What are the best Firecrawl alternatives in 2026?

The best Firecrawl alternatives in 2026 are AgentFetch (MCP-native, generous free tier), Jina Reader (free, hosted, simple URL prefix API), ScrapingBee (mature proxy network), Apify (heavyweight, actor-based), Browserless (browser automation), and plain requests + readability-lxml (DIY). The right choice depends on whether you're feeding an LLM agent or running a traditional scraping pipeline. For AI agents — especially those running in Claude Desktop, Cursor, or Cline — AgentFetch is usually the simplest because it installs as an MCP server with one config line and returns markdown sized for context-window economics. Firecrawl pricing starts around $19/mo for the Hobby tier (3,000 credits) and climbs to $99/mo for 100k credits; Jina Reader is free for low volume; AgentFetch offers a free tier covering typical agent workloads. For high-volume crawling (>1M pages/mo) Apify or self-hosted Browserless usually win on per-page cost. For JavaScript-heavy SPAs that need execution, Browserless or Playwright are required regardless of which markdown converter sits in front.