Open-source alternatives to Firecrawl Cloud (October 2026)

Open-source alternatives to Firecrawl Cloud

Firecrawl Cloud does 4 jobs: crawl a site to Markdown, scrape pages (JS-heavy and bot-protected), structured data extraction, web search with page content. Most projects replace one or two of them, so pick the job you actually need.

Quick answer

Facts checked 16 Oct 2026

Open-source alternatives to Firecrawl Cloud that run locally, allow commercial use and need no paid API include Scrapling (crawl a site to Markdown and scrape pages (JS-heavy and bot-protected); BSD-3-Clause). Firecrawl (self-hosted) covers all 4 Firecrawl Cloud jobs.

Crawl4AI

unclecode/crawl4ai #3 TRENDING

★ 86k active 1d ago

Open-source Python web crawler that turns pages into clean, LLM-ready Markdown or structured JSON, as a library, CLI or Docker server.

Replaces Crawl a site to Markdown + Scrape pages (JS-heavy and bot-protected) + Structured data extraction (partly) Not: web search with page content

Runs locally: Confirmed: Yes
Commercial use: Partial: Conditions · Apache-2.0
Paid services: Confirmed: None required
Hardware: Unknown: Unknown
Setup: Confirmed: Easy

Compare 7 of 8 facts sourced · checked today GitHub ↗ View details

Firecrawl (self-hosted)

firecrawl/firecrawl #1 TRENDING

★ 192k active today

Open-source version of the Firecrawl API that crawls, maps, searches and scrapes websites into Markdown or JSON, self-hosted with Docker Compose.

Replaces Crawl a site to Markdown + Scrape pages (JS-heavy and bot-protected) + Structured data extraction + Web search with page content (partly)

Runs locally: Confirmed: Yes
Commercial use: Partial: Conditions · AGPL-3.0
Paid services: Confirmed: None required
Hardware: Unknown: Unknown
Setup: Confirmed: Medium

Compare 6 of 8 facts sourced · checked today GitHub ↗ View details

Scrapling

D4Vinci/Scrapling #2 TRENDING

★ 88k active today

Python scraping and crawling framework with adaptive selectors, stealth browser fetchers, Scrapy-like spiders and Markdown output for AI.

Replaces Crawl a site to Markdown + Scrape pages (JS-heavy and bot-protected) (partly) Not: structured data extraction, web search with page content

Runs locally: Confirmed: Yes
Commercial use: Confirmed: Yes · BSD-3-Clause
Paid services: Confirmed: None required
Hardware: Unknown: Unknown
Setup: Confirmed: Easy

Compare 7 of 8 facts sourced · checked today GitHub ↗ View details

No project meets all of your requirements. The list below shows what you'd need to relax.

Common questions about Firecrawl Cloud alternatives

Is there a free, open-source alternative to Firecrawl Cloud?

Yes. Firecrawl (self-hosted), Crawl4AI and Scrapling are free to download and run on your own computer without paid API keys. Firecrawl (self-hosted) covers every job we list for Firecrawl Cloud; the others cover only part of it, so check which job you need.

Can I do crawl a site to Markdown locally without a Firecrawl Cloud subscription?

Yes, with Scrapling (BSD-3-Clause), Crawl4AI (Apache-2.0) and Firecrawl (self-hosted) (AGPL-3.0). Check the hardware notes and licence conditions on each page before you start.

Can I do scrape pages (JS-heavy and bot-protected) locally without a Firecrawl Cloud subscription?

Yes, with Scrapling (BSD-3-Clause), Crawl4AI (Apache-2.0) and Firecrawl (self-hosted) (AGPL-3.0). Check the hardware notes and licence conditions on each page before you start.

Which Firecrawl Cloud alternatives can I use commercially?

Confirmed: Scrapling. With conditions: Crawl4AI and Firecrawl (self-hosted). This is not legal advice; read each licence.

Does any open-source project replace all of Firecrawl Cloud?

Firecrawl (self-hosted) covers every job we list for Firecrawl Cloud.