firecrawl vs moli
firecrawl is much bigger: 183.1k stars against 2.2k. Over the days we have tracked them firecrawl moved +20.5% and moli +129.1%, so moli is growing faster right now.
They split the axes: firecrawl leads on context depth, moli on privacy and setup ease.
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 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
- 183.1k
- Tracked growth
- +20.5%
- Maturity
- ●●●●●
- Last commit
- 4h ago
- Language
- TypeScript
- License
- AGPL-3.0
- Cost to run
- Hosted service — API key required
A standalone, Rust-built, DOM-first headless browser that performs on-demand layout and rendering to minimize resource use for AI agent workloads compared with Chromium-based engines.
- Stars
- 2.2k
- Tracked growth
- +129.1%
- Maturity
- ●●●●●
- Last commit
- 40m ago
- Language
- Rust
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Cost to run
- Free, local binary
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 | firecrawl | moli |
|---|---|---|
Context depth How much of your codebase it sees before it answers: the open diff, the diff plus related files, or the whole repository. | ●●●●● Whole-site crawling | ●●●●● No repo insight |
Noise control How it keeps output volume down — severity thresholds, deduplication, incremental runs over new commits only. | ●●●●● Structured output | ●●●●● Opt-in controls |
Customization How far it bends to your team: custom rules, prompts, style guides, per-path config. | ●●●●● Prompt & schema | ●●●●● CLI options |
Privacy Whether your code stays on your own infrastructure: fully local, self-hostable, or cloud API only. | ●●●●● Hosted API key | ●●●●● Runs locally |
Model freedom Whether you can point it at any provider, or it is wired to one. | ●●●●● Firecrawl models | ●●●●● No model support |
Setup ease What it takes to get a first useful run out of it. | ●●●●● API key required | ●●●●● One-line install |
Which one to pick
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)
Pick moli if…
Resource-efficient — choose Moli when you need a lightweight, local headless browser optimized for agent workflows with full automation protocols and on-demand visual rendering.
- Privacy: Runs locally (5/5 against 3/5)
- Setup ease: One-line install (5/5 against 3/5)
What people want from each one
firecrawl/firecrawl
lexmount/moli
Questions people ask
Is firecrawl better than moli?
They split the axes: firecrawl leads on context depth, moli on privacy and setup ease. firecrawl is worth picking when 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.
Which of firecrawl and moli keeps my code private?
firecrawl: Hosted API key (3/5). moli: Runs locally (5/5).
What does each one cost to run?
firecrawl: Hosted service — API key required. moli: Free, local binary.
Full profiles: firecrawl/firecrawl and lexmount/moli. Everything else in Browser agents.