Question 1

Is Portkey better than Firecrawl?

Accepted Answer

It depends on your use case. Portkey is known for AI gateway for reliable and fast LLM applications, while Firecrawl Turn websites into LLM-ready markdown or structured data. See our full comparison above for a detailed breakdown.

Question 2

Is Portkey free?

Accepted Answer

Portkey pricing: Free + Pro plans.

Question 3

Is Firecrawl free?

Accepted Answer

Firecrawl pricing: Free (open-source) + Cloud.

Question 4

What are the main differences between Portkey and Firecrawl?

Accepted Answer

Portkey and Firecrawl differ in features, pricing, and platform support. Portkey: AI gateway for reliable and fast LLM applications. Firecrawl: Turn websites into LLM-ready markdown or structured data. See the full side-by-side comparison above for details.

Feature	Portkey	Firecrawl
Category	LLM APIs & Inference	Data & ETL
Pricing	Free + Pro plans	Free (open-source) + Cloud
GitHub Stars	6k	✓ More stars 20k
Platforms	Web, Docker	Linux, macOS, Docker, Web
Key Features	✓ AI gateway ✓ Fallbacks ✓ Load balancing ✓ Caching ✓ Observability	✓ Web scraping ✓ Markdown conversion ✓ Crawling ✓ JavaScript rendering ✓ API
Pros	+ Automatic fallbacks + Load balancing + Request caching + Observability built-in + Open-source gateway	+ LLM-optimized output + Handles JavaScript sites + Clean markdown conversion + API + self-hosted options + Fast crawling
Cons	− Added infrastructure layer − Learning curve − Some features need Pro − Latency overhead	− Cloud pricing per page − Self-hosted needs resources − Some sites block crawlers − Rate limiting on free tier
Tags	gatewayreliabilityobservabilityapi	scrapingwebmarkdownopen-source

PortkeyvsFirecrawl

Portkey

Firecrawl

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