← WebExtract · Alternatives · Benchmark · API docs
Updated 2026-10-30. Competitor facts were read from their public pages on 2026-10-30 (KST); links are in the table and at the bottom. Prices and limits change, so check the linked pages.
Which should you pick?
Pick Firecrawl if you need JavaScript rendering, browser actions, crawling or mapping a whole site, web search, PDF/DOCX parsing, your own JSON schema, a monthly plan with a large included volume (above roughly 50,000 basic pages a month our per-call price costs more), or invoicing and cloud-marketplace billing. WebExtract does none of those today.
Pick WebExtract if you fetch single, static public pages and want clean Markdown or fixed-schema JSON (article metadata, product/price, tables), you want to pay per call with no account and no subscription (USDC through x402 for an agent with a wallet, or prepaid credits that never expire), and your volume is small or irregular. You can try it without signing up: curl -H "X-Billing: free" "https://api.webextract.dev/v1/markdown?url=https://example.com" (20 free calls a day per IP address).
| WebExtract | Firecrawl | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Pay-per-call API and MCP server: one public page to Markdown plus fixed-schema JSON. Source: our docs. | "Firecrawl is the context API for AI agents. Search, scrape, and interact with the live web to get clean Markdown or structured data." Source: docs.firecrawl.dev/introduction. |
| Endpoints | GET /v1/markdown, GET /v1/extract (and POST with a JSON body); MCP tools page_markdown and extract_url. | Search, Scrape, Interact, Parse, Map, Crawl, Monitor, Agent (their docs menu). |
| JavaScript rendering, browser actions | No (rendering is switched off for now; see limits below). | Yes. Their page lists "Proxies, anti-bot, JavaScript rendering, and dynamic content"; Interact can click and fill forms. |
| Crawl, map, web search | No. | Yes (Crawl, Map, Search). |
| PDF and office files | No (HTTP 415). | Parse: "Turn local PDFs, DOCX, XLSX, HTML, and more into Markdown or structured JSON." |
| Structured output | Fixed schema: metadata, product (with price_detail), tables. | A "JSON" format on Scrape and Crawl. Their page does not say more in the part we read. |
| Pricing model | Per call: $0.002 /v1/markdown, $0.005 /v1/extract (structured JSON included). Prepaid credits never expire. | Monthly plans with credits: Free 1,000 credits/month; Hobby $19 (5,000); Standard $99 (100,000); Growth $399 (500,000); Scale $749 (1,000,000); Enterprise custom. Billed monthly; annual billing is cheaper. Source: firecrawl.dev/pricing. |
| Price of one basic page | $0.002 (Markdown). | 1 credit. Per credit, our arithmetic from their page: $0.0038 on Hobby, about $0.00099 on Standard, about $0.0008 on Growth, about $0.00075 on Scale (monthly billing, plan fully used). Extra credits on a paid plan come in $5 steps: 1,000 credits on Hobby, 2,000 on Standard, 2,500 on Growth, 5,000 on Scale. |
| Price of a page with structured JSON | $0.005 (same endpoint, no extra charge). | 1 credit plus 4 for the JSON format, so 5 credits (their page: "the JSON, Question, and Highlight formats add 4 credits per page"). |
| Free | 20 calls a day per caller IP address, no account (REST needs the opt-in header X-Billing: free). Shared by REST and MCP. | Free plan: 1,000 credits a month, no card. The docs say the first scrape needs no account or API key. |
| Payment methods | USDC through x402 on 7 networks (REST); card (Stripe) for prepaid credits. | Stripe (cards, PayPal); AWS Marketplace and Google Cloud Marketplace. We found no x402 or USDC on the pages we read. |
| Failed requests | Not charged: 404, timeout, blocked, robots.txt disallowed. Measured on the sandbox route only (see below). | "A scrape that returns no result is not charged. A page that responds with an error status such as 403 or 404 is still returned to you and costs 1 credit." |
| Credits left over | Prepaid credits never expire. | Hobby, Standard and Growth credits do not roll over; Scale keeps unused credits for one month (their pricing FAQ). |
| MCP | Hosted remote MCP server https://api.webextract.dev/mcp (free calls or prepaid key). | MCP server with setup guides for several clients (their docs menu). |
This is our arithmetic, not a measurement and not a quote from them. Assumptions: one credit per basic page, five credits per page with structured JSON, monthly billing (annual plans are cheaper), the plan fully used, and the cheapest Firecrawl option for that volume including $5 top-ups on one plan. Our column uses the per-call x402 price; larger prepaid packs lower it (the docs list $50 for 15,000 credits, which works out to about $0.0013 per Markdown call and $0.0033 per extract call).
| Pages per month | WebExtract, Markdown | Firecrawl, basic page | WebExtract, structured JSON | Firecrawl, page with JSON format |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $2 | $0 (Free plan covers 1,000 credits) | $5 | $19 (Hobby) |
| 5,000 | $10 | $19 (Hobby) | $25 | $99 (Standard) |
| 10,000 | $20 | $44 (Hobby $19 + 5 × $5 top-ups) | $50 | $99 (Standard) |
| 50,000 | $100 | $99 (Standard) | $250 | $399 (Growth) |
| 100,000 | $200 | $99 (Standard) | $500 | $399 (Growth) |
Reading the table: below roughly 50,000 basic pages a month ($99 ÷ $0.002 ≈ 49,500) a per-call price is lower, and above that Firecrawl's Standard plan is. For structured JSON the break-even is roughly 80,000 pages a month ($399 ÷ $0.005 = 79,800). At very low volume Firecrawl's free plan (1,000 credits a month) beats our 20 free calls a day. Firecrawl's plans also include rendering, crawling and concurrency that we do not offer, so the cheaper number is not automatically the better deal.
/v1/render/*) exists but is switched off right now and answers HTTP 503 render_disabled (never charged); we do not promise a date.unsupported_type, not charged).blocked_by_site (not charged). One call must finish within 10 seconds.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.
Also see WebExtract vs Jina Reader and the overview of alternatives. Last updated 2026-10-30.