Firecrawl vs Cloro vs Apify: Which Is Better?

Three tabs open: Firecrawl, Cloro and Apify. Each one promises your AI the web data it needs.

They don’t mean the same thing by data.

Pick wrong, and 1,000 Perplexity answers cost you $15.50 instead of $3.20. Or the tool can’t do your job at all.

We ran Firecrawl ourselves and priced the same jobs on all three live rate cards.

Firecrawl vs Cloro vs Apify comes down to a question most comparisons never ask.

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What most comparisons of these three get wrong

It’s tempting to line these three up like rivals and score them on speed and price. That’s the wrong fight.

The question that matters is simpler. What are you trying to read?

A web page is one thing. What ChatGPT told your customer this morning is another. A Google Maps listing is a third.

Each tool was built around one of those. Push the wrong job through it, and you’ll pay several times more or hit a wall.

There’s also a catch in how each one bills you when the credits run out. We’ll get to it.

How we compared them (and what we didn’t do)

Short version: real API calls where we could, and a calculator everywhere else.

We used Firecrawl for real. We fetched all three vendors’ pricing pages through its hosted MCP server. Each one came back as clean Markdown, tables intact, for 1 credit.

For Apify, we skipped the marketing page. We pulled each Actor’s exact per-result price, for every plan, straight from Apify’s public API.

For Cloro, we worked from its live rate card and its documentation.

What we didn’t do: run paid jobs on Cloro or Apify. So you won’t find speed or accuracy scores for those two here. Any we gave you would be made up.

Every price was checked on October 11, 2026. We then turned each rate card into dollars per 1,000 results on the cheapest paid plan. The maths is below, so you can check it.

Why go to the source? Because vendor comparisons drift.

Cloro’s own Apify comparison, tested in August 2026, puts Apify’s Starter plan at around $39 a month. It’s $19 today.

The same page lists AI platform monitoring as not available out of the box. Yet Apify has sold a ChatGPT add-on since January 2026.

Want every plan in detail? We’ve broken down Firecrawl pricing and Apify pricing separately, and our editorial policy explains how we test everything else.

What is each one actually built for?

Firecrawl reads web pages for your AI. Cloro reads what AI chatbots and Google show people. Apify rents you ready-made scrapers for specific sites.

Firecrawl: any web page, cleaned up for AI

Give Firecrawl a URL and you get the page back as Markdown, HTML, JSON or a screenshot. Give it a search query and it finds pages, then scrapes them in the same call if you ask.

It also crawls whole sites, maps their URLs and drives a live browser for clicks and typing. That makes it a natural fit for AI agents and RAG pipelines.

It’s open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence, with more than 190,000 GitHub stars. The company also announced a $75 million Series B.

• Best for: AI apps, agents and RAG pipelines that need to read the open web.
• Not ideal for: tracking what ChatGPT says, because Firecrawl doesn’t query AI chatbots.

Cloro: what ChatGPT and Google show real people

Send Cloro a prompt and a country, and it returns what an AI engine showed a real user. That means the answer, the sources it cited and their positions.

It covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, plus classic Google Search and Google News. On AI engines, you can target a single US state.

Cloro is the newcomer here. It was founded in October 2025 in Malta. It says 300+ paying companies already use it, including Ahrefs and Surfer SEO.

• Best for: SEO teams tracking how often AI answers mention or cite a brand.
• Not ideal for: reading ordinary web pages, because it has no page scraper.

Apify: a store of ready-made scrapers, and the platform to run them

Apify is the veteran, founded in 2015. Its store lists more than 84,000 ready-made scrapers, called Actors, for sites like Google Maps, Instagram, TikTok and Amazon.

You pick an Actor, run it and pay per result. Developers can build their own, too, on Apify’s open-source Crawlee library. For the wider field, our roundup of web scraping tools covers more options.

Here’s what surprised us. Apify can do a version of both other jobs.

Its RAG Web Browser fetches pages as Markdown, the way Firecrawl does. Its Google Search Results Scraper sells add-ons for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot answers, the way Cloro does.

• Best for: data from one specific platform, because someone has probably built the scraper already.
• Not ideal for: predictable bills on custom scrapers, because compute units are hard to estimate before a run.

So Apify does it all? On paper, yes. Whether it should is a money question, and the money tells a different story.

Same question, three tools: what comes back?

