Software Alternatives & Startups

Firecrawl VS create-api.dev by Kong

Compare Firecrawl VS create-api.dev by Kong and see what are their differences

Firecrawl

The web data API for AI agents

No screenshot yet
Rating
5.0 · 1 review
Pricing
Open source
create-api.dev by Kong

Generate and share OpenAPI specs with AI

No screenshot yet
Rating
0 reviews

Which is more popular?

Based on our record, Firecrawl seems to be more popular. It has been mentioned 6 times since March 2021.

social mentions
6 vs 0
Web Scraping popularity
100% vs 0%
alternatives listed
240+ vs 12

Base details

Website, pricing, platforms and company facts side by side.

Firecrawl
cK
create-api.dev by Kong
Website firecrawl.dev api.dev
Pricing
Open source Official pricing
—
Company Startup from the United States —
Listed in

About Firecrawl and create-api.dev by Kong

In their own words, as submitted to SaaSHub.

Firecrawl
cK
create-api.dev by Kong

Firecrawl is the open-source web data API for AI agents. Search the web and get full-page results, scrape any URL (including JavaScript-heavy pages) into clean Markdown or structured JSON, crawl and map entire sites, parse PDFs and documents, and interact with dynamic pages. Free plan: 1,000...

Read more about Firecrawl

No description of create-api.dev by Kong yet.

Features and specs

What each product offers, as listed by its team.

Firecrawl 5 features
cK
create-api.dev by Kong 5 features
  • Fast Performance
    Firecrawl is optimized for speed, making web crawling and data extraction highly efficient, reducing the time needed to gather data.
  • User-Friendly Interface
    The platform offers an intuitive interface that allows users to set up and manage crawls without extensive technical knowledge, making it accessible to a broader audience.
  • Scalability
    Firecrawl is designed to scale easily, enabling users to handle large volumes of data and run multiple crawls simultaneously without performance degradation.
  • Customizability
    The tool provides extensive customization options, allowing users to tailor the crawling process to their specific needs, including setting specific parameters and rules.
  • Integration Capabilities
    It supports seamless integration with various data storage solutions and tools, enhancing productivity by enabling easy data management and utilization.

Possible disadvantages

  • Cost
    Depending on the level of usage and features required, Firecrawl can become expensive, limiting access for startups or small enterprises with tight budgets.
  • Limited Offline Support
    As a web-based tool, Firecrawl may not offer extensive offline functionality, which can be a drawback for users needing offline access to data or service.
  • Learning Curve for Advanced Features
    While the basic interface is user-friendly, mastering more advanced features and customizations can require a steep learning curve for users unfamiliar with crawling technologies.
  • Dependence on Internet Connectivity
    Firecrawl's functionality is heavily reliant on a stable internet connection, which can be a limitation in areas with poor connectivity.
  • Privacy Concerns
    Users might have concerns about data privacy and security, especially when handling sensitive data, as web crawlers inherently interact with various external websites.
  • Rapid API Development
    create-api.dev by Kong enables developers to quickly scaffold and create APIs, significantly reducing the time needed to go from concept to a working API endpoint.
  • Kong Ecosystem Integration
    Being a Kong product, it integrates well with the broader Kong ecosystem including Kong Gateway, providing access to powerful API management, authentication, rate limiting, and other plugins out of the box.
  • Developer-Friendly Interface
    The platform offers an intuitive and streamlined interface that simplifies the API creation process, making it accessible to developers of varying skill levels.
  • Built-in Best Practices
    The tool encourages API design best practices and standards such as OpenAPI specification compliance, helping teams produce well-structured and consistent APIs from the start.
  • Free to Get Started
    The platform allows developers to get started for free, lowering the barrier to entry for individuals and small teams who want to experiment with API creation and management.

Possible disadvantages

  • Vendor Lock-in Risk
    Building APIs on Kong's platform may create dependency on their ecosystem, making it potentially difficult and costly to migrate to alternative API management solutions in the future.
  • Limited Documentation and Community
    As a relatively newer product, the documentation and community support may not be as extensive or mature compared to more established API development tools and frameworks.
  • Pricing Uncertainty at Scale
    While free to start, costs can escalate as usage grows and teams need more advanced features, enterprise support, or higher throughput, which may not be transparent upfront.
  • Limited Customization
    The opinionated nature of the tool may limit flexibility for developers who need highly customized API architectures or non-standard configurations that fall outside the platform's predefined templates and workflows.
  • Dependency on External Service
    Relying on an external hosted service for API creation means potential downtime, latency issues, or service disruptions that are outside the developer's control, which could impact development workflows.

