Firecrawl vs Steel
A side-by-side comparison of Firecrawl and Steel, drawn from Ignaite's continuously-verified listings.
Compared from listings verified as of
At a glance
| Attribute | Firecrawl | Steel |
|---|---|---|
| Category (differs) | Data Ops | Infra |
| Pricing | FREEMIUM | FREEMIUM |
| License | Open core | Open core |
| Deployment | Hybrid | Hybrid |
| Platforms (differs) | API, Web | Web, API |
| Model support | Model-agnostic | Model-agnostic |
| Vendor (differs) | Firecrawl | Nen Labs |
| Capabilities (differs) |
|
|
The honest brief
Firecrawl
Returns clean LLM-ready markdown (not raw HTML), handles JS + anti-bot, and its AGPL core can be self-hosted.
- Clean markdown / structured JSON output
- Manages proxies and JS rendering for you
- AGPL core, self-hostable
- Scrape, crawl, map, search in one API
- AGPL license constrains redistribution
- Hosted usage priced by credits
- Heavy sites can still need tuning
Steel
Open-source, Docker-self-hostable browser sandbox unlike most closed agent-browser APIs — run local or in cloud.
- Self-host via Docker or use the cloud
- Handles sessions/proxies/CAPTCHAs
- Page-to-markdown/screenshot/PDF
- Framework- and model-agnostic
- Infrastructure, not a full agent
- Managed cloud is metered
- Younger than incumbent scrapers
- Needs an agent framework on top
When to pick which
Both cover Web scraping.
Pick Firecrawl if you need Unified search and Structured extraction.
- Unified search (secondary capability)
- Structured extraction (secondary capability)
Pick Steel if you need Browser automation.
- Browser automation (primary capability)
Firecrawl leans on Web scraping as a headline capability; Steel treats it as secondary.
- Web scraping (primary capability)