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Firecrawl and Jina Reader alternatives

Updated 2026-10-30. Competitor facts come from their public pages, read 2026-10-30 (KST), and are linked on the detail pages.

Which should you pick?

Choose WebExtract when you only need to turn single, static public pages into clean Markdown or fixed-schema JSON, you want to pay per call ($0.002 Markdown, $0.005 with structured JSON) without an account or subscription, and your agent can pay in USDC through x402 or you prefer prepaid credits that never expire.

Choose Firecrawl when you need JavaScript rendering, browser actions, crawling, site mapping, search, PDF parsing or a monthly plan with a large included volume. Choose Jina Reader when you want the lightest start (a URL prefix), headless-browser rendering by default, CSS selectors, search, or your own schema through their ReaderLM-v2 headers.

We have not run either of them; there are no head-to-head speed or accuracy numbers on these pages.

At a glance

	WebExtract	Firecrawl	Jina Reader
Best for	Occasional or low-volume fetches of static public pages by agents; no-account pay per call	Rendering, crawling, search, PDFs and high monthly volume on a plan	Quick URL-prefix reads, JavaScript pages, selectors, search
Billing	Per call: $0.002 / $0.005; prepaid credits never expire	Monthly plans from Free (1,000 credits) and Hobby $19 to Scale $749, plus $5 top-ups on paid plans	Tokens by output length; price table on their site
Free	20 calls a day per IP, no account (REST needs `X-Billing: free`)	1,000 credits a month, no card	20 RPM without a key; 10M free tokens with a new key
Pays in	USDC (x402) or card (Stripe)	Card, PayPal; AWS or Google Cloud Marketplace	Card, Google Pay, PayPal (Stripe)
Failed fetches	Not charged (sandbox measured)	No result: not charged; 403 or 404 page returned: 1 credit	Tokens not deducted
JavaScript pages	No (render switched off for now)	Yes	Yes (default engine, per their FAQ)
Crawl, map, search	No	Yes	Search: yes
PDF	No	Yes (Parse)	Mentioned on their page
Your own JSON schema	No (fixed schema)	JSON format	Yes, via headers (ReaderLM-v2)
x402 USDC	Yes (REST, 7 networks)	Not found on pages read	Not found on page read

Detail pages, each with sources and what we do not do: WebExtract vs Firecrawl · WebExtract vs Jina Reader.

The price difference in one paragraph

A per-call price has no fixed monthly fee, so it is cheaper at low or irregular volume; a plan is cheaper once you use it heavily. By our arithmetic from Firecrawl's public prices (details and assumptions on the Firecrawl page), a $0.002 Markdown call costs less than Firecrawl's cheapest option below roughly 50,000 basic pages a month, except at 1,000 pages or fewer, where their free plan costs nothing, and it costs more above that. For structured JSON ($0.005 here, 5 credits there) the break-even is roughly 80,000 pages a month. Jina bills tokens, and we do not quote a figure for it.

What WebExtract does not do

HTTP only: we read the raw HTML and run no JavaScript. Pages that build their content in the browser come back empty or thin. JS rendering (/v1/render/*) exists but is switched off right now and answers HTTP 503 render_disabled (never charged); we do not promise a date.
One URL per call: no crawling, no site map, no web search, no browser actions (click, fill forms).
No PDF or other non-HTML files (HTTP 415 unsupported_type, not charged).
Fixed output schema (article metadata, product/price, tables). You cannot pass your own JSON schema or an instruction.
We respect robots.txt (HTTP 451 when it disallows the URL) and document no proxy network and no anti-bot handling. A site that blocks us answers HTTP 422 blocked_by_site (not charged). One call must finish within 10 seconds.
We document no uptime guarantee, no invoicing, no team features and no cloud-marketplace billing.
Paying through MCP with x402 has not been tested. Over MCP use the free calls or a prepaid key; x402 is documented for the REST endpoints.

What we measured (and what we did not)

Our own numbers are on the benchmark page (test date 2026-10-26, one client machine, 10 public pages that are friendly to scraping practice, 4 runs per page and endpoint, through the sandbox route that uses the same extraction code with Base Sepolia test USDC): /v1/markdown 38 of 40 succeeded (95.0%), /v1/extract 40 of 40 (100.0%); simple field checks passed 75/75 and 212/212. Ten deliberately failing calls changed the test wallet's USDC balance by 0.000000. The 2 failures were one upstream 422 and one testnet settlement failure (the response said it was not charged; that text was not balance-checked); details on the benchmark page. All scripts and raw files are linked from that page so you can rerun them.

We did not run any competitor. There is no head-to-head speed, accuracy or success-rate number on this page and none should be implied. No mainnet payment was tested in that benchmark.

Try it

curl -H "X-Billing: free" "https://api.webextract.dev/v1/markdown?url=https://example.com"

20 free calls a day per IP address, no signup. See the docs, the benchmark and the wallet payment page.

Sources: firecrawl.dev/pricing, docs.firecrawl.dev/introduction, jina.ai/reader, all read 2026-10-30 (KST). Last updated 2026-10-30.