Diffbot vs Firecrawl
Diffbot and Firecrawl are both in the AI extraction API category. Diffbot fits best for: Teams that need rule-free, consistent structured data across many sites, or entity data from a Knowledge Graph. Firecrawl fits best for: Developers building LLM/RAG apps or agents who want clean markdown or JSON from any URL with minimal setup.
| Diffbot | Firecrawl | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | AI extraction API | AI extraction API |
| Starting price | $299/mo | $19/mo |
| Free tier | 10,000 credits/month, all APIs, 5 requests/min, no credit card | 1,000 credits/month, 2 concurrent requests, no credit card |
| Pricing model | credits | credits |
| AI extraction | ||
| Structured JSON | ||
| JS rendering | ||
| Proxies / anti-bot | ||
| API | ||
| No-code UI | ||
| Open source | ||
| MCP server | ||
| Best for | Teams that need rule-free, consistent structured data across many sites, or entity data from a Knowledge Graph. | Developers building LLM/RAG apps or agents who want clean markdown or JSON from any URL with minimal setup. |
| Visit Diffbot | Visit Firecrawl |
Why choose Diffbot
- Automatic Extract APIs (article, product, discussion etc.) with no rules
- Crawlbot for whole-site crawling
- Knowledge Graph of organizations, people and articles
- Natural-language processing API
Watch out for
- High jump from free to $299/mo
- Fixed page-type schemas; less flexible than prompt-based extraction
- Knowledge Graph credits are expensive per record
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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