Everything you need to know about Firecrawl - The API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale.
Firecrawl is an API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale. It converts websites into clean Markdown or structured data that your AI agents can use. It handles complex JavaScript-heavy sites, rotating proxies, rate limits, and other technical challenges so you can focus on building your applications.
Firecrawl uses a headless browser to render JavaScript-heavy pages, ensuring you get the full content as it appears to users. We've optimized our rendering pipeline to handle complex sites efficiently while maintaining high performance. Our system covers 96% of the web, including sites that rely on dynamic content loading.
Firecrawl supports multiple output formats including clean Markdown, structured JSON, screenshots, HTML, and raw text. The Markdown output is optimized for LLMs with minimal token usage, while JSON provides structured data for programmatic processing. You can specify your preferred format when making API calls.
Yes, Firecrawl supports authentication through cookies, headers, and session management. You can provide credentials that will be maintained during your scraping session. This allows you to access content behind login walls, personal dashboards, and other authenticated areas of websites.
The Agent feature is an AI-powered web automation tool. You describe what information you need in natural language, and our AI agent searches, navigates, and extracts the relevant content. It handles complex multi-step tasks like comparing products across sites, researching companies, or gathering market data without requiring you to specify exact URLs.
Firecrawl automatically manages rate limits and scaling through our distributed infrastructure. We handle rotating proxies, IP rotation, and request throttling to ensure reliable performance. Our system is built to handle millions of pages with a P95 latency of 3.4s, making it suitable for high-volume applications.
The open source version (AGPL-3.0 licensed) allows you to self-host Firecrawl with full access to the codebase. The cloud service at firecrawl.dev provides additional features including enhanced infrastructure, premium support, advanced Agent capabilities, and SLA guarantees. The cloud version is optimized for production workloads with continuous improvements.
Firecrawl employs multiple strategies to bypass anti-bot measures: rotating proxies, user-agent rotation, headless browser detection bypass, CAPTCHA solving integration, and request pattern randomization. Our system is continuously updated to handle new anti-bot technologies while maintaining compliance with websites' terms of service.
Firecrawl can parse and extract content from various file types including PDFs, DOCX files, and other common document formats hosted on websites. We convert these documents into readable text or structured data that can be processed by your applications. The parsed content follows the same output format options as regular web pages.
Firecrawl waits for dynamic content to load before extraction. We automatically detect and wait for AJAX requests, lazy-loaded images, and other dynamic elements. You can also specify custom wait times or interact with pages programmatically to trigger content loading before extraction.