What is Firecrawl used for?

Firecrawl is an open-source web data API that enables AI agents to search, scrape, and interact with web pages, providing LLM-ready data. It is a good fit for AI agents that need to search and retrieve web data, developers building applications that scrape and process web content, and companies needing to extract structured data from websites.

Is Firecrawl open source?

Yes. Firecrawl is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at firecrawl/firecrawl and is written mainly in TypeScript.

Yes. Firecrawl is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available.

Can I self-host Firecrawl?

Yes. Firecrawl can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Firecrawl an alternative to?

Firecrawl is an open-source alternative to Diffbot. Other open-source alternatives to Diffbot include Crawl4AI, Maxun and Anakin.

Is Firecrawl actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Firecrawl was on 9 October 2026, and the latest release is v2.11.0, published on 19 June 2026. The project has 190k stars on GitHub.

Firecrawl: open-source alternative to Diffbot

About Firecrawl

Firecrawl is a web data API designed for AI agents. It provides search, scraping, and interaction capabilities to gather data from the web. The service is open source and offers access to more sources through Alexandria.

It is aimed at developers and companies building AI applications that need to retrieve and process web content. The API supports multiple programming languages including Python, Node.js, and cURL, and can output data in formats like Markdown, JSON, and screenshots.

Key features

Search the web and get full content from results
Scrape websites and get LLM-ready data in Markdown, JSON, screenshot, etc.
Interact with scraped pages using AI prompts or code
Map and crawl websites
Agent for autonomous data gathering
Open source

Good fit for

AI agents that need to search and retrieve web data
Developers building applications that scrape and process web content
Companies needing to extract structured data from websites

Built with: TypeScript tools
Tags: web-data-api; ai-agents; scraping; search; open-source

Firecrawl: questions and answers

What is Firecrawl used for?: Firecrawl is an open-source web data API that enables AI agents to search, scrape, and interact with web pages, providing LLM-ready data. It is a good fit for AI agents that need to search and retrieve web data, developers building applications that scrape and process web content, and companies needing to extract structured data from websites.
Is Firecrawl open source?: Yes. Firecrawl is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at firecrawl/firecrawl and is written mainly in TypeScript.
Is Firecrawl free?: Yes. Firecrawl is open source, so the software itself is free to use. A managed cloud version is also available.
Can I self-host Firecrawl?: Yes. Firecrawl can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Firecrawl an alternative to?: Firecrawl is an open-source alternative to Diffbot. Other open-source alternatives to Diffbot include Crawl4AI, Maxun and Anakin.
Is Firecrawl actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Firecrawl was on 9 October 2026, and the latest release is v2.11.0, published on 19 June 2026. The project has 190k stars on GitHub.