What is the difference between Firecrawl and Apify?

Firecrawl specializes in crawling whole websites and turning them into clean Markdown built for an LLM to read. Apify is a marketplace of platform-specific scrapers targeting individual sites like Instagram or LinkedIn. They're complementary, not competing, tools.

How much does Firecrawl cost after the free credits run out?

The Hobby plan is 19 dollars a month for 3,000 credits, which comfortably covers a small business's ongoing competitor and content research.

What counts as one Firecrawl credit?

Each page crawled uses one credit. The 500 free monthly credits are enough to review several competitor sites a week without paying anything.

How do I set up Firecrawl MCP server for Claude Code?

Create a free Firecrawl account, copy the API key from the dashboard, set it as the FIRECRAWL_API_KEY environment variable in the install command for your tool, and restart Claude. After that, describing a URL in plain English is enough to trigger a crawl.

Can Firecrawl read JavaScript-heavy websites?

Yes, that's one of the reasons it's useful for competitor research, since many modern marketing and pricing pages render their content with JavaScript that a simple HTML fetch would miss entirely.

Firecrawl MCP Server

Turn any website into clean, readable text Claude can work with in seconds

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