Firecrawl vs Buildkite
AI-native web scraping + crawling API — LLM-ready data extraction
vs. Hybrid CI/CD — your compute, their orchestration. Built for scale.
Pricing tiers
Firecrawl
Free
500 credits one-time. 2 concurrent requests. For exploration.
Free
Self-Hosted (OSS)
AGPL-3.0 licensed. Run on your own infra.
$0 base (usage-based)
Hobby
$19/month ($16 annual). 3,000 credits/month. 5 concurrent.
$19/mo
Standard
$99/month ($83 annual). 100,000 credits. 50 concurrent. Most popular.
$99/mo
Growth
$399/month ($333 annual). 500,000 credits. 100 concurrent.
$399/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Dedicated support + SLA, bulk discounts, zero-data retention, SSO, advanced security.
Custom
Buildkite
Free (Developer)
$0. Unlimited jobs on self-hosted agents. 10K jobs/mo on Buildkite Hosted.
Free
Buildkite Hosted (usage)
Per-minute on Buildkite-hosted agents. $0.002/min Linux baseline.
$0/mo
Pro
$20/user/mo. SSO. Audit log. Support. Unlimited self-hosted.
$20/mo
Enterprise
Custom. SAML, RBAC, audit SLA, dedicated support.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on Firecrawl vs free on Buildkite.
| Metric | Firecrawl | Buildkite |
|---|---|---|
| No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers. | ||
Features
Firecrawl · 16 features
- Batch Scrape — Scrape many URLs in parallel.
- Crawl — Crawl an entire site following links. Returns all pages.
- Custom Headers/Cookies — Scrape behind login via headers.
- Deep Research (beta) — AI agent that autonomously researches a query across many sites.
- Extract (AI) — Structured extraction with a JSON schema → Firecrawl runs LLM for you.
- JavaScript Rendering — Headless browser handles SPAs, React/Vue sites.
- LLM-Ready Markdown — Cleaned + normalized Markdown optimized for LLM ingestion.
- Map — Fast — returns all URLs on a site without fetching content.
- MCP Server — Official MCP for Claude / Cursor / Agents.
- Open Source (AGPL) — Self-host the entire stack via Docker.
- PDF Parsing — Extract text from PDFs.
- Residential Proxies — Bypass anti-bot + geoblocks (paid).
- Scrape — Single URL → clean markdown/JSON/HTML.
- Screenshots — Visual screenshot alongside content.
- Search (beta) — Google-like search API returning results + content.
- Structured Output — Extract to JSON schema via LLM.
Buildkite · 17 features
- Agent Queues — Route jobs to specific agents by tag.
- Annotations — Rich Markdown in build UI.
- Artifacts — Upload + download build artifacts.
- Audit Log — Enterprise audit.
- Automatic Cancel — Cancel stale builds on new push.
- Automatic + Manual Retries — Configurable retry semantics.
- Buildkite Hosted Agents — Managed agents (opt-in).
- Dynamic Pipelines — Generate YAML in a command step.
- input Step — Block for user input.
- Parallelism — Parallel step scaling with BUILDKITE_PARALLEL_JOB.
- Pipelines — YAML + optional dynamic upload.
- Plugins — Agent-level lifecycle hooks.
- Secrets (Vault) — Integrate with HashiCorp Vault, SSM.
- Teams + RBAC — Enterprise permissions.
- Test Engine — Flaky test + timing insights.
- trigger Step — Fire another pipeline.
- wait Step — Sync point in pipeline.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Firecrawl | Buildkite |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | Firecrawl CLI | bk (Buildkite CLI) |
| SDK | firecrawl-go, firecrawl-js, firecrawl-py | — |
| REST | Firecrawl REST API | Buildkite REST API |
| GRAPHQL | — | Buildkite GraphQL API |
| MCP | Firecrawl MCP Server | — |
| OTHER | — | Buildkite Agent, Buildkite Dashboard, Buildkite Plugins, pipeline.yml |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Some links to Firecrawl and Buildkite may be affiliate links — Staxly may earn a commission if you sign up through them, at no extra cost to you. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
Want this comparison in your AI agent's context? Install the free Staxly MCP server.