head to head
Fastcrawl vs firecrawl
firecrawl is the open source alternative to Fastcrawl — scraping and crawling api for ai agents, over rest and mcp. Here is the honest comparison.
Yes — firecrawl is a viable free replacement for Fastcrawl. firecrawl is open source under AGPL-3.0, written in TypeScript, with 183,038 GitHub stars, 9,882 forks and 621 open issues; it was last pushed 6 hours ago. Fastcrawl costs from $5, while self-hosting firecrawl carries no licence fee — the trade is your operational time instead of a subscription. 3 other open source Fastcrawl alternatives are tracked here, led by Crawl4AI at 84,048 stars. firecrawl ranks #1 of 4 tracked open source Fastcrawl alternatives by stars. The tracked set, by adoption: Crawl4AI (84,048 stars), Scrapling (82,865 stars), crawlee (25,865 stars). Replacement criteria on this page: 4 reasons to move to firecrawl and 3 reasons to stay on Fastcrawl.
choose firecrawl if
- Your Fastcrawl bill is growing with seats or usage
- You need your data in a format and server you control
- Your compliance posture requires auditing the code that touches sensitive data
- You have (or can rent) a server and basic Docker comfort
stick with Fastcrawl if
- You need the polished onboarding and support SLAs of a commercial vendor
- Your team has zero capacity to operate software, even self-hosted-simple
- You depend on a Fastcrawl integration ecosystem that the OSS alternatives have not replicated
Side by side
| firecrawl (open source) | Fastcrawl | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (self-hosted) | Free tier 2,000 credits/month; paid from $5/month |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Proprietary |
| Source code | Public, auditable | Closed |
| Self-hosting | Yes — mendableai/firecrawl | Cloud only |
| Data ownership | Your server, your format | Vendor's cloud |
| Community | ★ 183K · ⑂ 9.9K | — |
| Built with | TypeScript | — |
Why people look for a Fastcrawl alternative
About firecrawl
Firecrawl is an open source web context API that enables AI agents to search, scrape, and interact with websites at scale. It lives in the AI and data extraction ecosystem, providing structured, LLM ready outputs from unstructured web content. Built in TypeScript and licensed under AGPL 3.0, it supports both self hosting and a hosted service via firecrawl.dev.
read the full firecrawl overview →
Other open source alternatives to Fastcrawl
last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked
Frequently asked questions
Is firecrawl a good replacement for Fastcrawl?
firecrawl is an open source alternative to Fastcrawl (Scraping and crawling API for AI agents, over REST and MCP). It is written in TypeScript and licensed under AGPL-3.0, with 183,038 GitHub stars.
Is firecrawl free compared to Fastcrawl?
Yes. firecrawl is open source — there is no licence fee, and you can self-host it. Fastcrawl is typically a paid subscription, so the trade-off is licence cost against the operational work of running it yourself.
How do I migrate from Fastcrawl to firecrawl?
Migration effort depends on the data formats involved. Check firecrawl's documentation for import options, and compare the feature table above to confirm the capabilities you depend on are covered before switching.