Searchbase vs Firecrawl (2026 Comparison)
2026-09-08
Quick answer: Searchbase searches B2B contact databases (Apollo alone: 240M+ people and 30M+ companies, as Apollo states; plus Hunter and more) and the open web from one prompt, and hands you the finished table instead of raw page content: companies or people with email and phone where a provider has them, the ads they run, the jobs they post and the social profiles they keep. Describe your ideal customer. Searchbase finds them across Europe in one prompt, with the source on every cell. It works in Italian as well as English, bills in euros, and charges per action rather than per seat (€0 to €199 a month), with no code to write. Firecrawl is the better pick if you are a developer who wants a clean API that turns any URL into LLM-ready markdown, with SDKs in six languages and crawl, search, map and interact endpoints ($0 free with 1,000 credits a month, then $16, $83, $333 and $599 a month on annual billing). Both are free to start, and they are genuinely not the same kind of product.
What each tool actually does
Firecrawl (firecrawl.dev) describes itself as "the context API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale". It is infrastructure. You call an endpoint and it hands back structured content: scrape returns LLM-ready data from a URL as markdown, JSON or a screenshot; crawl follows links from a starting point across a whole site; search searches the web and returns full content from the results; map produces a site map; interact, the newest one, scrapes a page then lets you act on it with AI prompts or code; monitor tracks pages continuously. Official SDKs cover Python, Node.js, Go, Rust, Java and Elixir, plus a CLI, and there is Model Context Protocol support so Cursor, Claude, Claude Code, Codex and Windsurf can call it directly. Firecrawl's own numbers: 1.25M developers, 150,000+ companies, 5 billion requests served, 177.9K GitHub stars, 96% coverage on their 1,000-URL benchmark measured 13 January 2026, P95 latency of 3,387 ms, and 93% fewer input tokens than the alternatives they compare against.
Firecrawl is very good at what it does and has the developer mindshare in this category, alongside Apify and Bright Data. But it stops where your code begins. It gives you the page. Deciding which pages to fetch, what a row means and which values are trustworthy is your application.
Searchbase (searchbase.org, Europe) is the finished product on the other side of that line. You write the request in plain words, "every digital agency in Milan with an email and a website", "heads of marketing at Italian furniture manufacturers", "creators in the running niche with over 10k followers and a contact email", "companies advertising kitchen furniture on Meta in Italy", and the agent decides where to look. For standard B2B contacts it queries contact databases, Apollo (240M+ people and 30M+ companies, as Apollo states) and Hunter among them, and enriches companies against Crunchbase and the Italian company registry. For everything else it searches, opens the pages, reads them and extracts the rows, streaming them into a spreadsheet while you watch. No endpoint, no SDK, no parsing. Every cell carries a link to the page or provider it came from, a badge with when it was collected and the extraction method, and emails carry the provider's status. If a value cannot be verified it stays n/a instead of being guessed. From the people it finds, the agent drafts personalised email and LinkedIn sequences that you approve before anything launches.
The short version: Firecrawl is a component you build with. Searchbase is the built thing, with the contact databases already wired in.
Side by side
| Searchbase | Firecrawl | |
|---|---|---|
| Input | plain-language prompt | a URL or query, passed to an endpoint |
| Coverage | B2B contact databases (Apollo alone: 240M+ people and 30M+ companies, as Apollo states; plus Hunter and more) plus any public web page, 12 social platforms, 3 ad libraries (Meta, Google, TikTok), 9 job boards, the Italian company registry, Crunchbase | any URL you pass, 96% coverage on their own 1,000-URL benchmark |
| Output | table of companies or people: email and phone where a provider has them, website, LinkedIn, any column you ask for; source link on every cell | markdown, JSON or screenshot of page content |
| Verification | source link, collection time and method on every cell; provider status on emails; unknown = n/a, never guessed | you get the page content, verification is yours to build |
| Ad intelligence | yes, the Meta, Google and TikTok ad libraries | no, unless you build it |
| Creators and social | yes, 12 platforms | no, unless you build it |
| Languages | English, Italian | English |
| Pricing model | per action, no seats: a 10-person team pays the same as one | credits per fetch |
| Pricing | €0 / €29 / €79 / €199 per month, billed annually; 150 to 12,000 credits | Free $0 (1,000 credits a month); Hobby $16 a month annual or $19 monthly (5,000 credits); Standard $83 a month annual (100,000 credits); Growth $333 (500,000); Scale $599 (1,000,000); Enterprise custom |
| CRM and export | HubSpot push; CSV, JSON, API, webhooks | your code writes wherever you want |
| Outreach | drafts personalised email and LinkedIn sequences per lead; you approve before launch | none |
| Code required | none | yes |
| Developer surface | export API from Pro, webhooks on Business | Python, Node.js, Go, Rust, Java and Elixir SDKs, a CLI, and scrape, crawl, search, map, interact and monitor endpoints |
| Best for | any team that needs a list a single database cannot give: B2B sales, agencies, recruiters, marketers, European and Italian teams | developers and AI engineers building products |
Where Firecrawl is stronger
- Developer SDKs and endpoints. Six official SDKs, a CLI, MCP support so an AI coding agent can call it natively, and endpoints for crawling a site, mapping its URLs, searching with full content returned and interacting with a page after it loads. If your job is "give my app the web", Firecrawl beats any UI product, including this one.
