firecrawlvskatana

None - - -

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

16,499 6 18 MIT

Nov 07 2022 v1.5.0(2026-03-10 14:52:47 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.

Katana is a next-generation web crawling and spidering framework written in Go by ProjectDiscovery. It is designed for fast, comprehensive endpoint and asset discovery and is widely used in the security research and bug bounty communities.

Katana offers multiple crawling modes:

Standard mode Fast HTTP-based crawling without a browser. Parses HTML, JavaScript files, and other resources to discover endpoints and links.
Headless mode Uses a headless Chrome browser for crawling JavaScript-rendered pages and single-page applications (SPAs).
Passive mode Discovers URLs from external sources (Wayback Machine, CommonCrawl, etc.) without actively visiting the target.

Key features include:

Scope control Configurable crawl scope with regex patterns for including/excluding URLs, domains, and file extensions.
JavaScript parsing Extracts endpoints from JavaScript files, inline scripts, and AJAX requests even in standard (non-headless) mode.
Customizable output Filter and format output with field selection, JSON output, and custom templates.
Rate limiting Built-in rate limiting and concurrency control to avoid overwhelming targets.
Proxy support HTTP and SOCKS5 proxy support with rotation.
Form filling Can detect and auto-fill forms to discover endpoints behind form submissions.

While Katana was designed for security research and reconnaissance, its fast crawling capabilities and JavaScript parsing make it equally useful for web scraping discovery and sitemap generation.

Highlights

ai-poweredpopularasync

fastpopularlarge-scale

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 package main import ( "context" "math" "github.com/projectdiscovery/katana/pkg/engine/standard" "github.com/projectdiscovery/katana/pkg/output" "github.com/projectdiscovery/katana/pkg/types" ) func main() { // Configure crawl options options := &types.Options{ MaxDepth: 3, FieldScope: "rdn", // restrict to root domain BodyReadSize: math.MaxInt, Timeout: 10, Concurrency: 10, Parallelism: 10, Delay: 0, RateLimit: 150, Strategy: "depth-first", OnResult: func(result output.Result) { // Process each discovered URL println(result.Request.URL) }, } // Create and run the crawler crawlerOptions, _ := types.NewCrawlerOptions(options) defer crawlerOptions.Close() crawler, _ := standard.New(crawlerOptions) defer crawler.Close() // Start crawling _ = crawler.Crawl("https://example.com") } ```

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