Comparison
Bluefield vs Firecrawl
Firecrawl and Bluefield are both web-scraping APIs that return LLM-ready Markdown for AI pipelines, and in our latest shared benchmark they tie on coverage (both 96%). Choose Bluefield if you want cryptographic proof of every result, the fastest typical response (783 ms p50 vs 2.3 s), and the top score in a blind quality panel. Choose Firecrawl if you want a lower worst-case latency, a lower cost per scrape, or the largest open-source community.
At a glance: Bluefield vs Firecrawl
| Capability | Bluefield | Firecrawl |
|---|---|---|
| Provenance / attestation | Signed, offline-verifiable on every live fetch (Ed25519 + AWS KMS) | None |
| Coverage | 96% (280/292) | 96% (280/292) — tie |
| Latency p50 | 783 ms (~3× faster) | 2339 ms |
| Latency p95 | 32.3 s | 11.9 s |
| Cost / successful scrape | $0.00134 | $0.00083 |
| Blind quality panel (0–100) | 58.3 | 52.3 (lead not statistically significant) |
| Output (median chars) | 11,645 — leaner | 30,388 |
| Watch mode (signed webhook on change) | Yes | Partial |
| Open source | Self-host (Docker) + open verifier | AGPL core (~135k★) |
| Hosting | US (Fly.io); GDPR-aware, DPA on request | US |
Where Firecrawl is the better choice
- Predictable worst-case latency.
- Firecrawl's p95 (11.9 s) beats ours (32.3 s) — our escalation to the unlocker tier on hard pages gives a fatter tail. If you need tight tail latency more than provenance, Firecrawl wins.
- Lower cost per scrape.
- $0.00083 vs our $0.00134 — our blended cost is higher because the escalating fetcher pays for browser/unlocker tiers on hard URLs.
- The biggest open-source community.
- Firecrawl's ~135k-star AGPL repo and ecosystem are unmatched.
Where Bluefield wins
- Provenance you can verify.
- Every live fetch returns a cryptographic attestation (Ed25519, signed via AWS KMS) — run `npx bluefields verify response.json` and get "signature valid, content unmodified". Firecrawl returns clean markdown but no proof of origin or integrity. Cache hits and PDFs are unsigned in v1.
- Typical speed.
- 783 ms median vs 2,339 ms — about 3× faster on the median request in the same run.
- Quality.
- Bluefield scored highest in a blind, label-stripped multi-judge panel (58.3 vs 52.3) and returns leaner output (≈11.6k vs ≈30k median chars) — the panel’s bias probe confirms it penalizes boilerplate padding. The edge over Firecrawl is within the confidence interval — not statistically significant; the panel uses single-vendor judges and isn’t yet human-calibrated.
- Coverage is a tie, not a deficit.
- Both returned usable content on 280/292 URLs.
Migrating from Firecrawl
The surfaces map closely (scrape / crawl / map / search / extract). Point at https://api.bluefields-data.com, set Authorization: Bearer bf_live_<key>, and each live result additionally carries a signed manifest. The MCP server is a drop-in for agent pipelines.
curl -X POST https://api.bluefields-data.com/scrape \
-H "Authorization: Bearer bf_live_<key>" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"url":"https://example.com","formats":["markdown"]}'
# -> { "markdown": "...", "content_hash": "...", "attestation": { ...signed... } }Frequently asked questions
- Does Bluefield have better coverage than Firecrawl?
- No — they tie. In our latest shared benchmark both returned usable content on 280 of 292 URLs. Bluefield leads on median latency and blind-panel quality; Firecrawl leads on worst-case latency and cost per scrape.
- Is Bluefield cheaper than Firecrawl?
- No. Bluefield costs more per successful scrape ($0.00134 vs $0.00083) because its fetcher escalates to browser/unlocker tiers on hard pages. You pay more on hard URLs and get provenance on every one.
- What does Bluefield do that Firecrawl can't?
- Sign every live result so you can prove — offline — what was fetched, from where, and when. No major scraping API ships that today.