Firecrawl vs Bright Data
Choosing between Firecrawl and Bright Data? Both are scraping & crawling providers you can call through a single Auxiliar key, so the honest answer is usually “use whichever wins the job in front of you” — and with one key and one bill, you don’t have to commit to either.
We ran both on the identical curator-fleet corpus. Firecrawl leads on scraping a page to clean, LLM-ready content (9.81 vs 7.82). On the headline test (scraping a page to clean, LLM-ready content), Firecrawl scored 9.81/10 (anti-bot bypass 100%) versus 7.82/10 for Bright Data. The full measured breakdown is below.
Measured, side by side
Composite score /10 on each shared capability, from the Auxiliar curator fleet — same corpus for both.
| Capability | Firecrawl | Bright Data | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| ScrapeAnti-bot bypass | 9.81100% · #1/10 | 7.8275% · #4/10 | Firecrawl |
| CrawlCoverage | 8.610.92 · #1/5 | 4.470.10 · #4/5 | Firecrawl |
Beyond the overlap
Capabilities each provider scored on that the other doesn't cover.
Firecrawl also does
- Screenshot
- Parse · PDF/doc
- Extract · AI/schema
- Watch
- Act · declarative
- Act · NL-agent
Bright Data also does
- Scrape-domain
Firecrawl — choose if
You want the highest-quality scrape/markdown and a single surface for scrape, crawl, extract and screenshot.
Bright Data — choose if
You face the hardest anti-bot targets and want the strongest unblocker + compliance posture.
Firecrawl — avoid if
You're cost-sensitive on hard targets — stealth + JSON stack ~5–9× the base credit.
Bright Data — avoid if
You need crawl link-discovery — its url_collection dataset returns only the seed.
One key. Every provider on this page.
Stop juggling signups and invoices. One Auxiliar API key calls all of them — upstream keys injected server-side, usage billed to a single balance. Swap the base URL and go.
curl https://api.auxiliar.ai/serper/search \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $AUXILIAR_API_KEY" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{"q": "latest ai agent news"}'