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Firecrawl vs Serper

A side-by-side look at 2 AI & ML tools for 2026 — the verdict, pricing, ratings, features, and what readers think.

firecrawl.dev

Best for Developers building AI agents and RAG apps that need clean, LLM-ready data from any website through one API.

The open-source web data API that lets AI agents search, scrape and interact with the live web.

Visit Firecrawl

serper.dev

Best for Developers who want cheap, fast Google results as a search tool for agents, RAG pipelines and SEO scripts.

A fast, low-cost Google Search API that gives AI agents and apps structured SERP data in one to two seconds.

Visit Serper

Pricing compared

Firecrawl

$16/mo

Serper

$0.3/1k queries

	Firecrawl	Serper
Starting price	$16/mo	$0.3/1k queries
Free tier	Yes	Yes
Free trial	Free plan with 1,000 credits per month, no credit card required	2,500 free queries, no credit card required
Platforms	API · CLI · Web · Self-hosted	API · Web

Firecrawl

Pros

One API covers search, scrape, crawl, map and interaction, so agents need fewer separate tools.
Returns clean markdown or JSON that cuts input tokens versus raw HTML.
Open source with a very active GitHub community, which lowers lock-in risk.
Free plan of 1,000 credits a month with no credit card makes prototyping easy.
Connects to AI agents and MCP clients with a single command.

Cons

Shared credit system means search, JSON extraction and interaction cost different amounts, so budgeting takes monitoring.
Pages that return 403 or 404 errors still cost 1 credit.
Benchmark and token-saving claims are vendor-published, not independently verified.
Aimed at developers; there is no end-user research interface.
SSO and SCIM are limited to the Enterprise plan.

Serper

Pros

Google-quality results (organic, knowledge graph, answer box, PAA) through a simple JSON API.
Among the cheapest per-query pricing in the category, from $0.30 per 1,000 queries at volume.
2,500 free queries with no credit card make evaluation risk-free.
Covers Search, Images, News, Maps, Places, Videos, Shopping, Scholar, Patents and Autocomplete.
Ships as a ready-made tool in LangChain, so wiring it into an agent takes minutes.

Cons

Returns snippets and links only; you still need a scraper or extraction API for full page content.
Not an agent-native or semantic index, so results are not pre-chunked or token-optimised for LLMs.
Depends on Google results, which makes it a wrapper rather than an independent search index.
The homepage does not publish rate limits, credit expiry or company details such as HQ and founding year.

	Firecrawl	Serper
Plans & pricing
Free tier	✓ Yes	✓ Yes
Pricing model	Usage-based API credits	Per usage
Integrations & extensibility
Public API	✓ Yes	✓ Yes