firecrawl vs webcmd
firecrawl is much bigger: 184.5k stars against 2.5k. Over the days we have tracked them firecrawl moved +21.4% and webcmd +114.7%, so webcmd is growing faster right now.
They split the axes: firecrawl leads on context depth, webcmd on model freedom.
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
- 184.5k
- Tracked growth
- +21.4%
- Maturity
- ●●●●●
- Last commit
- 9m ago
- Language
- TypeScript
- License
- AGPL-3.0
- Cost to run
- Hosted service — API key required
Learns site navigation and compiles it into reusable deterministic commands so agents stop rediscovering the web and greatly reduce token spend.
- Stars
- 2.5k
- Tracked growth
- +114.7%
- Maturity
- ●●●●●
- Last commit
- 20m ago
- Language
- TypeScript
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Cost to run
- Free to run locally; optional hosted cloud
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 | webcmd |
|---|---|---|
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 | ●●●●● Diff only |
Noise control How it keeps output volume down — severity thresholds, deduplication, incremental runs over new commits only. | ●●●●● Structured output | ●●●●● Minimal controls |
Customization How far it bends to your team: custom rules, prompts, style guides, per-path config. | ●●●●● Prompt & schema | ●●●●● Plugin & config |
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 | ●●●●● Several providers |
Setup ease What it takes to get a first useful run out of it. | ●●●●● API key required | ●●●●● CLI 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 webcmd if…
Cost-saving — use learned, deterministic browser adapters to cut agent token and browsing variance while running locally or via optional cloud.
- Model freedom: Several providers (3/5 against 1/5)
What people want from each one
firecrawl/firecrawl
agentrhq/webcmd
Questions people ask
Is firecrawl better than webcmd?
They split the axes: firecrawl leads on context depth, webcmd on model freedom. 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 webcmd keeps my code private?
firecrawl: Hosted API key (3/5). webcmd: Self-hostable (4/5).
What does each one cost to run?
firecrawl: Hosted service — API key required. webcmd: Free to run locally; optional hosted cloud.
Full profiles: firecrawl/firecrawl and agentrhq/webcmd. Everything else in Browser agents.