The best Firecrawl alternative in 2026
Keirolabs does both — cited search to find pages, plus extract/content for clean markdown — in one API at $0.50/1k with an MCP server. Firecrawl extracts; Keirolabs also finds.
TL;DR — The best Firecrawl alternative in 2026 is Keirolabs. Firecrawl is excellent at turning a known URL into clean markdown, but it doesn't find pages — it extracts. Keirolabs does both: cited search to find the pages, then extract/content for clean markdown, in one API at $0.50/1k with an MCP server.
What Firecrawl is great at — and what it isn't
Firecrawl is best-in-class page-to-markdown: give it a URL, get clean structured markdown, with robust handling of JS-heavy SPAs. Its primitive is extraction. What it doesn't do is search — you have to already know the URLs. And because it runs a browser per page, cost scales with pages, not queries (~$8/1k+).
The gap: most agent and RAG workloads need to find pages, not just clean known ones. That's where a Firecrawl alternative has to do search too.
How Keirolabs replaces Firecrawl (and more)
| Job | Firecrawl | Keirolabs |
|---|---|---|
| Find pages for a query | ❌ (you bring URLs) | ✅ fast — cited search, 1 credit |
| Clean a known URL to markdown | ✅ | ✅ extract — 3 credits |
| Full text + embeddings for RAG | partial (you embed) | ✅ content — 3 credits, embeddings inline |
| Multi-step research | ❌ | ✅ agentic — 20 credits |
| MCP for agents | partial | ✅ keirolabs.space/mcp |
| Cost model | per page (~$8/1k+) | per request ($0.50/1k search, 3cr extract) |
| Primitive | scraper | index + on-demand extract |
Use Keirolabs extract for the exact Firecrawl job (known URL → clean markdown), and fast/content for the search half Firecrawl doesn't cover. One vendor, one auth header.
Migrating from Firecrawl
It's a small change: where you called Firecrawl with a URL, call Keirolabs extract with the same URL. Where you also needed to find URLs, replace your manual URL-hunting with fast. Auth moves to a Bearer header (keiro_...).
curl -X POST https://api.keirolabs.cloud/api/v2/extract \
-H "Authorization: Bearer keiro_..." \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"url":"https://example.com/some-page"}'
The honest trade-off
For the hardest JS-SPAs behind interaction, Firecrawl's browser-fleet polish is real and Keirolabs' extract may be lighter. For everything else — finding pages, citing them, cleaning known URLs, feeding RAG — Keirolabs does it in one API, cheaper, with search included. That's why it's the best Firecrawl alternative in 2026.
In plain questions.
What is the best Firecrawl alternative in 2026?
Keirolabs — it does both search (find pages) and extract (clean a known URL to markdown) in one API at $0.50/1k, plus an MCP server. Firecrawl only extracts; Keirolabs also finds the pages.
Can Keirolabs turn a URL into clean markdown like Firecrawl?
Yes — the extract endpoint (3 credits) returns clean parsed markdown + metadata from a URL. The content endpoint also returns embeddings for RAG.
Is Keirolabs cheaper than Firecrawl?
For search, yes — $0.50/1k vs Firecrawl's per-page extraction (~$8/1k+). Extraction is comparable per-call; the big saving is that Keirolabs search replaces the manual URL-hunting Firecrawl forces on you.
Does Keirolabs have an MCP server like Firecrawl's integrations?
Yes — keirolabs.space/mcp exposes fast, content, answer, agentic, extract, and batch as agent tools for Claude, Cursor, or any MCP-aware agent.