Ask all three about the best CRM for a small team, and you get three different kinds of answer.

We put that exact question to Firecrawl’s search. It returned five ranked pages for 2 credits. They were a Reddit r/CRM thread, Zoho, Slack’s blog, the US Chamber of Commerce and PCMag.

That’s a reading list, not an answer. It’s perfect if your app reads those pages next.

Cloro answers a different question: what did the AI say? Its own homepage demo sends the same prompt to Perplexity. Back come the answer and the three sources Perplexity cited, in order: Wikipedia, Reddit and YouTube.

In this one example, only Reddit showed up on both lists. That gap is the whole case for tools like Cloro. The pages that rank aren’t always the pages an AI cites.

Apify’s Google Search Results Scraper can return either view. You get Google’s results page and, with an add-on switched on, the ChatGPT or Perplexity answer to the same query.

This round has no winner. It has a fork in the road: are you feeding an AI, or measuring what one says?

What do 1,000 results really cost on each?

On each tool’s cheapest paid plan, 1,000 results cost $1.90 to $15.50. No tool is cheapest for every job.

Job	Firecrawl (Hobby)	Cloro (Lite)	Apify (Starter)
1,000 web pages as Markdown	$3.80	Not offered	$1.90
1,000 Google searches	$7.60	$2.40	$2.50
1,000 ChatGPT answers	Not offered	$4.00	$7.50
1,000 Perplexity answers	Not offered	$3.20	$15.50
1,000 Google Maps places	No Maps tool	Local pack only	$3.00

Firecrawl’s search returns up to 10 web results. Cloro and Apify return Google’s full results page, ads and all. Cloro’s prices are for async requests, and sync calls add 2 credits each.

• Firecrawl Hobby: $19 buys 5,000 credits, so 1,000 credits cost $3.80. A page costs 1 credit, and a 10-result search costs 2.
• Cloro Lite: $30 buys 37,500 credits, so 1,000 credits cost $0.80. Google Search costs 3 credits, Perplexity 4 and ChatGPT 5.
• Apify Starter: your $19 becomes usage, and Actors charge per result. A Google results page costs $2.50 per 1,000. Each AI answer pays that, plus its own add-on: $5 for ChatGPT and $13 for Perplexity.

Scraping Google with your own code instead? Read our guide to scraping Google search results safely before you start.

Per answer or per month? They’re not the same

Per answer, Cloro is cheaper. Per month, light users can still pay less on Apify.

Cloro’s cheapest paid plan is $30. Apify’s $19 Starter covers about 2,500 ChatGPT answers before any overage.

So below roughly 4,000 ChatGPT answers a month, Apify’s total bill is smaller. Above that, Cloro pulls ahead fast. For Perplexity, the crossover comes much sooner, at about 1,900 answers.

Pages work the same way in reverse. Apify’s $19 buys about 10,000 page fetches, while Firecrawl’s $19 Hobby plan buys 5,000.

Firecrawl takes over at volume. Its $99 Standard plan includes 100,000 credits, or $0.99 per 1,000 pages.

Past about 50,000 pages a month, that beats Apify. Even on its $199 Scale plan, Apify’s RAG Web Browser charges $1.62 per 1,000.

Do bigger plans change the picture?

Yes, and mostly in Cloro’s and Firecrawl’s favour.

On Cloro’s $100 Hobby plan, ChatGPT answers drop to $2.00 per 1,000 and Perplexity to $1.60. Apify’s $199 Scale plan still charges $5.95 and $11.95.

For anything platform-specific, Apify stays the only real option. Google Maps places fall to $2.00 per 1,000 on Scale.

So this round splits three ways. Cloro wins every AI-answer job, Apify wins small page jobs and anything platform-specific, and Firecrawl wins pages at volume.

Which one plugs into your AI agent fastest?

All three ship an MCP server, so any of them can become a tool your AI agent calls.

MCP is the Model Context Protocol, the standard way agents in apps like Claude and Cursor call outside tools. It’s how we ran Firecrawl for our tests.

Firecrawl has the longest list. Its integrations list covers Claude Code, Cursor, LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, n8n, Zapier and Make.

Cloro’s MCP endpoint takes your API key in the URL. Its tools are simple: send a prompt and a country, get the answer back. It also has Python and JavaScript SDKs, plus n8n, Zapier and LangChain integrations.

