Keiro vs Firecrawl (2026): search + extract vs extract-only

TL;DR — Keiro and Firecrawl solve overlapping but different problems. Firecrawl turns a known URL into clean markdown (extraction). Keiro does that AND finds the pages in the first place (cited search) — in one API at $0.50/1k with an MCP server. Pick Firecrawl for pure extraction of known URLs at scale; pick Keiro when the agent also needs to discover and cite pages.

The one-line difference

Firecrawl's primitive is extraction. Keiro's is search, with extraction as one endpoint. That sounds small; it changes what you have to build.

• Firecrawl: you hand it URLs → it returns clean markdown. You still need a way to find the URLs (a search API, a sitemap, a scrape). Cost scales with pages.
• Keiro: fast finds and cites the pages, extract cleans a known URL, content returns full text + embeddings for RAG — one vendor, one Bearer header.

Head-to-head

When to pick which

• Pick Firecrawl if your whole job is "I have a list of URLs, give me clean markdown," and the pages include hard JS-heavy SPAs where their browser-fleet polish matters.
• Pick Keiro if you're building an agent or RAG pipeline that needs to find pages, cite them, and read them — and you'd rather have one API for search + extract + embeddings than a search vendor plus an extraction vendor.

Migrating from Firecrawl to Keiro

Where you called Firecrawl with a URL, call Keiro extract with the same URL. Where you were manually hunting for URLs to feed Firecrawl, replace that with fast. Auth moves to a Bearer header (keiro_...).

# search
curl -X POST https://api.keirolabs.cloud/api/v2/search/fast \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer keiro_..." -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"query":"EU AI Act 2026 changes","maxResults":5}'

# extract a known URL
curl -X POST https://api.keirolabs.cloud/api/v2/extract \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer keiro_..." -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com/policy"}'

The honest verdict

Firecrawl is genuinely the best at one thing: extraction of known, hard pages. Keiro is the better default for agent/RAG stacks because it covers search + extract + RAG in one cited, cheap API. For most teams, "I also need to find the pages" is the deciding factor — and that's Keiro.