WebPeel vs Every Alternative: The Complete Comparison (2026)

You're building an AI agent that needs to read the web. You search "best web scraping API" and find seven different tools, each claiming to be the best. Some are fast but fail on hard pages. Some are reliable but expensive. Some are free but limited. This is the page that saves you 40 hours of testing them all.

We ran all seven tools against the same 30 URLs — static pages, SPAs, anti-bot sites, PDFs, international content — and measured everything: success rate, speed, content quality, and cost per page. Then we wrote up honest recommendations, including cases where a competitor genuinely beats WebPeel.

TL;DR — Quick Verdict

For teams that need a two-sentence answer per tool:

The Big Comparison Table

Every major capability across all seven tools. Checkmarks are based on published documentation and independent testing.

⚠️ = limited or indirect support. Last verified February 2026. Refer to each provider's current documentation for accuracy.

Code Comparison

Feature tables are useful, but what does using each tool actually look like? Here's the same task — fetch a web page and get clean markdown — across four popular tools.

CLI / One-liner

# Install nothing — runs via npx
npx webpeel "https://example.com"

# With search
npx webpeel search "best AI frameworks 2026"

# Screenshot
npx webpeel screenshot "https://example.com"

# Requires API key
curl -X POST https://api.firecrawl.dev/v1/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer fc-..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com"}'

# Simplest possible — just prepend URL
curl "https://r.jina.ai/https://example.com"

# Search-first API, requires key
curl -X POST https://api.tavily.com/search \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"api_key":"tvly-...","query":"..."}'

Node.js SDK

import { peel } from 'webpeel';

// One function — handles everything
const result = await peel('https://example.com');
console.log(result.markdown);
console.log(result.metadata.title);

// Structured extraction with LLM
const data = await peel('https://example.com', {
  extract: { schema: { title: 'string', price: 'number' } }
});

import FirecrawlApp from '@mendable/firecrawl-js';

const app = new FirecrawlApp({
  apiKey: 'fc-...'
});

const result = await app.scrapeUrl(
  'https://example.com',
  { formats: ['markdown'] }
);
console.log(result.markdown);

MCP Server (Claude Code / Cursor)

// Add to your MCP config (claude_desktop_config.json / .cursor/mcp.json)
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "webpeel": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["webpeel", "--mcp"]
    }
  }
}

// That's it. 11 tools instantly available:
// fetch, search, crawl, map, extract, screenshot,
// batch, brand, summarize, answer, change_track

Benchmark Results

We ran all seven tools against the same 30 URLs across six categories: static pages, dynamic sites, SPAs, protected pages, documents (PDFs), and edge/international content. Every run used the same machine, network, and 30-second timeout. Methodology and raw data are public.

Overall Results

Success Rate (higher is better)

Share of URLs that returned meaningful content — not empty pages, error messages, or unsupported-site failures.

Content Quality Score (higher is better)

Measures completeness, title/metadata fidelity, and markdown usefulness for LLM workflows. Scored on extracted output against the ground-truth page content.

Median Speed — lower is better

WebPeel ranks 4th at 373ms median (p95: 1,855ms). Tavily and Exa are faster because they often serve indexed or pre-fetched content. WebPeel fetches every page live and escalates to browser rendering when needed — that's why it's slower and more reliable.

Category Breakdown

30 URLs split across 6 categories (5 URLs each). This shows where tools diverge most — especially on protected pages and PDFs.

Jina Reader scores 0/5 on PDFs and international edge pages — its URL-forwarding approach has fundamental limits on non-HTML content.

Pricing Comparison

Pricing models differ significantly — per-page, per-credit, per-search, and subscription bundles don't map cleanly against each other. We show published tiers with our best per-page equivalents where calculable.

WebPeel's free tier is the only one that resets every week rather than being a one-time credit grant. For low-volume users building and testing, that's a meaningful difference. Firecrawl's 500 credits disappear quickly; WebPeel's 125/week keeps coming back.

ScrapingBee pricing is highly variable — JavaScript rendering consumes 5 credits per page, and residential proxy usage multiplies further. Simple fetches can be cheap; complex use cases can be expensive. WebPeel's flat per-fetch pricing is more predictable.

When to Choose Each Tool

This is the most useful section. We're going to give honest, specific guidance — including cases where a competitor is genuinely the better choice.

Methodology

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best Firecrawl alternative?

WebPeel is the strongest Firecrawl alternative for most teams. It achieves a 100% success rate vs Firecrawl's 93.3%, costs ~8x less per page ($0.002 vs $0.016), includes a native MCP server with 11 tools, and is open-source under the same AGPL-3.0 license. If you need enterprise support contracts or very complex crawl-map workflows, Firecrawl remains a valid choice. See our Firecrawl migration guide.

Which web scraping API is the fastest?

Tavily at 47ms is the fastest by a wide margin, followed by Exa at 132ms and Firecrawl at 231ms. Both Tavily and Exa are fast partly because they serve pre-indexed content, which means you may not get the live, freshest version of a page. WebPeel ranks 4th at 373ms — it's slower because it always fetches live content.

What is the best MCP server for web scraping?

WebPeel is the most complete MCP server for web scraping, offering 11 MCP tools: fetch, search, crawl, screenshot, extract, and more. It runs locally with a single npx command or as a hosted server, with zero configuration required. Firecrawl, Exa, and Tavily also have MCP integrations, but with fewer tools and no local-first option. See our full MCP server comparison.

Is WebPeel free?

Yes on two counts. The hosted tier includes 125 free fetches per week, every week — not a one-time credit grant. The self-hosted version is fully open-source (AGPL-3.0) and free to run with no per-request costs, just your own infrastructure. For comparison, Firecrawl's free tier is 500 credits that don't reset.

How does WebPeel compare to Jina Reader?

WebPeel significantly outperforms Jina Reader on reliability: 100% vs 53.3% success rate in our benchmark. Jina Reader scored 0/5 on both PDF documents and international/edge pages. Its main advantage is zero-friction setup — just prepend r.jina.ai/ to any URL. For prototyping on simple pages, that simplicity is real. For production use on real-world content, WebPeel is far more capable.

Can I use these tools together?

Yes, and it often makes sense. A common pattern: use Exa or Tavily for fast search-based discovery of relevant URLs, then feed those URLs to WebPeel for reliable live content extraction. WebPeel's MCP server makes this kind of composition easy from within Claude Code, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible agent framework.

Last updated February 17, 2026. Benchmark data reflects a specific test run; provider performance, pricing, and features change frequently. Refer to each provider's documentation for current information. Raw benchmark data and scripts are available at github.com/webpeel/webpeel/tree/main/benchmarks.

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