Compare · Firecrawl
Webfold vs Firecrawl
Firecrawl is a hosted web-data API. Webfold is a small Apache 2.0 program that runs on your machine. Webfold converts HTML about 3.9 times faster than Firecrawl's Rust extractor. That times the conversion step on 54 public pages. Firecrawl is ahead on hosted browsing.
Firecrawl is a hosted web-data API. Webfold overlaps on most of what it offers. It is a small program that converts pages without a browser. It runs on your own machine. A hosted API sits alongside.
Webfold on its own
How fast is Webfold alone?
Each job is measured on its own. The performance page states the figures once. We link them here.
- Turn a web page into clean Markdown: 4.6 µs a page, in process. About 217,000 pages a second per core, conversion only.
- Crawl a whole site into a folder of Markdown: 7,000 live pages in about 16 s. 427 to 443 pages a second on 4 cores, over the network.
- Convert Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenDocument and ebooks to Markdown: 27.7 µs a document, in process. 203,854 documents a second on 64 workers.
Now the comparison
Webfold against Firecrawl
| Aspect | Webfold | Firecrawl |
|---|---|---|
| Page to Markdown | Yes. No browser needed for plain HTML. | Yes. |
| Crawl and map | Yes. Repeated page furniture folded out of crawls. | Yes. |
| Search | Merges named engines, including arXiv and OpenAlex. No own index. | Live web search, plus its own curated indexes. |
| Documents | PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, ebooks, with OCR fallback. | Parse: similar formats, with OCR routing. |
| Live browser | Own lightweight engine, or connect your Chromium. | Hosted live browser sessions (Interact). |
| Monitoring | Command-line watch and diff. No webhooks yet. | Hosted monitors with webhooks. |
| Web archives (WARC) | Capture, extract and replay. | No archive capture or replay. |
| Run it yourself | Single binary on your machine. | Self-hostable open-source core. |
| Code licence | Apache 2.0. | AGPL-3.0 core, with some parts under MIT. |
| Pricing | Coming soon. | Free tier, then plans from $16 to $599 a month billed annually, plus enterprise (as of 5 Nov 2026). |
| Compliance | Security policy published. No third-party attestation yet. | SOC 2 Type II, zero data retention, SSO. |
Where is each tool ahead?
Where Firecrawl is ahead
- A managed live browser for interacting with pages. That includes logging in.
- Hosted monitors that call a webhook. They judge what changed.
- Curated indexes for developer docs, US law or life sciences.
- Enterprise compliance. A large ecosystem. Customer stories are published.
Where Webfold is ahead
- One small program on your own machine. No browser farm. No per-page credits.
- HTML to Markdown about four times faster. That times the conversion step against Firecrawl's own Rust extractor. See the benchmark for the protocol.
- It captures web archives. It replays them. It extracts from them at volume.
- Apache 2.0 licence. That suits teams that cannot use AGPL code.
How do I move from Firecrawl to Webfold?
| If you use | In Webfold |
|---|---|
| scrape | webfold scrape, or POST /v1/web/scrape |
| crawl | webfold crawl, or POST /v1/web/crawl |
| map | webfold index map, or POST /v1/web/map |
| search | webfold search, or the MCP search tools |
| parse | webfold convert and webfold pdf |
| monitor | webfold job watch (no webhooks yet) |
What is the evidence?
Each figure states its dataset. It states its limits.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Is Webfold a drop-in replacement for Firecrawl?
The shapes are similar but not identical, and there is no compatibility layer. Expect to change a few calls, as in the table above.
Which is faster overall?
We have only measured the HTML-to-Markdown conversion step, where Webfold is faster. We have not compared whole-service latency or coverage.
Which is cheaper?
Webfold pricing is coming soon, so we are not making a price comparison.
Try it on your own pages.
Run the command-line tool. Join the waitlist for the hosted API.