Raptor or Firecrawl?
Both crawl websites and both plug into AI agents, but they answer different questions. Firecrawl turns pages into clean Markdown and JSON for an agent to read. Raptor audits a site’s technical SEO and tells you what to fix first.
Everything about Firecrawl here was checked against its own site, pricing page, docs and repository on . The pages are listed at the end.
The short version
Firecrawl is the right tool when you
- need web pages as Markdown or JSON for an LLM or an agent
- want to search the web and get the full pages back
- need to act on a page, with AI prompts or code, before reading it
- want a model to pull structured data out of pages
- want a hosted API, so there’s nothing to run yourself
Raptor is the right tool when you
- want to know why pages aren’t indexed, or why the wrong address shows in search
- need a verdict: findings ranked by what to fix first, with a score to track
- check canonicals, redirects, hreflang, sitemaps and internal links together
- want everything on your own machine, with no credits to count
- want a CI build to fail on an SEO regression
Side by side
Raptor first, Firecrawl second, row by row. Where we looked for something and didn’t find it, the cell says so.
| What | Raptor | Firecrawl |
|---|---|---|
| Cost and licence | ||
| Price | RaptorFree, with no credits. The page budget is a flag. | FirecrawlA free plan with 1,000 credits a month, then from $19 a month (Hobby, 5,000 credits) to $749 (Scale, 1,000,000). One credit is one page on a basic scrape or crawl.From Pricing |
| Licence | RaptorMIT. The public repository isn’t open yet. | FirecrawlAGPL-3.0 for the core, and MIT for the SDKs and some UI components.From Repository and licence |
| Where it runs | ||
| The crawl | RaptorOn your machine. Nothing is uploaded. | FirecrawlOn Firecrawl’s infrastructure, through its API, which serves cached results by default. Zero data retention is for Enterprise plans.From Docs: scrape |
| Self-hosting | RaptorIt only runs on your own machine or server. | FirecrawlDocker Compose runs scrape, crawl, map and search. Screenshots and page actions need a separate service, and Agent and Browser are cloud only.From Docs: self-hosting |
| Robots.txt | RaptorObeyed by default. --ignore-robots exists for sites you control. | FirecrawlObeyed by default. Only Enterprise plans can turn that off for a crawl.From Docs: crawl |
| How agents use it | ||
| MCP server | RaptorNine tools, over stdio: crawl, status, cancel, summary, findings, query, inspect, compare and the link graph. | Firecrawlfirecrawl-mcp, with tools to scrape, map, search, crawl, parse, interact and monitor, and a hosted endpoint.From Docs: MCP tools |
| Command line | Raptorraptor: crawl, inspect, link, sitemap and serve, with plain output when an agent runs it. | Firecrawlfirecrawl-cli: search, scrape, interact, crawl, map and agent jobs, against the cloud or a self-hosted instance.From Docs: CLI |
| What comes back | ||
| Output | RaptorFindings with a score and grade, an HTML report, JSON and CSV. | FirecrawlMarkdown, HTML, screenshots, links and structured JSON, among other formats.From Docs: scrape |
| SEO checks | Raptor128 checks: indexability, canonicals, redirects, hreflang, sitemaps, internal links, titles and more, each with how to fix it. | FirecrawlNone built in that we found. Its SEO page says “your current tools handle scoring”. Scrape results include each page’s status code, title, description and robots tag.From SEO teams |
| Internal links | RaptorPageRank over the crawl’s links, with orphans, hubs and silos. | FirecrawlMap lists a site’s URLs, and its SEO page says Crawl returns each page’s internal links for you to analyse.From SEO teams |
Where they meet
The overlap is real, and small.
Both crawl a site
Firecrawl’s Crawl and Map walk a site’s URLs, as Raptor does from its start address. What each keeps from the walk is the difference: Firecrawl the pages’ content, Raptor what’s wrong with them.
Both plug into agents
Each has an MCP server and a command line. Firecrawl’s tools fetch and read the web; Raptor’s return a site’s verdict and the findings behind it.
Both obey robots.txt
By default. Raptor’s --ignore-robots is for sites you control; Firecrawl lets Enterprise plans turn it off.
SEO data, not an SEO verdict
Firecrawl publishes an SEO audit skill for agents that extracts titles, descriptions, headings and links. Judging them is left to the agent. That judging is what Raptor’s checks do.
From SEO audit skill
Where the facts come from
Each row about Firecrawl names one of these pages, read on 18 October 2026. Prices and features change, so if something here no longer matches, the page has gone out of date, and these links are where to check.