firecrawlvspholcus

None - - -

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

7,594 1 - Apache-2.0

Feb 15 2020 v1.4.0(2026-03-03 03:58:32 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.

Pholcus is a minimalistic web crawler library written in the Go programming language. It is designed to be flexible and easy to use, and it supports concurrent, distributed, and modular crawling.

Note that Pholcus is documented and maintained in the Chinese language and has no english resources other than the code source itself.

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 package main import ( "github.com/henrylee2cn/pholcus/exec" _ "github.com/henrylee2cn/pholcus/spider/standard" // standard spider ) func main() { // create spider object spider := exec.NewSpider(exec.NewTask("demo", "https://www.example.com")) // add a callback for URL route by regex pattern. In this case it's any route: spider.AddRule(".*", "Parse") // Start spider spider.Start() } // define callback here func Parse(self *exec.Spider, doc *goquery.Document) { // callbacks receive HTMl document reference and } ```

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