FreshGeo vs Firecrawl
Firecrawl turns any website into clean markdown for your LLM. FreshGeo turns seven business questions into typed JSON. One is a scraper you can point anywhere; the other is a grounded answer for a fixed set of domains.
Firecrawl is the scraper we recommend when teams actually need to crawl. Its markdown output is the cleanest LLM-ready format in the category.
Firecrawl, ScrapingBee and Bright Data solve extraction — give them a URL, get back content. That is the right tool when you own the list of pages. FreshGeo solves grounding — give it a business question (what is this competitor charging, who is hiring, what is trending) and get a typed answer with sources[]. You skip picking URLs, parsing HTML, and writing selectors.
When Firecrawl wins
- →You already know the exact URLs or domains you need to extract from.
- →You need full-page markdown or structured extraction for arbitrary sites, not just business domains.
- →You are building a RAG index over specific documentation or knowledge sites.
- →You need crawling (follow links across a whole site), which FreshGeo does not offer.
When FreshGeo wins
- ✓You do not know which URL has the answer — you just know the question (e.g. "is Acme hiring SDRs in Manchester?").
- ✓You want typed JSON fields, not markdown your agent re-parses.
- ✓You need cross-domain entity linking — same company_id across pricing, jobs and news.
- ✓You want per-agent spend caps so a scraping loop cannot exhaust credits overnight.
- ✓You need deterministic replays via cache_id for audit and evals.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Firecrawl | FreshGeo |
|---|---|---|
| Primary abstraction | URL → markdown / extracted JSON | Question → typed JSON answer |
| Input | You supply URLs or crawl seeds | You supply entities (company, role, region) |
| Response format | Markdown + optional LLM extraction | Typed JSON with sources[] per field |
| Data domains | Any public website | 7 business domains, pre-modelled |
| Freshness control | On-demand crawl | Domain-tuned cache, intent hourly / pricing daily |
| Deterministic replay | — | cache_id re-fetches identical payload |
| MCP-native | Community MCP wrappers | First-party MCP server |
| Auth model | Workspace API key | Per-agent keys + hard spend caps |
| Entity graph | — | Shared company_id across domains |
| JS rendering / anti-bot | Yes, included | Handled internally per domain |
| Schema maintenance | You maintain extraction prompts | FreshGeo maintains schemas |
| Pricing model | Per page credit | Per typed call, cached hits free |
| Hosting | US | UK, SOC 2 in progress |
| SLA | Plan-dependent | 99.95% |
| Integration time | Hours to days (per-site extraction prompts) | ~10 min via MCP |
Find the Head-of-RevOps roles a target account posted in the last 30 days
import FirecrawlApp from '@mendable/firecrawl-js';
const fc = new FirecrawlApp({ apiKey: KEY });
const crawl = await fc.crawlUrl('https://acme.com/careers', {
limit: 50, scrapeOptions: { formats: ['markdown'] },
});
// Then: pass each page to an LLM, ask it to
// detect RevOps roles, dedupe, parse dates,
// and hope Acme's careers HTML didn't change. import { FreshGeo } from 'freshgeo';
const fg = new FreshGeo({ apiKey: KEY });
const roles = await fg.jobs.search({
company: 'acme.com',
role_family: 'revops',
posted_within: '30d',
});
// -> [{ title, location, posted_at,
// seniority, sources: [...] }, ...] How teams make the switch
- 01 List the sites your Firecrawl pipelines hit — group by intent (pricing pages, careers, news, review sites).
- 02 For each group, check whether a FreshGeo domain already covers it (pricing, jobs, competitor monitoring, news/risk usually do).
- 03 Keep Firecrawl for sites that are genuinely one-off (internal docs, niche forums, long-tail vendors).
- 04 Swap the covered groups to FreshGeo MCP tools and delete the extraction prompts.
- 05 Turn on per-agent keys and spend caps before pointing an autonomous loop at either.
- 06 Measure: pages crawled, LLM extraction tokens, and time spent fixing broken selectors. Most teams recover 1-2 engineering days a month.
Questions buyers ask us
Does FreshGeo crawl arbitrary websites? +
No, and that is deliberate. FreshGeo covers seven business domains with curated sources per domain. If you need to crawl arbitrary sites, use Firecrawl. If you are building extraction prompts for competitor pricing pages or careers sections, FreshGeo already owns that schema and keeps it current.
How is FreshGeo different from ScrapingBee? +
ScrapingBee is an excellent proxy-and-render layer — you give it a URL, it returns rendered HTML. That is infrastructure. FreshGeo is a data product: you ask a business question, it returns typed facts. Different layers of the stack. Teams often use ScrapingBee for bespoke scrapes and FreshGeo for the repeated business queries.
Can FreshGeo replace Bright Data? +
For the seven covered domains, yes — and with less plumbing. Bright Data is unmatched for scale, residential proxies and truly arbitrary scraping. If your use case is "scrape the entire open web at millions of pages per day", stay on Bright Data. If it is "ground my agent on competitor and market signals", FreshGeo is the shorter path.
What about anti-bot and JS rendering? +
FreshGeo handles rendering, rotation and anti-bot internally per domain — you never see a 403 or a Cloudflare challenge. The trade-off is you cannot point it at an arbitrary URL. You get reliability on seven domains in exchange for breadth.
Do I pay per page like Firecrawl? +
No. FreshGeo charges per typed call, and cached hits (re-fetching the same cache_id) are free. A single call may aggregate dozens of underlying pages behind the scenes. In practice teams replacing Firecrawl-based extraction save 40-70% once caching kicks in.
Is FreshGeo UK-hosted and GDPR-clean? +
Yes. FreshGeo is UK-hosted with SOC 2 in progress and a 99.95% SLA. All seven APIs return sources[] with fetched_at timestamps so your compliance team can audit where any given field came from. Useful if your agent is making decisions regulators might ask about.
Stop maintaining extraction prompts
Keep Firecrawl for the long-tail sites. Route competitor, jobs, pricing and news through FreshGeo MCP and delete the scrapers you no longer need.