FirecrawlvsVercel AI Gateway

Full side-by-side comparison — features, pricing, platforms, and which one wins in 2026.

Firecrawl

Data & ETL

Turn websites into LLM-ready markdown or structured data

Full review →Website ↗

Vercel AI Gateway

LLM APIs & Inference

Unified API gateway for routing app calls across hundreds of AI models

Full review →Website ↗
FeatureFirecrawlVercel AI Gateway
CategoryData & ETLLLM APIs & Inference
PricingFree (open-source) + CloudFree monthly credits; pay-as-you-go at provider list price with no markup
GitHub Stars
✓ More stars
20k
—
PlatformsLinux, macOS, Docker, WebWeb, API
Key Features
  • ✓ Web scraping
  • ✓ Markdown conversion
  • ✓ Crawling
  • ✓ JavaScript rendering
  • ✓ API
  • ✓ Single API key
  • ✓ Hundreds of models
  • ✓ Unified model API
  • ✓ Provider routing and fallbacks
  • ✓ Automatic retries
  • ✓ Usage and spend monitoring
  • ✓ Bring Your Own Key
  • ✓ AI SDK and OpenAI-compatible APIs
Pros
  • + LLM-optimized output
  • + Handles JavaScript sites
  • + Clean markdown conversion
  • + API + self-hosted options
  • + Fast crawling
  • + One endpoint for many model providers
  • + Centralized usage, spend, and observability
  • + Automatic retries and fallbacks improve production resilience
  • + No token markup according to Vercel docs
  • + Works with AI SDK and OpenAI-compatible API clients
Cons
  • − Cloud pricing per page
  • − Self-hosted needs resources
  • − Some sites block crawlers
  • − Rate limiting on free tier
  • − Best fit for teams already building web apps or using Vercel/AI SDK
  • − Underlying provider terms and model limits still apply
  • − BYOK fallback can still consume AI Gateway credits
  • − Exact model pricing should be checked in the current Gateway model list
Tags
scrapingwebmarkdownopen-source
ai-gatewaymodel-routingvercelai-sdkllm-apibyokobservability

Want to compare different tools?

← Back to compare picker

Related Comparisons

Firecrawl vs Hugging Face →Vercel AI Gateway vs Hugging Face →Firecrawl vs LlamaIndex →Vercel AI Gateway vs LlamaIndex →Firecrawl vs Crawl4AI →Vercel AI Gateway vs Crawl4AI →Firecrawl vs Haystack →Vercel AI Gateway vs Haystack →Firecrawl vs LiteLLM →Vercel AI Gateway vs LiteLLM →Firecrawl vs Docling →Vercel AI Gateway vs Docling →