Firecrawl alternatives

Reachkit makes a competing cold email tool with a built-in lead database, so it’s on this list only for readers whose Firecrawl work ends in outreach. Every price below comes from the vendor’s own site, read in October 2026.

The right replacement depends on what you fed Firecrawl:

• Search results with page content, on a monthly plan: Tavily.
• Search on its own index, paid per request: Exa.
• Google and other search engine results as data: SerpApi.
• Local business lists without writing code: Outscraper.
• Web research on every lead, no code to host: Clay.
• Company data by API, no subscription: Explorium.
• Person records by API, billed per match: People Data Labs.
• Email addresses at a company domain: Hunter.
• Qualified accounts turned into sent cold email: Reachkit.

If you want another scraper of the same kind, the pages ranking for this search compare Crawl4AI, Apify, Spider and Bright Data; I haven’t checked their prices. Firecrawl’s own core is also open source and can be self-hosted.

For reference, Firecrawl’s free plan gives 1,000 credits a month, Hobby costs $19 a month ($16 billed yearly) and Standard $83 a month billed yearly, as of October 2026.

Tavily is a web search and extraction API for AI agents. Send a query and get ranked results with page content; send up to 20 URLs to Extract and get cleaned text back. Crawl, Map and a Research agent round it out. Nebius has owned Tavily since February 2026. It fits developers whose Firecrawl calls usually started with a search, not a known URL.

Price (October 2026): the free Researcher plan gives 1,000 credits a month with no card. Paid plans are billed monthly (I found no yearly option), from Project at $30 for 4,000 credits to Growth at $500 for 100,000, or $0.008 a credit on pay-as-you-go. A basic search uses 1 credit, an advanced one 2.

Strengths:

• Extract bills 1 credit per 5 successful URLs at basic depth, and failed extracts are free: about $1.50 per 1,000 URLs on Project, by my math.
• An official MCP server (MCP is how assistants such as Claude plug into other apps), usable with sign-in, a key, or keyless.

Drawbacks: a Research request takes 4 to 250 credits depending on the model, and Tavily publishes the range, not the exact price. Written reviews are scarce (3 on G2), and a GitHub thread reports results pointing to dead 404 pages. Fees are non-refundable.

Versus Firecrawl: Tavily starts from a search, Firecrawl from a page. Per 1,000 pages, Firecrawl costs $3.80 on monthly Hobby and about $0.83 on yearly Standard. See the Tavily profile.

Exa is a search engine that programs call instead of people, answering from a crawl and index it built itself. It adds people search over 1B+ profiles, company search, Contents for clean text from known URLs, and Exa Agent for jobs like building and enriching a list. It fits developers who want web search and contact lookups on one account.

Price (October 2026): pay as you go, with no subscription or minimum. Every month starts with $10 of free credit, no card needed. Instant search costs $4 per 1,000 requests, Fast or Auto $7 with text for 10 results included, and Contents $1 per 1,000 pages for each content type. Agent runs charge $0.02 per email and $0.07 per phone found, plus compute.

Strengths:

• Self-serve API rates are published, so a prototype costs what the rate card says.
• A hosted, open-source MCP server and an official n8n node.

Drawbacks: many separate meters, and an Agent run’s exact cost shows only afterwards unless you pick a fixed-effort price. Exa’s privacy policy says query data can train its models; zero data retention is listed under Enterprise. One r/gtmengineering user called its structured people and company lists weak.

Versus Firecrawl: Exa searches its own index; Firecrawl fetches and renders the pages you point it at. See the Exa profile.

SerpApi runs a live search on Google or another engine and hands back the whole results page as JSON, raw HTML or Markdown, with ads, local packs, knowledge panels and AI Overviews parsed into fields. Its site lists more than 100 APIs, from Google Maps to Bing and Amazon. It fits teams that used Firecrawl’s search to track rankings or pull Maps listings.

Price (October 2026): Free gives 250 searches a month. Starter is $25 for 1,000, Developer $75 for 5,000 and Production $150 for 15,000, month to month, with Cloud tiers up to 54 million searches. One successful request counts as one search, however many results it returns.

Strengths:

• Errors, failures and identical repeats within an hour are free, and a paid plan is refundable within 7 days if you used 20% of it or less.
• Support: 4.9 on Trustpilot from 106 reviews (October 2026), where reviewers keep naming the help desk. Trustpilot notes SerpApi hasn’t invited reviews recently.

Drawbacks: high cost is the top con in G2’s review summary, and a G2 reviewer wrote that credits expire at every renewal, which punishes bursty use. Google and Reddit have both sued SerpApi over scraping; both cases were still open in October 2026.

