Steel vs Firecrawl

A side-by-side comparison built from both listings. Blank cells mean the company has not given that detail; we never guess.

Steel compared with Firecrawl
Detail	Steel	Firecrawl
What it does	Browser Infrastructure for AI Agents	Web data API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale
Stage	Growing	Growing
Founded	Not given	2022
Based in	Not given	Not given
Pricing model	freemium	freemium
Pricing	Not given	Not given
Key features	Session API for on-demand cloud browser sessions Auto CAPTCHA solving Proxy and browser fingerprinting controls Sub-second session startup time Up to 24-hour session duration Cookie and storage management Compatible with Puppeteer, Playwright, and Selenium Session Viewer for debugging Auto sign-in for auth-walled websites	Search Scrape Interact JavaScript rendering Document parsing Structured data extraction Web crawling MCP integration
What makes it different	Open-source self-hosted option available on GitHub Works with existing tools via standard CDP WebSocket Fastest session startup time in industry Built-in anti-bot and CAPTCHA handling One-line integration with Puppeteer	96% coverage on benchmark versus 79% for Puppeteer and 75% for cURL 93% fewer input tokens for LLM models by removing navs, footers, and ads Open source with 188K GitHub stars and transparent development One-command setup for AI agents through CLI and MCP
Free plan	Not given	Not given
Open source	Not given	Not given
Platforms	Not given	Not given
Public API	Not given	Not given
Community votes	0	0
DR (Domain Rating by Ahrefs)	54 no change since last check	80 no change since last check
Trust Flow (Majestic)	28	33
Citation Flow (Majestic)	33	53
Referring domains (Majestic)	652	7386

5 details filled in for both companies.

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