What is Firecrawl? A Developer-Friendly Web Crawler for the AI Era

Table of Contents

1. Why Web Crawling Matters in 2025
2. What is Firecrawl?
3. Key Features
4. Powerful Capabilities
5. Getting Started (Setup)
6. Pricing
7. MarkItDown vs Firecrawl Comparison
8. FireCrawl Comparison with Popular Tools
9. Conclusion

Why Web Crawling Matters in 2025

Recently, there has been an explosion of LLM-powered apps. Such apps are driven by web data, sourced through crawling websites. Whether you are building Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, knowledge bases, product aggregators, or competitor trackers, accessing structured content from public websites is essential.

In the past, web crawling has been handled via traditional tools, e.g., BeautifulSoup or Scrapy. However, the complexity of modern websites—especially those relying on dynamic JavaScript—poses great challenges to these tools. Even headless browsers like Puppeteer often require extensive customization to function effectively.

This is where Firecrawl comes in. Firecrawl is an API service that takes a web URL, crawls it, and converts it into Markdown. Since LLMs can effectively process Markdown, this gives them a great advantage.

What is Firecrawl?

Firecrawl is a developer-first, API-based web crawler designed for the modern web. It allows you to extract structured content from websites without dealing with HTML, browser automation, or other complex scraping logic.

It intelligently extracts meaningful sections of a page and organizes them in Markdown format. Firecrawl works through artificial intelligence. This makes it a perfect tool for anyone building any of the following:

• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems
• Search and indexing engines
• LLM-powered assistants
• Automated content aggregators
• Web monitoring or competitor intelligence tools

It works by taking a URL of a website and returning a Markdown file containing the contents of the site.

Key Features

• Scrape: Scrapes a single URL and returns content in an LLM-ready format, including Markdown, JSON, screenshot, and raw HTML
• Crawl: Crawls all URLs of a given site and returns its content in Markdown or other LLM-friendly formats
• Map: Input a website and instantly get a list of all internal URLs on the site
• Extract: Extract structured data from a single page, multiple pages, or even entire websites

Powerful Capabilities

• LLM-ready output formats: Markdown, structured JSON, screenshot, HTML, links, and metadata
• Handles the hard stuff: Automatically manages proxies, anti-bot challenges, JS-rendered content, and output parsing
• Highly customizable:
  • Exclude specific HTML tags
  • Crawl behind auth walls using custom headers
  • Control depth with maxDepth settings
• Media parsing support: Can parse PDFs, DOCX files, and images
• Action automation: Simulates actions like click, scroll, and wait before extracting data
• Batch scraping: Scrape thousands of URLs asynchronously

Getting Started (Setup)

There are several ways to use Firecrawl: online, cURL, and the SDK.

Before using the API you have to obtain an API Key from here.

Online Crawling and Scraping

If your task involves just a few web pages, you can access their website and perform an online crawl or scrape without additional setup.

Using cURL

Crawling with cURL

Use the following command to crawl a website:

curl -X POST https://api.firecrawl.dev/v1/crawl \
    -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY' \
    -d '{
      "url": "https://docs.firecrawl.dev",
      "limit": 100,
      "scrapeOptions": {
        "formats": ["markdown", "html"]
      }
    }'

Scraping with cURL

To scrape a webpage, use:

curl -X POST https://api.firecrawl.dev/v1/scrape \
    -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY' \
    -d '{
      "url": "https://docs.firecrawl.dev",
      "formats" : ["markdown", "html"]
    }'

Using the Firecrawl SDK

You can also use the SDK which is available in multiple languages. For this tutorial, we will consider the Python SDK.

Installation

pip install firecrawl-py

Crawling with Python SDK

from firecrawl import FirecrawlApp
app = FirecrawlApp(api_key="fc-YOUR_API_KEY")
# Crawl a website:
crawl_status = app.crawl_url(
  'https://firecrawl.dev', 
  params={
    'limit': 100, 
    'scrapeOptions': {'formats': ['markdown', 'html']}
  },
  poll_interval=30
)
print(crawl_status)

Scraping with Python SDK

from firecrawl import FirecrawlApp
app = FirecrawlApp(api_key="fc-YOUR_API_KEY")
# Scrape a website:
scrape_result = app.scrape_url('firecrawl.dev', params={'formats': ['markdown', 'html']})
print(scrape_result)

Pricing

Firecrawl offers flexible pricing plans to accommodate various needs, allowing you ti start for free and scale as your business grows.

Free Plan

• Credits: 500 (one-time)​
• Cost: $0​
• Features:
  • Scrape up to 500 pages​
  • 2 concurrent browsers
  • Low rate limits

Hobby Plan

• Credits: 3,000 per month​
• Cost: $16/month or $190/year (billed annually)​
• Features:
  • Scrape up to 3,000 pages​
  • 5 concurrent browsers
  • 1 seat

Standard Plan (Most Popular)

• Credits: 100,000 per month​
• Cost: $83/month or $990/year (billed annually)​
• Features:
  • Scrape up to 100,000 pages​
  • 50 concurrent browsers​
  • 3 seats​
  • Standard support​

Growth Plan

• Credits: 500,000 per month​
• Cost: $333/month or $3,990/year (billed annually)​
• Features:
  • Scrape up to 500,000 pages​
  • 100 concurrent browsers​
  • 5 seats​
  • Priority support​

Enterprise Plan

• Credits: Unlimited
• Cost: Custom pricing​
• Features:
  • Bulk discounts
  • Top priority support​
  • Custom concurrency limits​
  • Improved stealth proxies​
  • Service Level Agreements (SLAs)​
  • Advanced security and controls​

NB: Prices are subject to change.

MarkItDown vs Firecrawl Comparison

There are several tools available that convert files to Markdown. In this section, we will compare some of these tools, starting with MarkItDown, a very powerful tool from Microsoft.

Purpose

• Firecrawl: Designed for extracting and transforming web content into LLM-friendly formats such as JSON and Markdown.
• MarkItDown: Designed to convert files (e.g., PDFs, images, videos) into Markdown for LLM consumption.

AI Capabilities

• Firecrawl: Uses AI to parse and structure web content during crawling, breaking it into meaningful semantic chunks.
• MarkItDown: Uses AI to transcribe and convert files into structured text and Markdown.

Ideal Use Cases

• Firecrawl:
  • Large-scale web crawling
  • Extracting content from JavaScript-heavy websites
  • Building AI pipelines like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
  • Batch scraping and handling anti-bot protection
• MarkItDown:
  • Converting documents and files (PDFs, images, etc.) to Markdown
  • Processing media files for AI enhancement
  • Ideal for static document workflows

Main Difference

• Firecrawl: A web-focused crawling tool, ideal for scraping websites at scale.
• MarkItDown: A document and file conversion tool, designed for transforming media into text and Markdown.

FireCrawl Comparison with Popular Tools

The table below includes a comparison with other tools.

Conclusion

Firecrawl offers a modern way to perform web crawling. It provides a robust API that produces LLM-ready output formats, and the ability to handle dynamic websites. It is a go-to choice for anyone building:

• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines
• LLM agents and assistants
• Content aggregators
• Competitive intelligence tools
• Search and indexing systems

Whether you’re a solo builder, startup, or part of a large team, Firecrawl’s minimal setup and scalable pricing allow you to focus on building — not managing complex scraping infrastructure.

It’s the web crawler reimagined for the AI-driven future.

Frequently Asked Questions