Comparison
Dataswap vs Firecrawl: crawl the web, or buy it licensed
This is the comparison where the honest conclusion is frequently “use them”. If the job is “turn this website into structured content”, that is what Firecrawl is for, and it is not what we sell.
Firecrawl
A crawling and scraping platform: point it at a site or a URL and get structured content back, with a published free tier.
Dataswap
Licensed search and business data with an analysis layer, sourced without anti-bot evasion and with a signed receipt per response.
Side by side, with sources
| Axis | Dataswap | Firecrawl |
|---|---|---|
| Crawling a site you name | Not offered. We read up to ten URLs you pass to POST /v1/extract/schema, and extract a product catalog from a storefront URL — we do not follow links, discover pages or work through a sitemap. | The core of the product.source |
| Free tier | Free plan gives you an account and an API key, with no included credits. | 1,000 credits per month on the Free plan.source |
| Entry paid tier | Starter $49/month for 24,500 credits. 1 credit = $0.002, and a Google organic search is 1 credit. | Hobby at $16/month billed yearly for 5,000 credits, Standard at $83/month billed yearly for 100,000.source |
| Sourcing position | Licensed upstream providers, no anti-bot evasion, no CAPTCHA solving, no residential proxy rotation — asserted in a signed receipt on the response. | Not found on the pages we checked (4 August 2026) |
| Where inference runs | Synthesis runs on models we host in the EU. Requests are not sent to third-party model vendors, and the receipt records inference: eu-only. | Not found on the pages we checked (4 August 2026) |
Their prices above are the yearly-billing figures shown on their pricing page on the date at the bottom of this page; ours are list prices from our own. A Firecrawl credit and a Dataswap credit buy different things, so the useful comparison is per job, not per credit.
When Firecrawl is the better choice
The job is “crawl this website”
Following links, working through a sitemap, rendering pages that only exist after JavaScript runs, converting a whole documentation site to text — none of that is what we do, and pretending otherwise would waste your week.
The content lives on a site with no licensed feed
Your own customers’ sites, a partner portal, a niche forum. Licensed supply covers search engines, marketplaces, business listings and review platforms. Outside that, we have nothing to sell you.
You want to start free and stay small
1,000 credits a month at no cost. Our Free plan includes no credits, so a small experiment is cheaper there.
You need a browser
We do not run one. Content that only appears after client-side rendering may be unreadable to us and readable to them.
When Dataswap is the better choice
You need the results page, not the page
Organic results, News, Maps, Shopping, People-Also-Ask, the AI Overview and AI Mode are data we buy licensed and return as JSON. A crawler that hits a search engine directly is doing something else entirely, and something a licensed supplier does not have to do.
Provenance has to be defensible
For regulated buyers the question is not only what you extracted but how it was obtained. Our answer is a contractual position and a signed receipt, and bot_evasion: false is a line only a licensed pipeline can put in writing and keep true.
You want extraction that refuses to guess
Fields with no supporting evidence come back null because the server nulls them, not because the model was careful. That is checkable behaviour rather than a prompt.
You want measurement, not just content
Share of answer across engines, digital shelf including AI citations, entity cards at a single timestamp — analysis routes on the same key as the data.
Questions about this comparison
- Can Dataswap crawl a website for me?
- No. You can pass up to ten URLs to POST /v1/extract/schema and get a filled JSON Schema back, and you can point catalog extraction at a storefront URL. Neither of those is a crawler: nothing follows links or discovers pages.
- Why not just crawl search engines directly?
- Because doing it at scale means evading anti-bot protections, and we do not build that — it is the one thing we have said we will not ship. Buying the data licensed is what lets a response carry a signed sourcing claim.
- Do the two overlap at all?
- On extraction, yes: both turn pages into structured output. Everything else is different — they crawl sites you name, we read licensed search, marketplace, business and review data and measure what answer engines cite.
How we checked
Every claim about Firecrawl on this page was read from their own public pages on 4 August 2026. Where we could not find something, the table says so rather than assuming it does not exist. Vendors change their pricing and their positioning; if you find a row that is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
- Firecrawl pricing https://www.firecrawl.dev/pricing
- Dataswap pricing https://dataswap.io/#pricing
We publish no latency or quality benchmarks of our own, for this or any comparison, because we have not run a study we would be willing to defend. Measure both on your own queries.
Keep reading
Put the prism to work.
Create an account and get your API key — no card required. Start on the six live bands and the twelve inference tools; the eight new capabilities land on the same key as they ship.