Bright Data vs Firecrawl
Bright Data is a Proxy & data infrastructure, while Firecrawl is an AI extraction API. Bright Data fits best for: Companies scraping heavily protected sites at scale that need the strongest proxy and unblocking infrastructure. Firecrawl fits best for: Developers building LLM/RAG apps or agents who want clean markdown or JSON from any URL with minimal setup.
| Bright Data | Firecrawl | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Proxy & data infrastructure | AI extraction API |
| Starting price | Pay as you go | $19/mo |
| Free tier | Web Unlocker / MCP: 5,000 free requests per month (per official MCP docs and pricing page as indexed by search); first deposit matched up to $500 in promo credits (docs) | 1,000 credits/month, 2 concurrent requests, no credit card |
| Pricing model | per GB (proxies) and per 1K successful requests (Unlocker/SERP/Scraper APIs) | credits |
| AI extraction | ||
| Structured JSON | ||
| JS rendering | ||
| Proxies / anti-bot | ||
| API | ||
| No-code UI | ||
| Open source | ||
| MCP server | ||
| Best for | Companies scraping heavily protected sites at scale that need the strongest proxy and unblocking infrastructure. | Developers building LLM/RAG apps or agents who want clean markdown or JSON from any URL with minimal setup. |
| Visit Bright Data | Visit Firecrawl |
Why choose Bright Data
- Residential, ISP, datacenter and mobile proxy networks
- Web Unlocker with automatic CAPTCHA/anti-bot handling
- Browser API (hosted headless browsers)
- SERP API and site-specific Web Scraper APIs
Watch out for
- Pricing is complex and spread across many products
- Overkill and expensive for small projects
- Promotional vs list prices make cost comparison tricky
Why choose Firecrawl
- Scrape, crawl, map and search endpoints
- Clean markdown output for LLMs
- LLM-based JSON extraction with a schema or prompt
- Agent endpoint (preview) and browser interact sessions
Watch out for
- JSON extraction costs 5x a plain scrape (1 + 4 credits)
- No pay-as-you-go on the free plan
- Self-hosted version lacks some cloud-only features
Our product
Only need structured JSON from pages?
BestAIScraper's extraction API takes a URL and a list of fields and returns typed JSON. Pay per use, no subscription.
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