AIHawk vs firecrawl
firecrawl is much bigger: 193.2k stars against 32.2k. Over the days we have tracked them AIHawk moved +6.2% and firecrawl +24.9%, so firecrawl is growing faster right now.
They split the axes: AIHawk leads on model freedom, firecrawl on context depth and noise control.
Stars and commit dates come from our own daily tracking. The six axes are read off each project's documentation by our review pipeline, so they describe what a project says about itself, not what we measured in its code.
Where they stand today
Drives a real, patched Firefox browser over MCP or OpenRouter so the agent can click, type and read actual web pages for automation rather than relying on APIs or scraped data.
- Stars
- 32.2k
- Tracked growth
- +6.2%
- Maturity
- ●●●●●
- Last commit
- 22h ago
- Language
- TypeScript
- License
- MIT
- Cost to run
- Your OpenRouter API key or assistant-provided model
Provides an agent-ready web context API that scrapes JS-heavy pages into LLM-ready Markdown/JSON and supports actions (click/scroll/write) plus large-scale crawling — a combination many scrapers don’t offer.
- Stars
- 193.2k
- Tracked growth
- +24.9%
- Maturity
- ●●●●●
- Last commit
- 29m ago
- Language
- TypeScript
- License
- AGPL-3.0
- Cost to run
- Hosted service — API key required
Six axes, head to head
Each axis runs 0 to 5. The label under a score is what that project's own docs claim, not a category average.
| Axis | AIHawk | firecrawl |
|---|---|---|
Context depth How much of your codebase it sees before it answers: the open diff, the diff plus related files, or the whole repository. | ●●●●● No repo access | ●●●●● Whole-site crawling |
Noise control How it keeps output volume down — severity thresholds, deduplication, incremental runs over new commits only. | ●●●●● None mentioned | ●●●●● Structured output |
Customization How far it bends to your team: custom rules, prompts, style guides, per-path config. | ●●●●● Config & flags | ●●●●● Prompt & schema |
Privacy Whether your code stays on your own infrastructure: fully local, self-hostable, or cloud API only. | ●●●●● Cloud API key | ●●●●● Hosted API key |
Model freedom Whether you can point it at any provider, or it is wired to one. | ●●●●● OpenRouter / MCP | ●●●●● Firecrawl models |
Setup ease What it takes to get a first useful run out of it. | ●●●●● Config + API key | ●●●●● API key required |
Which one to pick
Pick AIHawk if…
Real browser automation — pick AIHawk when you need an agent that interacts with complex web pages (mouse, keyboard, real page rendering) and can integrate with your assistant or OpenRouter.
- Model freedom: OpenRouter / MCP (3/5 against 1/5)
Pick firecrawl if…
Agent-ready — connect agents to live web data with a single API, get structured LLM-ready output, and interact with pages (click/scroll/write) at scale.
- Context depth: Whole-site crawling (5/5 against 1/5)
- Noise control: Structured output (3/5 against 1/5)
What people want from each one
firecrawl/firecrawl
Questions people ask
Is AIHawk better than firecrawl?
They split the axes: AIHawk leads on model freedom, firecrawl on context depth and noise control. AIHawk is worth picking when real browser automation — pick AIHawk when you need an agent that interacts with complex web pages (mouse, keyboard, real page rendering) and can integrate with your assistant or OpenRouter.
Which of AIHawk and firecrawl keeps my code private?
AIHawk: Cloud API key (3/5). firecrawl: Hosted API key (3/5).
What does each one cost to run?
AIHawk: Your OpenRouter API key or assistant-provided model. firecrawl: Hosted service — API key required.
Full profiles: feder-cr/AIHawk and firecrawl/firecrawl. Everything else in Browser agents.