Looking for a Firecrawl alternative?
Firecrawl made turning a website into LLM-ready data a single API call. Teams usually start looking elsewhere for one of three reasons: the bill gets hard to predict once structured extraction is involved, data is stored in the United States, or they want to choose the model that reads their data. Botnom was built around those three things.
Botnom compared with Firecrawl
The day-to-day workflow carries over: scrape, crawl, map, search, extract, batch, webhooks, MCP and scheduled monitoring. These are the things that change when you switch.
| Category | Botnom | Firecrawl |
|---|---|---|
| 50,000 pages a month | $29 on Starter | $99 on Standard (Hobby covers 5,000) |
| 500,000 pages a month | $149 on Pro | $399 on Growth |
| Structured JSON extraction | 5 credits per extract request | 5 credits per page (JSON adds 4 to the page credit) |
| How prices are set | A fixed, published cost for every operation | Page credits plus add-ons; Agent runs are priced dynamically |
| Where data is stored | Helsinki, Finland (EU) | United States |
| LLM used for extraction | Your choice of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, x.ai and more | Firecrawl’s own models |
| LLM audit trail | Every prompt, response, token count and cost | Credit usage dashboard |
Firecrawl figures come from its public pricing page, documentation and privacy policy as of October 2026. Firecrawl is a trademark of its owner. Spotted something out of date? Email hello@botnom.com.
Why it adds up
The bill is easy to forecast. A page is one credit whatever formats you request, extraction is a flat 5 credits per request, and nothing is priced at run time. It also costs less at Botnom’s plan sizes: $29 instead of $99 for 50,000 pages, and $149 instead of $399 for 500,000.
Your data is stored in the EU. The hosted service runs in Helsinki, Finland, which keeps residency reviews short for European teams.
The model is your decision. Your admin picks the LLM that runs extraction from a live catalog with current prices, and every prompt is kept in an audit log with its tokens and cost.
Other Firecrawl alternatives
A few other tools come up when teams compare options. Each is good at something specific, but none of them replaces the whole Firecrawl workflow the way Botnom does.
Crawl4AI
An open-source Python crawler that turns pages into markdown. You run and scale it yourself, including the browsers, job queue, API, keys and dashboards. Botnom uses crawl4ai as its engine and adds the hosted API, job queue, team accounts, schedules and dashboard on top.
Jina Reader
Put r.jina.ai/ in front of a URL and get markdown back. It’s quick for reading single pages and running searches, and is designed around that rather than whole-site crawls or scheduled monitoring.
Tavily
A search-first API for agents, with extract, crawl and map endpoints built around it. A strong choice when search is the centre of the workflow; Botnom is the better fit if you also need screenshots, scheduled monitoring, or extraction on a model you choose.
Apify
A marketplace of scrapers built for specific websites, run on Apify’s platform with pricing that depends on the scraper and the compute it uses. Useful when someone has already built a scraper for your target site; Botnom gives you one general API with per-page pricing.
Switching takes an afternoon
Botnom uses the same operation names and many of the same request fields, such as formats, onlyMainContent, waitFor, actions, includePaths and limit, so request bodies mostly carry over.
The main difference is that every Botnom operation runs as a job: you get an id back straight away and read the result when it’s done, by polling or with a webhook. Moving a large workload? Email hello@botnom.com and we’ll help you plan the move.
# 1. start the job: same body you send today
curl -X POST https://botnom.com/api/v1/scrape \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $BOTNOM_API_KEY" \
-H "content-type: application/json" \
-d '{"url": "https://example.com", "formats": ["markdown", "links"]}'
# → { "id": "cmu7f2…", "status": "queued" }
# 2. read the result when the job has succeeded
curl https://botnom.com/api/v1/jobs/cmu7f2…/result \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $BOTNOM_API_KEY"Run your Firecrawl workload on Botnom
The free plan includes 1,000 pages a month, so you can test against your real targets first.