- Volume and price per page. 100,000 credits a month for $83, 1,000,000 for $599. No interactive research agent competes on that unit cost, because you are buying raw fetches rather than finished analysis.
- Reliability published in public. 96% coverage on their 1,000-URL benchmark, P95 latency of 3,387 ms, 5 billion requests served, 177.9K GitHub stars and integrations with Shopify, Zapier, Replit and Canva. Publishing checkable numbers is rare in this category.
Where Searchbase is stronger
- One prompt, every source. Firecrawl fetches the URL you name. Searchbase queries the B2B contact databases, Apollo (240M+ people and 30M+ companies, as Apollo states) and Hunter among them, and reads the open web, 12 social platforms, 3 ad libraries, 9 job boards, Crunchbase and the Italian company registry, deciding for itself what to look at until the table is populated.
- No code, and no application to build. Firecrawl gives you page content. Turning that into "247 agencies in Milan with a verified email" is a project: search strategy, deduplication, extraction schema, quality checks, retries, plus the contact-database contracts. Searchbase is that project, finished. If nobody on your team writes Python, the comparison ends here.
- A source on every cell. Firecrawl returns page content and it is on you to track which value came from where. Searchbase attaches the link, the collection time and the extraction method to each individual value, and the provider's status to each email, so a client can click any number and see the page.
- Unverifiable stays empty. Searchbase writes
n/arather than a guess. When an LLM parses raw scraped markdown in your own pipeline, you enforce that discipline yourself. - Ad libraries and creator research, ready made. Reading the Meta, Google and TikTok ad libraries to answer "who is advertising this in Italy" and pulling creator profiles across 12 platforms are built-in capabilities, not integrations you write.
- It ends in outreach, per action, in euros. The agent drafts personalised email and LinkedIn sequences for the people it found and pushes contacts into HubSpot, with your approval before anything launches. Pricing is per action with no seat charge, so a ten-person team pays what one pays, in euros, from a European company, with prompts and results in Italian as well as English. Firecrawl, like Apify and Bright Data, is upstream of all of that by design.
How credits work in Searchbase
You pay per action, not per seat. Reading a page costs about 1 credit, a social profile about 3, a Deep Research report 20 to 40. The Free plan renews 150 credits every month with no card. Starter (€29) gives 1,000 credits, Pro (€79) gives 4,000 with API access and rollover, Business (€199) gives 12,000 with webhooks. Export is JSON on every plan, CSV from Starter, an API from Pro and webhooks on Business, with a direct HubSpot push for contacts. Firecrawl also sells credits, but a Firecrawl credit buys a fetch while a Searchbase credit buys a fetch plus the reading, the extraction and the citation, so the raw numbers are not comparable.
Frequently asked questions
Is Searchbase a Firecrawl alternative? Usually not. They sit at different layers. Firecrawl is an API for developers building an application. Searchbase is a finished research tool for people who are not going to build one. The one case where they compete is a team about to write a lead-list pipeline on top of Firecrawl and wondering whether to buy the finished thing instead.
Could I build Searchbase on top of Firecrawl? You could build something in that direction, and people do. Firecrawl handles the fetching well. What you would still write is the part that decides which pages to read, queries the contact databases alongside them, extracts consistent rows from inconsistent layouts, keeps the source for each value and refuses to fill a cell it cannot verify. That is more work than the scraping.
Which one is cheaper? Firecrawl Hobby is $16 a month on annual billing for 5,000 credits, Standard $83 for 100,000. Searchbase Starter is €29 for 1,000 credits, Business €199 for 12,000. Firecrawl is far cheaper per page fetched, but Searchbase includes the work you would otherwise pay an engineer to do, and charges nothing per seat, so compare finished lists, not credits.
Does Firecrawl do outreach or lead enrichment? No, and it does not claim to. Firecrawl is web content infrastructure. Enrichment and sequencing sit a layer up, in tools like Apollo, Clay or Lusha, or in Searchbase, which queries the contact databases itself and drafts sequences from the people it found.
Does Searchbase have an API? Yes, from the Pro plan (€79 a month), with webhooks on Business and a HubSpot push for contacts. It is an export surface rather than a scraping API, so it does not replace Firecrawl's endpoints.
Where does the data come from? Searchbase: B2B contact databases including Apollo and Hunter, plus company sites, 12 social platforms, 3 ad libraries, 9 job boards, Crunchbase, the Italian company registry, reviews and press, each linked from the cell. Firecrawl: whichever URL or query you pass it, returned as page content.
Prices and features checked on 2026-09-08 from https://www.firecrawl.dev/ and https://www.firecrawl.dev/pricing. Tell us if something changed.