Diffbot vs Firecrawl

Machine-learning page understanding and a knowledge graph against a lightweight crawl-to-Markdown service.

Diffbot is computer-vision page extraction plus a knowledge graph of billions of entities — no rules, no selectors, no maintenance. It is maintained by Diffbot, runs on HTTP API · Crawlbot · KG query language, and starts at from $299 / mo.

Firecrawl is turns any site into clean, LLM-ready markdown with crawl, scrape, map and extract endpoints. It comes from Firecrawl (Mendable), runs on HTTP API · Python/Node SDK · LangChain & LlamaIndex integrations, and starts at free tier · from $16 / mo.

Diffbot is an extraction and entity product: it returns typed objects — articles, products, organisations — without selectors. Firecrawl is a retrieval product optimised for feeding text into models. They overlap less than the category label suggests.

We score every scraping tool on five axes that decide real projects: how quickly a new engineer becomes productive, how far the tool scales before it needs replacing, how well it survives anti-bot systems, how good the documentation and community are, and what you get per dollar. Diffbot scores 8/10 overall against 8.7/10 for Firecrawl, but the aggregate hides the trade-off that matters to you.

The clearest gaps are on value for money and scale. Read those two rows first; the rest are close enough that team familiarity should decide.

Throughput decides your proxy bill as much as your compute bill: a tool that needs a full browser to read a page transfers ten to thirty times more bytes than one that parses HTML directly, and residential bandwidth is priced per gigabyte.

Diffbot sustains Managed, bulk crawls supported and uses roughly None (remote). Firecrawl sustains 5 – 100 concurrent browsers by plan at roughly None (remote). On JavaScript-heavy targets, Diffbot handles rendering like this: Yes, vision-based analysis Firecrawl: Yes, always available

Diffbot: Per-credit enterprise pricing; the knowledge graph is licensed separately from extraction APIs.

Firecrawl: Credit-based; one page scrape is one credit, extraction and rendering cost more.

Neither list price is your real cost. Add proxy bandwidth for every tool that does not bundle it, add the compute hours for anything that drives a browser, and add the engineering time that a self-hosted stack consumes every month. A framework that is free to license routinely costs more per delivered page than a paid unlocker once residential gigabytes and failed requests are counted honestly.

Proxy strategy is where most scraping projects leak money. Diffbot expects: Fully managed — no proxy configuration exposed Hosted variants proxy for you; self-hosted variants need your own rotating residential gateway.

Firecrawl expects: Managed proxies with a stealth mode tier for protected pages Hosted variants proxy for you; self-hosted variants need your own rotating residential gateway.

Whichever tool you pick, tier your proxy network per domain rather than globally. Start every target on datacenter IPs, promote it to rotating residential when the block rate on that specific domain passes a few percent, use static ISP IPs for anything logged in, and reserve mobile exits for app-only endpoints. Teams that apply one proxy type to every target routinely overpay by five to ten times.

Neither tool is strictly better. The lists below are the differences that changed our recommendation during testing, not feature-sheet trivia.

Diffbot is an extraction and entity product: it returns typed objects — articles, products, organisations — without selectors. Firecrawl is a retrieval product optimised for feeding text into models. They overlap less than the category label suggests.

Choose Diffbot when: You need typed entities, relationships and a knowledge graph rather than page text.

Choose Firecrawl when: You need clean page content for a retrieval pipeline at a much lower price per page.

A large share of production stacks run both. Using Diffbot for the bulk of the crawl and Firecrawl for the fraction of domains it handles better is almost always cheaper than forcing one tool to cover every target, because the expensive path only gets used where it earns its price.