Firecrawl vs Apify vs Last Crawler: Which Web Scraping API Should You Use?

Picking a web scraping API isn't just a pricing decision. The architecture of the tool determines what breaks, when it breaks, and how much work you do to fix it. Three tools keep coming up: Firecrawl, Apify, and Last Crawler. They take genuinely different approaches to web data extraction.

Here's what each does, where each falls apart, and when to pick which.

Firecrawl

Firecrawl is a developer-friendly scraping API built for LLM pipelines. You give it a URL, it returns clean markdown. It handles JavaScript rendering, some bot detection, and has a crawl mode for entire sites. The API is simple and the documentation is good.

Strengths:

• Clean markdown output that works well as LLM context
• Easy to integrate — a few lines of code to get structured output
• Handles most JavaScript-rendered pages
• Good rate limiting and retry behavior out of the box

Weaknesses:

• Still selector-dependent under the hood. When sites change structure, extraction breaks.
• Costs add up fast at scale. Their pricing tiers are generous for prototyping, punishing for production.
• Markdown extraction is great. Structured extraction — specific fields, typed values — requires you to run a second LLM pass yourself, which adds latency and cost.
• Limited control over the actual browser behavior (timeouts, cookies, auth flows).

Firecrawl is the best tool for feeding webpage content into an AI pipeline. It is not the best tool for reliably extracting specific structured data.

Apify

Apify is a platform, not an API. There's a marketplace of pre-built "actors" for hundreds of sites — Amazon product scrapers, LinkedIn scrapers, Google Maps extractors, and thousands more. You can also write your own actors and deploy them on their infrastructure.

Strengths:

• Pre-built scrapers for major sites mean you don't write anything for common use cases
• Full programmatic control when you write your own actors (Playwright, Puppeteer, Cheerio)
• Scales well — they handle infrastructure, scheduling, storage
• Proxy rotation and browser fingerprinting baked in

Weaknesses:

• Steep learning curve. The concepts (actors, datasets, key-value stores, runs, tasks) take real time to internalize.
• Pre-built actors break when the target site updates. You're then either waiting for the actor author to fix it or debugging someone else's code.
• Expensive at production scale. Their compute pricing is not cheap.
• Custom actors require writing and maintaining selector-based scrapers, which brings all the usual fragility.

Apify makes sense if you want a managed platform and you're willing to pay for it. It doesn't fix brittle extraction -- it just gives you better infrastructure around it.

Last Crawler

Last Crawler takes a different approach: describe what you want, not where it lives. You send a URL and a JSON schema. The API returns data matching your schema, extracted by AI that reads the page the way a person would.

Strengths:

• Schema-driven extraction means no selectors to write or maintain
• Works across different site layouts for the same type of content — one schema for all e-commerce product pages, regardless of the store
• Handles JavaScript-heavy pages, SPAs, and dynamically loaded content
• No proxy management — rendered in real browsers, so bot detection is not a problem

Weaknesses:

• Newer product, smaller ecosystem
• Not the right tool if you just want raw HTML or markdown (other tools do that fine)
• AI extraction adds some latency vs. pure selector-based tools

Last Crawler is designed for production data pipelines where you need typed, structured output and cannot afford to maintain per-site scraper code. See how the URL to JSON API works in practice.

Feature Comparison

When to Use Each

Use Firecrawl when you need clean webpage content to feed into an LLM. If your use case is "turn this URL into context for my AI app," Firecrawl is the fastest path there.

Use Apify when you need a fully managed scraping platform and you're targeting well-known sites that already have actors. It's also the right call if you want to build and sell your own scrapers — their marketplace model works well for that.

Use Last Crawler when you need to extract specific, typed data fields from web pages at scale, and you cannot afford to write and maintain selector-based code for every site you target. If your data pipeline breaks every time a website redesigns, Last Crawler is the fix.

FAQ

What is the best Firecrawl alternative?

It depends what you need. If you want raw content for LLM ingestion, Firecrawl is already good — look at Apify if you want more infrastructure control. If you want structured data extraction that doesn't break when sites change, Last Crawler is the better fit. It skips the markdown-to-structured-data conversion step entirely. We cover more options in our Firecrawl alternatives roundup.

What is the best web scraping API in 2026?

There's no single answer because the tools solve different problems. For unstructured content extraction, Firecrawl. For full scraping platform with managed infrastructure, Apify. For AI-powered structured data extraction without selector maintenance, Last Crawler. We break this down further in our best web scraping API in 2026 guide. The "best" API is the one that matches your actual use case.

Is AI-based web scraping reliable enough for production?

For structured field extraction, yes. The real question is whether selector-based extraction is reliable. Selectors break on every site redesign. AI extraction reads the page by meaning, so minor layout changes don't break it. In production data pipelines, AI extraction tends to be more stable, not less.