Steel gives you browsers.
Firecrawl gives you AI-ready data.

The core difference between Firecrawl and Steel comes down to abstraction level and output. Steel is browser infrastructure: it gives you cloud browser sessions that you connect to with Puppeteer or Playwright, and you write the navigation and extraction logic yourself. Firecrawl is an AI-native data API: one call to /scrape returns clean LLM-ready markdown, one call to /crawl handles an entire site, and a /search endpoint finds and scrapes results in a single request. When you compare Firecrawl and Steel for AI pipelines or developer productivity, Firecrawl eliminates the automation code entirely — Steel is better suited to teams that need low-level browser control for complex agent workflows.

Yes. AI agents can self-onboard to Firecrawl by choosing the integration path that fits the task — replacing native fetch and search with Firecrawl's scrape, search, and interact endpoints, or embedding the API directly into the app they're building. Once you authorize, they're ready to go. Steel requires agents to create a browser session, connect via Puppeteer or Playwright, write navigation and extraction logic, and release the session — each step adds friction to automated onboarding.

Yes. Firecrawl returns clean markdown and structured JSON on every request with no post-processing needed. Steel is browser infrastructure — it gives you cloud browser sessions that you control with Puppeteer or Playwright, but you handle data extraction and formatting yourself.

Firecrawl uses credit-based pricing starting at 1 credit per page for standard scrapes, with plans from $83/month for 100k credits. Steel also uses credit-based pricing starting at $29/month, billed per browser hour ($0.05-$0.10/hr) plus separate charges for proxy bandwidth.

Yes. Firecrawl is fully open source under the AGPL-3.0 license and can be self-hosted with Docker. Steel is also open source under the Apache 2.0 license with Docker self-hosting. However, Steel's self-hosted version is limited to single concurrency with no managed proxies.

Most developers scrape their first page in under a minute. Firecrawl requires a single API call — no browser automation code needed. Steel requires creating a session, connecting via Puppeteer or Playwright, writing navigation and extraction logic, then releasing the session.

Yes. Firecrawl's Browser endpoint provides browser-level control, actions, and data extraction through a simple API — no Puppeteer or Playwright code required. Steel provides raw browser sessions that you connect to with automation tools and control programmatically, which offers more low-level control but requires more code.

Yes. Firecrawl provides scrape, crawl, search, map, and browser endpoints all through one unified API. Steel focuses on browser sessions — it does not include crawling, web search, or site mapping. Those capabilities would need to be built or sourced separately.

Firecrawl is purpose-built for AI pipelines. It returns clean markdown ready for chunking and embedding, with structured extraction via natural language prompts or JSON Schema. Steel is designed for browser automation and agent workflows — it provides the browser sessions but leaves data extraction, cleaning, and formatting to the developer.

Migrating is straightforward because Firecrawl replaces your browser automation code with simple API calls. Instead of creating a Steel session, connecting Puppeteer, writing navigation and extraction logic, and releasing the session, you make a single call to Firecrawl's /scrape endpoint and get clean markdown back. For crawling, replace your session-per-page loop with one /crawl call that handles discovery and pagination automatically. Firecrawl offers SDKs for Python, Node.js, Go, Rust, and Java, so most teams complete the migration in under a day.

Yes. Firecrawl is SOC 2 Type II compliant with GDPR compliance and DPA available. Enterprise plans include zero data retention and 99.9% SLA. You can self-host for air-gapped environments or use the managed cloud. Over 500,000 developers and 80,000+ companies use Firecrawl.