Jina Reader vs Firecrawl — which is better for AI agents?

Jina Reader is better for quick prototypes; Firecrawl is better for production crawlers; neither is MCP-native, which is why agent developers increasingly pick a third option like AgentFetch. Jina Reader is a free hosted endpoint — prepend https://r.jina.ai/ to any URL and you get LLM-clean markdown back. It's the lowest-friction option for a one-off agent prototype, but it has no MCP integration, no per-tool rate-limit budgeting, and rate limits apply at the network level. Firecrawl is a paid SaaS with structured extraction, multi-page crawling, and a JS-rendering option; pricing starts at $19/mo and climbs with credits. It's more capable than Jina but requires API key management, HTTP client code, and bespoke integration per agent runtime. For agents running in Claude Desktop, Cursor, or Cline, both leave you writing glue code. An MCP server like AgentFetch installs in one config line and exposes the same fetch/extract tools to every MCP-compatible agent at once, with markdown output tuned for LLM context cost.