firecrawl vs page-agent
firecrawl is much bigger: 176.7k stars against 29.0k. Over the days we have tracked them firecrawl moved +16.3% and page-agent +18.2%, so page-agent is growing faster right now.
They split the axes: firecrawl leads on context depth and noise control, page-agent on model freedom 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
- 176.7k
- Tracked growth
- +16.3%
- Maturity
- ●●●●●
- Last commit
- 4h ago
- Language
- TypeScript
- License
- AGPL-3.0
- Cost to run
- Hosted service — API key required
An in-page GUI agent that runs entirely inside any web page with a single script, no extension or headless browser required.
- Stars
- 29.0k
- Tracked growth
- +18.2%
- Maturity
- ●●●●●
- Last commit
- 1d ago
- Language
- TypeScript
- License
- MIT
- Cost to run
- Demo testing LLM available; otherwise use your API key
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 | page-agent |
|---|---|---|
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 | ●●●●● Single-page only |
Noise control How it keeps output volume down — severity thresholds, deduplication, incremental runs over new commits only. | ●●●●● Structured output | ●●●●● No noise controls |
Customization How far it bends to your team: custom rules, prompts, style guides, per-path config. | ●●●●● Prompt & schema | ●●●●● Config options |
Privacy Whether your code stays on your own infrastructure: fully local, self-hostable, or cloud API only. | ●●●●● Hosted API key | ●●●●● Self-hostable |
Model freedom Whether you can point it at any provider, or it is wired to one. | ●●●●● Firecrawl models | ●●●●● Bring-your-own-key |
Setup ease What it takes to get a first useful run out of it. | ●●●●● API key required | ●●●●● One-line integration |
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)
- Noise control: Structured output (3/5 against 1/5)
Pick page-agent if…
Easy integration — one-line in-page script to add an AI copilot to any web app, with support for your own and locally deployed models.
- Model freedom: Bring-your-own-key (5/5 against 1/5)
- Setup ease: One-line integration (5/5 against 3/5)
What people want from each one
firecrawl/firecrawl
alibaba/page-agent
Hacker News: Page-Agent.js: The GUI Agent Living in Your Webpage drew 3 points and 0 comments.
Questions people ask
Is firecrawl better than page-agent?
They split the axes: firecrawl leads on context depth and noise control, page-agent on model freedom 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 page-agent keeps my code private?
firecrawl: Hosted API key (3/5). page-agent: Self-hostable (4/5).
What does each one cost to run?
firecrawl: Hosted service — API key required. page-agent: Demo testing LLM available; otherwise use your API key.
Full profiles: firecrawl/firecrawl and alibaba/page-agent. Everything else in Browser agents.