firecrawlvsgocrawl

None - - -

Apr 01 2024 0.0.0(2025-03-15 00:00:00 ago)

2,053 2 6 BSD-3-Clause

Nov 20 2016 58.1 thousand (month) (2021-05-19 15:14:49 ago)

Firecrawl is an AI-powered web scraping API that converts web pages into clean Markdown or structured data, optimized for use with large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines. It handles JavaScript rendering, anti-bot bypass, and content extraction automatically.

Firecrawl offers multiple modes:

Scrape Convert a single URL into clean Markdown, HTML, or structured data. Handles JavaScript rendering and anti-bot protections automatically.
Crawl Crawl an entire website starting from a URL, with configurable depth, URL patterns, and page limits. Returns all pages as clean Markdown.
Map Quickly discover all URLs on a website without fully scraping each page. Useful for sitemap generation and crawl planning.
Extract Use LLMs to extract specific structured data from pages based on a schema definition.

Key features:

Clean Markdown output ideal for LLM context windows
Automatic JavaScript rendering with headless browsers
Built-in anti-bot bypass for protected websites
Structured extraction with JSON schemas
Batch crawling with webhook notifications
Python and JavaScript SDKs

Firecrawl is a commercial API service (requires API key, has a free tier) backed by Y Combinator. It has become one of the most popular tools for feeding web content into AI applications and is widely used in the LLM/RAG ecosystem.

Note: while the primary service is an API, the core is open source and can be self-hosted.

Gocrawl is a polite, slim and concurrent web crawler library written in Go. It is designed to be simple and easy to use, while still providing a high degree of flexibility and control over the crawling process.

One of the key features of Gocrawl is its politeness, which means that it obeys the website's robots.txt file and respects the crawl-delay specified in the file. It also takes into account the website's last modified date, if any, to avoid recrawling the same page. This helps to reduce the load on the website and prevent any potential legal issues. Gocrawl is also highly concurrent, which allows it to efficiently crawl large numbers of pages in parallel. This helps to speed up the crawling process and reduce the time required to complete the task.

The library also offers a high degree of flexibility in customizing the crawling process. It allows you to specify custom callbacks and handlers for handling different types of pages, such as error pages, redirects, and so on. This allows you to handle and process the pages as per your requirement. Additionally, Gocrawl provides various functionalities such as support for cookies, user-agent, auto-detection of links, and auto-detection of sitemaps.

Highlights

ai-poweredpopularasync

Example Use

```python from firecrawl import FirecrawlApp app = FirecrawlApp(api_key="YOUR_API_KEY") # Scrape a single page - get clean markdown result = app.scrape_url("https://example.com/blog/article") print(result["markdown"]) # clean markdown content # Extract structured data with a schema result = app.scrape_url( "https://example.com/product/123", params={ "formats": ["extract"], "extract": { "schema": { "type": "object", "properties": { "name": {"type": "string"}, "price": {"type": "number"}, "description": {"type": "string"}, }, } }, }, ) print(result["extract"]) # {"name": "...", "price": 29.99, ...} # Crawl an entire website crawl_result = app.crawl_url( "https://example.com", params={"limit": 100, "scrapeOptions": {"formats": ["markdown"]}}, ) for page in crawl_result["data"]: print(page["metadata"]["title"], page["markdown"][:100]) # Map all URLs on a site map_result = app.map_url("https://example.com") print(f"Found {len(map_result['links'])} URLs") ```

```go // Only enqueue the root and paths beginning with an "a" var rxOk = regexp.MustCompile(`http://duckduckgo\.com(/a.*)?$`) // Create the Extender implementation, based on the gocrawl-provided DefaultExtender, // because we don't want/need to override all methods. type ExampleExtender struct { gocrawl.DefaultExtender // Will use the default implementation of all but Visit and Filter } // Override Visit for our need. func (x *ExampleExtender) Visit(ctx *gocrawl.URLContext, res *http.Response, doc *goquery.Document) (interface{}, bool) { // Use the goquery document or res.Body to manipulate the data // ... // Return nil and true - let gocrawl find the links return nil, true } // Override Filter for our need. func (x *ExampleExtender) Filter(ctx *gocrawl.URLContext, isVisited bool) bool { return !isVisited && rxOk.MatchString(ctx.NormalizedURL().String()) } func ExampleCrawl() { // Set custom options opts := gocrawl.NewOptions(new(ExampleExtender)) // should always set your robot name so that it looks for the most // specific rules possible in robots.txt. opts.RobotUserAgent = "Example" // and reflect that in the user-agent string used to make requests, // ideally with a link so site owners can contact you if there's an issue opts.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Example/1.0; +http://example.com)" opts.CrawlDelay = 1 * time.Second opts.LogFlags = gocrawl.LogAll // Play nice with ddgo when running the test! opts.MaxVisits = 2 // Create crawler and start at root of duckduckgo c := gocrawl.NewCrawlerWithOptions(opts) c.Run("https://duckduckgo.com/") // Remove "x" before Output: to activate the example (will run on go test) // xOutput: voluntarily fail to see log output } ```

Alternatives / Similar

crawl4ai new

63,373 compare

scrapegraphai new

23,278 compare

colly

25,231 compare

katana new

16,499 compare

pholcus

7,594 compare

geziyor

2,772 compare

browser-use new

87,251 compare

dataflowkit

711 compare

scrapy

61,276 compare

stagehand new

22,012 compare

rvest

1,517 compare

scrapling new

36,206 compare

crawlee new

22,720 compare

skyvern new

21,046 compare

mechanize new

4,440 compare

zenrows new

18 compare

ferret

5,964 compare

gocrawl

2,053 compare

scrapyd

3,087 compare

botasaurus new

4,321 compare

node-crawler

6,790 compare

panther

3,062 compare

goutte new

9,215 compare

gracy

248 compare

spidr

835 compare

kimurai new

1,098 compare

scrapydweb

3,400 compare

photon

12,807 compare

wombat

1,360 compare

autoscraper

7,136 compare

roach

1,454 compare

gerapy

3,495 compare

ruia

1,743 compare

ralger

165 compare

ayakashi

217 compare

phpscraper

583 compare

dude

425 compare

php-spider

1,341 compare

crwlr-crawler

369 compare