Two peas, one pod
Bright Data vs Firecrawl
By Sophie Filer · checked against both servers on 27 Oct 2026
Both scrape the web for your assistant. Firecrawl is the easier default: clean Markdown, site crawls and structured extraction. Bright Data earns its place on sites that block ordinary scrapers, because every request goes through its proxy and unblocking network, and it adds a remote browser for pages that need clicking.
Bright Data
Search and scraping through Bright Data, for sites that block ordinary requests.
Firecrawl
Scrape pages, crawl sites and search, returned as clean Markdown.
Side by side
| Compared | Bright Data | Firecrawl |
|---|---|---|
| Made by | Bright Data | Firecrawl (Mendable) |
| Strength | Getting past blocks and captchas | Clean output and whole-site crawls |
| Remote browser | Yes: navigate, click, type, screenshot | Page actions through one interact tool |
| Ready-made scrapers | Yes, for big marketplaces and social sites | No; you describe what to extract |
| Free allowance | 5,000 requests a month, then paid | A free tier of credits |
| Safety switch | CONTENT_GATE screens pages for injected instructions | Limits and path filters on crawls |
| Tools | 32 (26 only read) | 28 (17 only read) |
| Context its tools take | At least ~2,200 tokens | At least ~5,500 tokens |
| Runs on | Your computer | Your computer |
| You need | A Bright Data account and API token | A Firecrawl account and API key (there is a free tier); Node.js 18 or newer |
| Our install check | Started in our test | Started in our test |
| Licence | MIT | MIT |
| GitHub stars | 2.7K | 7.7K |
| Last commit | 26 Oct 2026 | 26 Oct 2026 |
Stars and commit dates refresh daily; tool counts come from our own run of each server.
Pick Bright Data if
- Your target sites return captchas or empty pages to other scrapers
- You collect search results or marketplace data at volume
- You need a hosted browser to log in, click through or fill forms
Pick Firecrawl if
- You mostly read docs, blogs and ordinary sites
- You want a site mapped and crawled in one call
- You want to describe the fields you need and get JSON back
Can you run both?
Many people keep Firecrawl as the everyday scraper and switch to Bright Data only for the sites that fight back. Running both doubles the tool list, so turn off the Bright Data groups you do not need with GROUPS or TOOLS.