Firecrawl alternative: ScrapingBot vs Firecrawl

Firecrawl is one of the best tools for getting the open web into an LLM: clean markdown, site crawls, maps and search. Where it stops is social platforms. If your agent or pipeline needs TikTok, Instagram, Google results or Amazon products next to ordinary pages, that is the gap ScrapingBot fills.

The short version

Social sites: the main difference

We sent TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit and Threads URLs to Firecrawl's /v2/scrape endpoint on October 3, 2026, without an API key. Each came back with success: false and the message that Firecrawl does "not support this site", followed by an invitation for enterprise customers to get in touch. The same message is in Firecrawl's open-source code, which checks requests against a domain blocklist. Whether an enterprise account can have those sites enabled, we couldn't verify.

ScrapingBot doesn't scrape those pages as HTML either. It has dedicated APIs that return the data as JSON: TikTok (11 endpoints, 1 credit each: videos, profiles, a creator's posts, sounds and the videos using them, comments, replies, followers, search) and Instagram (20 endpoints, 5 credits each: profiles, posts, reels, stories, comments, search). For an agent, that is the difference between parsing a page and getting followerCount directly:

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "user": { "id": "7664638705177150477", "uniqueId": "nasa", "nickname": "NASA", "verified": true, … },
    "stats": { "followerCount": 1900000, "followingCount": 23, "heartCount": 10200000, "videoCount": 52, … }
  },
  "duration": "0.74",
  "statusCode": 200,
  "creditsUsed": 1
}

ScrapingBot vs Firecrawl at a glance

Per-1,000 figures are plan price ÷ credits × credits per request: ScrapingBot rendered page $49.99 ÷ 275,000 × 5 × 1,000 = $0.91; Firecrawl Hobby $19 ÷ 5,000 × 1,000 = $3.80.

For AI agents: one MCP server or two

Many teams end up with both: Firecrawl for documentation sites and long-form web content, ScrapingBot for the sources Firecrawl declines. With ScrapingBot alone, one MCP connection gives an agent scrapeWebsite (pages as markdown), extractStructuredData, googleSearch, googleReviews, the TikTok and Instagram tools and the Amazon tools, all billed from one balance. The MCP setup guide connects it to Claude Code or Cursor in one command.

Moving a scrape call from Firecrawl

# Before: Firecrawl
import requests

res = requests.post("https://api.firecrawl.dev/v2/scrape", timeout=60,
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {FIRECRAWL_KEY}"},
    json={"url": "https://quotes.toscrape.com/js/", "formats": ["html"]})
html = res.json()["data"]["html"]

# After: ScrapingBot
import requests

res = requests.post("https://scrapingbot.io/api/v1/scrape", timeout=60,
    headers={"x-api-key": SCRAPINGBOT_KEY},
    json={"url": "https://quotes.toscrape.com/js/", "render_js": True, "wait_for": ".quote"})
html = res.json()["html"]

Set render_js only for pages that build their content in the browser; plain pages cost 1 credit instead of 5. If your code relies on Firecrawl's markdown, either convert the HTML yourself or describe the fields you need with ai_query and read ai_result. The JavaScript rendering guide walks through both.

Common questions