Firecrawl vs Spider for AI agents
Firecrawl and Spider both ran scrape, with the same tasks, the same model (Claude Haiku 5.5), the same prompt and the same limits. A task counts only when a script confirms every answer. Beyond that, only Firecrawl ran search, only Firecrawl ran map and only Firecrawl ran crawl.
The benchmark tests each provider's gap to its track's leader, with 95% intervals from resampling whole sites. It doesn't test every pair directly, so this page says when a gap is real and when it isn't one anybody can claim.
Scrape 60 tasks · Read one page and pull out exact fields: prices, versions, install commands.
Neither gap to the track's leader cleared chance, and the benchmark doesn't test these two against each other, so this 70-point gap isn't a result either can claim. Spider's interval runs 4%–100%, because whole sites are resampled and this track has few of them.
Firecrawl cost 1.22¢ per finished task and Spider 2.48¢, counting all API and model spend, failures included.
Read these numbers with
- Everything ran on free plans. Firecrawl's free plan allows 10 requests a minute, so its tuned scrape run hit rate limits and scored lower than its default.
- Spider was tested on scrape only, because its free wallet was small.
- Spider refused our test site because its malicious-URL filter flags the workers.dev domain. Three inspected responses carry that explicit 403.
- It scraped all 10 PyPI pages correctly. Two of its other passes are tasks where the right answer was empty, which it returned because the page was blocked.
- This is a domain compatibility finding, not a measure of how well Spider scrapes sites it accepts.
More
Every provider on each track: scrape. How a gap is tested: methodology.