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Firecrawl vs Zyte

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

zyte.com

Best for Engineering teams that need reliable, high-volume scraping of hard websites, or finished datasets.

Web scraping API and managed data delivery that handles bans, rendering and extraction for you.

Visit Zyte

Pricing compared

Firecrawl

$16/mo

Zyte

$0.13/1K responses

	Firecrawl	Zyte
Starting price	$16/mo	$0.13/1K responses
Free tier	Yes	—
Free trial	Free plan with 1,000 credits per month, no credit card required	$5 free credit, 30 days to try, no commitment
Platforms	API · CLI · Web · Self-hosted	Web · API · CLI
HQ	—	Cork, Ireland

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.

Zyte

Pros

One API covers proxy rotation, ban handling, headless rendering and extraction.
You pay per successful response, with the price set by the difficulty of the target site.
Every plan includes the full feature set, with no feature gating by tier.
Zyte Data offers a fully managed option when you do not want to maintain crawlers.
Maintains Scrapy, the widely used open-source crawling framework, and hosts it on Scrapy Cloud.

Cons

Per-request pricing varies by site tier, so budgeting needs the cost calculator rather than a flat rate.
Some advanced features carry additional usage-based costs.
Compliance guardrails restrict logins and PII extraction, which can limit some use cases.
Managed Zyte Data and Enterprise pricing is quote-only.

	Firecrawl	Zyte
Plans & pricing
Free tier	✓ Yes	—
Pricing model	Usage-based API credits	—
Integrations & extensibility
Public API	✓ Yes	—