head to head
Firecrawl vs Scrapling
Scrapling is the open source alternative to Firecrawl — scrape, crawl and search the web for ai applications. Here is the honest comparison.
Yes — Scrapling is a viable free replacement for Firecrawl. Scrapling is open source under BSD-3-Clause, written in Python, with 82,865 GitHub stars, 8,440 forks and 6 open issues; it was last pushed 9 hours ago. Firecrawl costs from $19, while self-hosting Scrapling carries no licence fee — the trade is your operational time instead of a subscription. 3 other open source Firecrawl alternatives are tracked here, led by Crawl4AI at 84,048 stars. Scrapling ranks #2 of 4 tracked open source Firecrawl alternatives by stars. The tracked set, by adoption: Crawl4AI (84,048 stars), crawlee (25,865 stars), trafilatura (6,846 stars). Replacement criteria on this page: 4 reasons to move to Scrapling and 3 reasons to stay on Firecrawl.
choose Scrapling if
- Your Firecrawl 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 Firecrawl 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 Firecrawl integration ecosystem that the OSS alternatives have not replicated
Side by side
| Scrapling (open source) | Firecrawl | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (self-hosted) | Free tier 1,000 credits/month; paid plans from $19/month (billed annually) |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Proprietary |
| Source code | Public, auditable | Closed |
| Self-hosting | Yes — D4Vinci/Scrapling | Cloud only |
| Data ownership | Your server, your format | Vendor's cloud |
| Community | ★ 83K · ⑂ 8.4K | — |
| Built with | Python | — |
Why people look for a Firecrawl alternative
About Scrapling
Scrapling is an adaptive Python web scraping framework for developers, data teams, and regular users who need anything from a single request to a full scale crawl without rewriting selectors every time a site changes.
read the full Scrapling overview →
Other open source alternatives to Firecrawl
last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked
Frequently asked questions
Is Scrapling a good replacement for Firecrawl?
Scrapling is an open source alternative to Firecrawl (Scrape, crawl and search the web for AI applications). It is written in Python and licensed under BSD-3-Clause, with 82,865 GitHub stars.
Is Scrapling free compared to Firecrawl?
Yes. Scrapling is open source — there is no licence fee, and you can self-host it. Firecrawl 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 Firecrawl to Scrapling?
Migration effort depends on the data formats involved. Check Scrapling's documentation for import options, and compare the feature table above to confirm the capabilities you depend on are covered before switching.