dots vs firecrawl
firecrawl is much bigger: 196.9k stars against 32.3k. Over the days we have tracked them dots moved +3534.3% and firecrawl +23.6%, so dots is growing faster right now.
firecrawl leads on context depth and noise control. dots does not take any axis by a clear margin.
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
Provides a real, patched Firefox engine that presents a consistent, human-like fingerprint (no WebDriver flags) so the agent interacts with sites without obvious automation traces.
- Stars
- 32.3k
- Tracked growth
- +3534.3%
- Maturity
- ●●●●●
- Last commit
- 5d ago
- Language
- TypeScript
- License
- MIT
- Cost to run
- Your OpenRouter API key
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
- 196.9k
- Tracked growth
- +23.6%
- Maturity
- ●●●●●
- Last commit
- 52m 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 | dots | 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. | ●●●●● Single page only | ●●●●● 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. | ●●●●● CLI flags & options | ●●●●● Prompt & schema |
Privacy Whether your code stays on your own infrastructure: fully local, self-hostable, or cloud API only. | ●●●●● Cloud via OpenRouter | ●●●●● Hosted API key |
Model freedom Whether you can point it at any provider, or it is wired to one. | ●●●●● OpenRouter only | ●●●●● Firecrawl models |
Setup ease What it takes to get a first useful run out of it. | ●●●●● Install + API key | ●●●●● API key required |
Which one to pick
Pick dots if…
Anti-detection browser — pick dots when you need a local agent that emulates a consistent human identity (screen, fonts, timezone, pointer events) and preserves profiles while using models via OpenRouter.
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 dots better than firecrawl?
firecrawl leads on context depth and noise control. dots does not take any axis by a clear margin. dots is worth picking when anti-detection browser — pick dots when you need a local agent that emulates a consistent human identity (screen, fonts, timezone, pointer events) and preserves profiles while using models via OpenRouter.
Which of dots and firecrawl keeps my code private?
dots: Cloud via OpenRouter (3/5). firecrawl: Hosted API key (3/5).
What does each one cost to run?
dots: Your OpenRouter API key. firecrawl: Hosted service — API key required.
Full profiles: feder-cr/dots and firecrawl/firecrawl. Everything else in Browser agents.