Analysis

An editorial look at what each product does well and who it suits.

Firecrawl
cK
create-api.dev by Kong

Overall verdict

  • Firecrawl is a solid, developer-friendly web scraping and crawling API that reliably turns websites into clean, LLM-ready data, making it especially valuable for AI and data-driven applications.

Why this product is good

  • Converts web pages into clean markdown or structured data optimized for LLMs, saving significant preprocessing time
  • Handles complex challenges like JavaScript rendering, dynamic content, and pagination out of the box
  • Offers a simple, well-documented API with SDKs for Python and Node.js that are easy to integrate
  • Provides features like crawling entire sites, scraping single pages, and structured data extraction with schemas
  • Open-source core with a hosted option, giving flexibility for both self-hosting and managed convenience
  • Actively maintained with a growing community and integrations with popular frameworks like LangChain and LlamaIndex

Recommended for

  • Developers building RAG pipelines and AI applications that need clean web data
  • Teams creating LLM-powered chatbots or knowledge bases from web content
  • Data scientists and engineers who need to scrape sites without managing scraping infrastructure
  • Startups and companies that want to quickly ingest and structure large volumes of web pages
  • Anyone needing to crawl JavaScript-heavy or dynamic websites reliably

Overall verdict

  • create-api.dev by Kong is a solid, developer-friendly resource that helps teams design, build, and manage APIs effectively, backed by Kong's strong reputation in the API gateway and management space.

Why this product is good

  • Backed by Kong, a well-established leader in API management and gateway technology
  • Offers practical guidance and tools for designing and building modern APIs
  • Focuses on developer experience with clear documentation and best practices
  • Helps teams accelerate API development with proven patterns and standards
  • Aligns with industry-standard approaches to API-first development

Recommended for

  • Developers looking to build APIs following best practices
  • Teams adopting an API-first development strategy
  • Organizations already using or considering Kong's API management platform
  • Startups and enterprises needing scalable and well-designed APIs
  • Engineers seeking educational resources on modern API design

Videos

Walkthroughs and reviews on video.

Firecrawl 2 videos + Add
cK
create-api.dev by Kong 0 videos + Add

Turn AI Web Scraping into Profit (My Firecrawl & n8n System)

More videos

  • - Firecrawl v2 is here! Great for building deep research AI agents

No create-api.dev by Kong videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Category popularity

How often each product is chosen within a category, 0–100% relative to the other.

Score bands 0–20 21–40 41–50 51–60 61–100
Firecrawl
cK
create-api.dev by Kong
100% 100%
0% 0%
0% 0%
100% 100%
100% 100%
AI
0% 0%
0% 0%
100% 100%

User comments

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Reviews and articles

External articles and on-site reviews we used to compare the two products.

Firecrawl 5.0 · 1 review
cK
create-api.dev by Kong no reviews yet
  • The best web scraping tools for AI agents in 2026
    spicrawl.com · Oct 2026

    It depends on the job. For turning known URLs into clean Markdown, a scraping API such as Spicrawl, Firecrawl or Jina Reader is the simplest. For crawling whole sites, Firecrawl, Crawl4AI, Context.dev and Apify follow...

  • Firecrawl is one of the most powerful tools
    SaaSHub review
    · Jun 2026

    Firecrawl is one of the most powerful tools for turning websites into clean, structured, LLM-ready data. It removes the complexity of traditional web scraping and provides a simple API that converts web pages into...

We have no reviews of create-api.dev by Kong yet. Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Recommendations tracked on public social media and blogs since March 2021.

Firecrawl 6 mentions
cK
create-api.dev by Kong 0 mentions
  • Turn any web page into clean markdown for ChatGPT or Claude
    # Find URLs on a site, ordered by relevance to a word Result = app.map("https://firecrawl.dev", search="pricing") # Scrape several URLs at once Job = app.batch_scrape([ "https://firecrawl.dev", "https://docs.firecrawl.dev", ],... - Source: dev.to / 4 days ago
  • I scanned Dub's codebase. It's not a link shortener.
    Generate-lander.ts — This is the interesting one. It uses Anthropic + Firecrawl to scrape a partner's website, then generates a custom landing page for their affiliate program. Automated partner onboarding. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Why hasn't AI improved design quality the way it improved dev speed?
    My guy, there's an error in your app: Firecrawl API key missing or invalid. Set FIRECRAWL_API_KEY in .env.local to your key from https://firecrawl.dev — then restart `next dev`. - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago

View more

Tracking create-api.dev by Kong since Jul 2025.

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