head to head · open source
firecrawl-mcp-server vs trafilatura
firecrawl-mcp-server has 7,489 GitHub stars, 891 forks, 136 open issues and last shipped today. trafilatura has 6,840 stars, 431 forks, 60 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. firecrawl-mcp-server leads on adoption by 9% (7,489 vs 6,840 stars). firecrawl-mcp-server is written in JavaScript under MIT; trafilatura is written in Python under Apache-2.0. firecrawl-mcp-server has attracted 12% as many forks as stars, trafilatura 6%. firecrawl-mcp-server 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
| firecrawl-mcp-server | trafilatura | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 7.5K | ★ 6.8K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-20 | 2026-09-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 891 | ⑂ 431 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick firecrawl-mcp-server if
- You weight community size — 7.5K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick trafilatura if
- You want the trafilatura feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and trafilatura fits your workflow better
About firecrawl-mcp-server
Firecrawl MCP Server is the official Model Context Protocol server that gives Cursor, Claude, and other MCP compatible AI clients search, scraping, and page interaction against the live web.
read the full firecrawl-mcp-server overview →
About trafilatura
Trafilatura is a Python package and command line tool that crawls the web and turns raw HTML into structured text and metadata, built for developers, researchers, and data teams assembling corpora, news feeds, or retrieval augmented generation datasets.
read the full trafilatura overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is firecrawl-mcp-server or trafilatura more popular?
firecrawl-mcp-server has 7,489 GitHub stars and trafilatura has 6,840. firecrawl-mcp-server has the larger community by that measure.
Are firecrawl-mcp-server and trafilatura free?
Both are open source. firecrawl-mcp-server is licensed under MIT and trafilatura under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between firecrawl-mcp-server and trafilatura?
firecrawl-mcp-server is written in JavaScript and trafilatura in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, firecrawl-mcp-server or trafilatura?
Choose firecrawl-mcp-server if you want the larger community (7,489 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose trafilatura if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.