Versus Firecrawl: by my math Firecrawl’s search (2 credits for up to 10 results) costs about $1.65 per 1,000 searches on yearly Standard, without scraping the results, far less than SerpApi’s Starter; SerpApi charges for parsing each engine’s own fields. See the SerpApi profile.

Outscraper is a pay-as-you-go scraping platform built around Google Maps. You choose business categories and areas in a browser, Outscraper runs the job remotely, and you download a spreadsheet or JSON file. Its Emails & Contacts Scraper then visits each business’s website, plus sources such as Facebook and LinkedIn, to collect emails, phones and social profiles. It fits people who sell to local businesses and don’t want to write a crawler.

Price (October 2026): no subscription. The first 500 Maps businesses every 30 days are free, then $3 per 1,000 up to 100,000 and $1 per 1,000 above. Emails & Contacts costs the same per 1,000 domains after 500 free, and the Email Verifier $3 per 1,000 after 25. Prepaid credits don’t expire, per its pricing explainer.

Strengths:

• Public unit prices, paid only in the months you scrape.
• An API with six SDKs, an n8n node and an official MCP server. Trustpilot shows 4.6 from 330 reviews (October 2026), with support singled out.

Drawbacks: running out of credits doesn’t stop a job. Outscraper’s FAQ says a task that costs more than your balance still finishes and you get an invoice, and surprise invoices recur in its 1-star reviews. New accounts may be asked for a $10 deposit first.

Versus Firecrawl: the website-to-email crawl comes as a ready-made job, billed per domain instead of per page. See the Outscraper profile.

Clay is a table where each row can run through data providers and AI steps. Claygent, its research agent, browses the web for each row and answers questions a database field can’t, such as whether a company sells to agencies: the kind of account research Firecrawl markets to sales and GTM teams. Waterfalls try one provider after another for an email, and Clay’s Sequencer can send the result. It fits GTM engineers and agencies who’d rather configure than host code.

Price (October 2026): the free plan includes 100 data credits and 500 actions a month. Launch is $185 monthly or $167 a month yearly, and Growth $495. Claygent on Clay’s Helium model costs 1 data credit plus 1 action a row.

Strengths:

• Lookups that come back empty are free, and every plan has unlimited seats.
• Clay’s pricing page counts 150+ providers, so web research and contact data sit in one table.

Drawbacks: with actions and data credits metered separately, spend is hard to predict, and G2’s AI summary lists a steep learning curve among the complaints. Growth is needed for the HTTP API, webhooks and CRM sync.

Versus Firecrawl: you get an answer per row instead of raw pages. See the Clay profile, Reachkit vs Clay or Apollo vs Clay.

Explorium sells B2B company and contact data through an API and a hosted MCP server built for AI agents. You fetch businesses or people by filters such as industry, size, location or job title at 1 credit a record, then pay more to enrich only the records you keep, with fields such as funding, headcount, tech stack or contact details. It fits teams that scraped websites for facts a data vendor already sells.

Price (October 2026): one-time packs, no subscription. Packs run from $29.99 for 500 credits (Lite) to $7,499.99 for 500,000 (Scale), after a 90-day free trial of 100 credits. A prospect with a work email takes 3 credits, about $0.18 on Lite or $0.075 on the $749.99 Growth pack, by my math.

Strengths:

• Buying needs no sales call below Enterprise, and there’s no per-seat charge.
• Sizing an audience costs nothing, and a phone (5 credits) is priced apart from an email (2).

Drawbacks: unused credits lapse a year after purchase, and money spent on packs isn’t returned. At a zero balance the service stops unless you turn on auto-refill, which Explorium’s docs list as live and its pricing page as coming soon. Except in Vibe Prospecting, its chat tool, access is through the API, the MCP server, n8n or Clay (company data only), and it doesn’t send email.

Versus Firecrawl: set fields at a set price instead of pages you parse. Firecrawl’s Alexandria now resells enrichment too, from Apollo, FullEnrich and Data Legion. See the Explorium profile.

People Data Labs (PDL) sells person, company, IP and job-posting records through developer APIs. Send what you know about someone, like a name and employer or an email, and Person Enrichment returns the matching profile; Person Search queries the dataset with filters. It fits developers who scraped team pages to build records and would rather buy them.

Price (October 2026): the free plan gives 100 credits a month, with emails, phones and addresses hidden since January 2025. Pro starts at $98 a month for 350 person records ($0.28 each), falling to $0.20 on the largest yearly self-serve tier. Company data is its own Pro plan, from $100 a month.

