fastCRW
Firecrawl
Apify
ScrapingBee
Browse AI
tavily
Octoparse
Parallel AI
AppWrite
Supabase
Firebase
Clerk
PocketBase.io
Xano
Convex.dev
PropelAuth
fastCRW is an open-source Firecrawl and Tavily alternative โ a single 8 MB Rust binary that gives you scrape, crawl, search, and extract APIs behind one drop-in /v1 endpoint. Built for RAG pipelines, LLM agents, research assistants, and any product that needs to read the live web and turn it into clean, model-ready markdown.
The /v1 surface is Firecrawl-compatible, so existing Python and Node SDKs swap in with a base URL change. Scrape returns LLM-ready markdown with optional screenshots, HTML, and link graphs. Crawl walks full sites with sitemap support, robots.txt, dedup, and streaming results. Extract pulls structured data via JSON schema or natural-language prompt. Map returns the URL graph without fetching every page.
The same binary exposes a Tavily-compatible AI search API. Each result already comes back as full clean markdown with relevance scoring โ one round trip, no second scrape pass, no second vendor bill. Perfect for LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, n8n, Dify, and any agent loop where latency kills UX.
Performance is the headline. On a public 1,000-URL benchmark, fastCRW hits 710 ms p50 and 833 ms average โ roughly 17ร faster than hosted Firecrawl on the same workload. Idle RAM is 6.6 MB, the Docker image is 8 MB, and cold start is sub-second. A $5 VM runs a real production scraping and search API.
Dual-mode by design: managed cloud with 500 free credits per month and linear paid tiers, or self-host the entire binary under AGPL-3.0 with zero per-request fees. Credits work across scrape, crawl, search, and extract โ one bill, not a stack of vendor invoices.
Open-source web scraping API and AI search API in one Rust binary. Firecrawl alternative, Tavily alternative, self-hostable, and built for the LLM era. Start free at fastcrw.com or clone the GitHub repo and run it yourself.
fastCRW AppWriteAppWrite is recommended for developers building applications who require a scalable backend solution without the overhead of managing infrastructure. It is particularly suited for developers who prefer open-source platforms and those who want to avoid vendor lock-in. AppWrite's features make it a good fit for startups, hobby projects, and even educational purposes where full control over the backend is desirable.
I've use it instead of Firebase on a 15$ DigitalOcean droplet and saved around ~$150 a month. Managing my own infra does take some extra time, but definitely worth it. The APIs and SDK are also surprisingly much easier to consume than Firebase. Waiting for the cloud version.
Based on our record, AppWrite seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 178 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.
Initially, I was using the Supabase free tier, but I was hitting the limits, and my app was becoming stale. Then I switched to Appwrite. Both are totally different; one is SQL, while the latter one is NoSQL. Although use node-appwrite package to skip the manual schema add-ons. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
Appwrite is an open-source platform that simplifies backend setup by providing authentication, databases, storage, functions, and hosting all in one place. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
I love Appwrite. My first hackathon was actually from Appwrite (using Appwrite) 2 years ago, and I've been using it ever since. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
Appwrite | Remote | Platform Engineers, AI, Interns | https://www.appwrite.careers Appwrite (https://appwrite.io) is an open-source backend platform that helps developers build secure web and mobile apps faster. Weโre hiring engineers across multiple teams to improve infrastructure, expand developer tooling, and scale our platform. Open roles: โ Platform Engineer. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
Appwrite is a backend-as-a-service platform that provides authentication, storage, and database. Appwrite is used for authentication and storage. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
Firecrawl - Turn any website into LLM-ready data.
Supabase - An open source Firebase alternative
Apify - Apify is a web scraping and automation platform that can turn any website into an API.
Firebase - Firebase is a cloud service designed to power real-time, collaborative applications for mobile and web.
ScrapingBee - ScrapingBee is a Web Scraping API that handles proxies and Headless browser for you, so you can focus on extracting the data you want, and nothing else.
Clerk - Clerk.io, the artificial intelligence for e-commerce that knows your customers interests.