl-mcp-server has 7,751. crawlee has the larger community by that measure.
Are crawlee and firecrawl-mcp-server free?
Both are open source. crawlee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and firecrawl-mcp-server under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between crawlee and firecrawl-mcp-server?
crawlee is written in TypeScript and firecrawl-mcp-server in JavaScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, crawlee or firecrawl-mcp-server?
Choose crawlee if you want the larger community (26,317 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose firecrawl-mcp-server if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.