Strengths:

• Most APIs bill only for matched records, and the full self-serve rate card is published in PDL’s help center.
• Unused credits roll over, up to one period’s allowance.

Drawbacks: PDL’s own schema docs say the emails field holds historical addresses that shouldn’t go straight into outreach, and its stats show a work email on about 3.4% of person records. Price at volume is a repeated complaint on SourceForge and comes up on G2 too, and it has no prospecting app or sender.

Versus Firecrawl: records instead of pages, charged per match rather than per fetch. See the People Data Labs profile.

Hunter finds professional email addresses from public web pages, verifies them and can send cold email sequences. Give Domain Search a company’s domain and it returns the addresses on file, each with its source page and the date it was first found. It fits anyone who pointed Firecrawl at contact and team pages to pull emails.

Price (October 2026): a free plan with 50 credits a month. Starter costs $49 a month ($34 billed yearly) for 2,000 credits, Growth $149 and Scale $299, with unlimited users on every plan. A found email uses 1 credit, a verification half a credit, and misses are free.

Strengths:

• It shows the public source behind each address.
• The API and an official MCP server come with every plan, Free included.

Drawbacks: G2 reviewers mention gaps on smaller companies. There’s no mobile number finder, inboxes beyond those included cost from $10 a month each, warmup is billed per inbox, and Hunter doesn’t offer refunds.

Versus Firecrawl: Hunter has already crawled the pages, so you pay for the address, not the fetch. See the Hunter profile or Reachkit vs Hunter.

This is our product. It picks up where the research stops: named people, verified emails and the sending, in one cold email platform. It fits founders, agencies and GTM engineers who use Firecrawl to qualify accounts for outbound.

Got a shortlist of companies from your scraping? Reachkit’s Lead Finder looks up people at exactly those companies, filtered by job title and seniority, across 500M+ people and 70M+ companies. Browsing results costs nothing; you spend a credit per verified lead you add. Page research comes along by CSV, with extra columns mapped to merge tags, and Claude or ChatGPT can run the search and build the campaign through Reachkit’s MCP connector, which is built to ask before it sends.

Price (October 2026): $39 a month on Growth, $29 a month on yearly billing, covering the whole workspace, with 1,000 lead credits a month, room for 5,000 contacts at once and up to 15,000 campaign emails a month. Scale, from $99, adds the CRM, REST API and webhooks. The trial is 30 days, no card.

Strengths:

• The sending side comes with it. Bring Google, Microsoft or IMAP mailboxes and pay no per-inbox fee, or order lookalike domains at $15 a year and Google or Microsoft inboxes at $5 a month, which Reachkit sets up and warms with AI.
• Add as many teammates as you like; there are no seat fees.

Drawbacks: it doesn’t scrape, crawl or search the web. Every lead comes from a single database, with no waterfall across providers, and per the help center a well-targeted search typically verifies 70 to 95%. The REST API doesn’t cover Lead Finder, and Reachkit advises warming new inboxes for at least 3 weeks before campaigns.

Versus Firecrawl: a different job. Firecrawl describes a company; Reachkit finds who to email there and sends. See pricing.

Look at what you sent Firecrawl most often, not at its feature list.

• You searched, then scraped the top results. Tavily if you want a monthly plan, Exa if you’d rather pay per request.
• You needed the search results page itself. SerpApi.
• You scraped known pages and only the bill bothers you. Price out yearly Standard ($83 a month for 100,000 credits) or a self-hosted copy of the open-source core first; the hosted version has features self-hosting lacks. A cancelled plan runs to the end of the paid period, so you can test a replacement alongside it.
• You scraped websites for emails. Outscraper for local businesses found on Maps, Hunter for company domains.
• You scraped to qualify leads. Clay for research per row without code, Explorium or People Data Labs for structured records in your own code.
• The research ends in a cold email. Reachkit for the contacts and the sending.

Firecrawl is good at what it was built for: turning messy web pages into text a program can use. If credit burn is your only problem, price out yearly Standard or self-hosting before you rebuild anything.

For outbound, I’d use scraped research to qualify accounts: does this company sell to agencies, is it hiring in sales. That’s where AI earns its place in cold email. But a qualified company isn’t a lead until you have a named person and an address that delivers. Reachkit covers that stretch, from account list to verified people to a campaign sent from warmed inboxes. If you need the research step itself, Clay or Tavily fit better.

Related: Firecrawl pricing and review, Similarweb alternatives and Reachkit vs Clay.