Pick Crawl4AI if
rAG and agent authors who want Markdown out and will stay on Cloud or Docker.
Read the Crawl4AI pageCrawl4AI vs Firecrawl
Our take
Pick Crawl4AI if rAG and agent authors who want Markdown out and will stay on Cloud or Docker. Pick Firecrawl if developers who need markdown from a URL and will stay on Cloud or self-host. Skip Crawl4AI if teams that need a stealth CDP grid (Steel) or neural web ranking (Exa). Skip Firecrawl if teams that want ranked neural search (Exa) or a hosted browser session grid (Browserbase).
Crawl4AI
open-source crawler plus a hosted scrape
Best for
Crawl4AI URL → clean Markdown for an agent
Firecrawl Clean page contents for an agent
Free plan
Crawl4AI $0 · apache-2.0. You run the browsers
Firecrawl $0 · 1,000 credits/month. 2 concurrent browsers. No card. No PAYG
Lowest paid
Crawl4AI Builder $99/mo
Firecrawl Hobby $16, monthly only
Next step up
Crawl4AI Scale $499/mo
Firecrawl Standard $83/mo yearly
Runs where
Crawl4AI Local or hosted
Firecrawl Local or hosted
Watch out
Crawl4AI Free is 10 requests/minute and 2 at a time
Firecrawl Hobby/Standard/Growth credits do not roll over
Last checked
Crawl4AI 2026-10-22 · docs.crawl4ai.com
Firecrawl 2026-10-21 · firecrawl.dev/pricing
Which one, then?
Pick Firecrawl if
developers who need markdown from a URL and will stay on Cloud or self-host.
Read the Firecrawl page