head to head · open source
firecrawl vs waterfox
firecrawl has 197,942 GitHub stars, 10,457 forks, 621 open issues and last shipped yesterday. waterfox has 6,344 stars, 438 forks, 332 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. firecrawl leads on adoption by 3,020% (197,942 vs 6,344 stars). firecrawl is written in TypeScript under AGPL-3.0; waterfox is written in JavaScript under a custom or non-standard licence. firecrawl has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, waterfox 7%. firecrawl 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 | waterfox | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 198K | ★ 6.3K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Custom / other |
| Written in | TypeScript | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 10K | ⑂ 438 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick firecrawl if
- You weight community size — 198K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick waterfox if
- You want the waterfox feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and waterfox fits your workflow better
About firecrawl
🔥 Firecrawl The API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale. 🔥 The web context API to find sources, extract content, and turn it into clean Markdown or structured data your agents can ship with. Open source and available as a hosted service. Pst. Hey, you, join our stargazers :) Why Firecrawl? Industry leading reliability : Covers 96% of the web, including JS heavy pages — no proxy headaches, just clean data (see benchmarks) Blazingly fast : P95 latency of 3.4s across millions of pages, built for real time agents and dynamic apps LLM ready output : Clean markdown, structured JSON, screenshots…
read the full firecrawl overview →
About waterfox
Waterfox Waterfox is a customisable browser based on Mozilla Firefox. This repository contains Mozilla platform code, Waterfox product code, branding, features, packaging, and release files. Building Waterfox uses the Mozilla build system. The usual ./mach entry points apply: Contributing Most Firefox development documentation still applies to this tree. Use the Firefox Source Docs for the shared Mozilla build system, testing tools, and platform code. Resources Waterfox website Firefox Source Docs
read the full waterfox overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is firecrawl or waterfox more popular?
firecrawl has 197,942 GitHub stars and waterfox has 6,344. firecrawl has the larger community by that measure.
Are firecrawl and waterfox free?
Both are open source. firecrawl is licensed under AGPL-3.0, and waterfox has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between firecrawl and waterfox?
firecrawl is written in TypeScript and waterfox 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, firecrawl or waterfox?
Choose firecrawl if you want the larger community (197,942 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose waterfox if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.