Apify’s server at mcp.apify.com lets an agent search the Store, run any Actor as a tool and read the results. It even takes payment from agents directly, with no account, through the x402 protocol.

One thing to plan for is speed. Cloro says its requests average 30 to 45 seconds, because it drives the real AI interfaces. An agent waiting on it needs patience, or an async call.

This round goes to Firecrawl, narrowly, because every endpoint works on its free plan. It already plugs into most agent tools, too. Apify is close behind if your agent needs many different sites.

Where does each one break?

Each tool has weak spots worth knowing before you build on it.

Firecrawl: when extras and error pages add up

Extras add up fast. JSON, question and highlight formats each add 4 credits per page. A structured crawl costs five times a plain one.

Error pages still cost money. A page that answers with a 403 or 404 comes back to you and is billed at 1 credit.

Keyless calls aren’t guaranteed either. When we tried the API without a key, Firecrawl refused all three calls, saying our IP address looked suspicious. A free API key fixes that.

Cloro: when you need an answer fast

Speed is its weak spot. Waiting that long is fine for a daily report, and painful inside a live chat feature.

You pay for successful extractions even when optional fields come back empty. No shopping cards or ads in the answer? You’re still charged.

Grok is listed but temporarily unavailable, and the free tier runs one job at a time.

Apify: when you’re on the free plan

Warning: AI add-ons on Apify’s free plan cost $0.20 per answer. On Starter, the ChatGPT add-on costs $0.005. That’s 40 times more for the same answer.

ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and AI Mode don’t support every country, either. Pick an unsupported one, and that engine returns nothing.

Store quality varies, too. Apify maintains its own Actors, but many come from independent developers. When a target site changes, a scraper can break until its author fixes it.

Those are the everyday weak spots. The biggest difference between the three only shows up on a bad day.

The catch: what happens when your credits run out?

When the credits run out, Firecrawl keeps billing, Cloro stops, and Apify bills overage on paid plans.

Remember the catch we mentioned at the start? This is it.

Firecrawl’s paid plans keep your requests working with automatic top-ups in $5 steps. Leave the monthly limit blank and there’s no ceiling at all. On the free plan, requests stop.

Cloro rejects every request with a 403 Insufficient Credits error once your balance hits zero. It emails you at 80% and 100%, and an upgrade takes effect immediately.

Apify’s free plan blocks your runs until the next cycle. Paid plans keep running and add the overage to your next invoice, up to a usage limit you set.

So which failure can you live with: a surprise bill, or a stalled job?

Our take: set a monthly cap on Firecrawl and a usage limit on Apify on day one. For Cloro, buy a plan with about 20% headroom, because there’s no pay-as-you-go to catch you.

Firecrawl vs Cloro vs Apify: which should you pick?

Pick by the job. Firecrawl feeds web pages to AI, Cloro tracks what AI says about you, and Apify scrapes specific sites.

Pick Firecrawl for an AI app or agent that reads the web, because one credit turns any page into clean Markdown. It’s also the cheapest for pages past about 50,000 a month.

Pick Cloro if you track what ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI say about your brand. It wins because, past a few thousand answers a month, it’s the cheapest per AI answer by a wide margin. Budget for slow requests, though.

Pick Apify if an Actor already scrapes your target, like Google Maps, because you pay per result and maintain nothing. It’s also the cheaper option for smaller page jobs.

Need two of these jobs? Pairing Firecrawl for pages with Cloro for AI answers gets you the lowest rate on each. Apify can cover both on one bill, at a higher price per AI answer.

What if none of them fit?

If you want raw HTML at volume, as cheaply as possible, ScraperAPI is built for that. Our ScraperAPI review covers its plans.

Rather click than code? Thunderbit and Browse AI are no-code scrapers you set up by pointing and clicking.

Tracking AI visibility but don’t want to write code? A dashboard such as RankPrompt does the reporting that Cloro leaves to you.

For classic Google rankings alone, our list of the best SERP APIs compares cheaper options.

Frequently asked questions

The bottom line

Firecrawl vs Cloro vs Apify isn’t one contest. It’s three different jobs that happen to share a shortlist.

• Firecrawl if you’re feeding web pages to an AI.
• Cloro if you’re tracking what AI tells your customers.
• Apify if you need a ready-made scraper for one site.

Your next step: run that real job on the tool’s free tier, then set a spending cap before you scale.