AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to LightCrawl
Lightweight, self-hostable Web scraping API & MCP server
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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/agent by Firecrawl ▲569While building mendable - we found that feeding LLMs well-structured markdown improved accuracy. We also found it surprisingly hard. We found some great tools online, but none reliably handled the entire process. We wanted an API that took a URL, crawled the pages in the URL, and gave us an easy-to-use, up-to-date markdown we could feed into our index. So, we released an open-source repo and an API that crawls and turns entire websites into a markdown with just a few lines of code The API handles: - Crawling without consistent sitemaps - Infra to handle running many crawling jobs - Proxying,…
Dec 2025 · firecrawl.dev · its alternatives →
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Agent-ready web context for any MCP client.
Aug 2026 · docs.firecrawl.dev · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! Excited to share our MCP Server at Hyperbrowser - something we’ve been working on for a few days. We think it’s a pretty neat way to connect LLMs and IDEs like Cursor / Windsurf to the internet. Our MCP server exposes seven tools for data collection and browsing: 1. `scrape_webpage` - Extract formatted (markdown, screenshot etc) content from any webpage 2. `crawl_webpages` - Navigate through multiple linked pages and extract LLM-friendly formatted content 3. `extract_structured_data` - Convert messy HTML into structured JSON 4. `search_with_bing` - Query the web and get results…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Firecrawl CLI▲249Firecrawl skills are an easy way for AI agents such as Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, and OpenCode to use Firecrawl through the CLI.
Mar 2026 · docs.firecrawl.dev · its alternatives →
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Firecrawl Simple is a stripped down and stable version of firecrawl optimized for self-hosting and ease of contribution. The upstream firecrawl repo contains the following blurb: >This repository is in development, and we're still integrating custom modules into the mono repo. It's not fully ready for self-hosted deployment yet, but you can run it locally. Firecrawl's API surface and general functionality were ideal for our Trieve sitesearch product, but we needed a version ready for self-hosting that was easy to contribute to and scale on Kubernetes. Therefore, we decided to fork and begin…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Simple Scraper▲556Turn any website into an API in just a few seconds.
2019 · simplescraper.io · its alternatives →
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An ultra-fast, single-binary MCP server written in Rust as a lightweight alternative to Node.js/Python. - StamManif/mcp-stama
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Two months ago, I started building this side-project in the morning, before my full-time job. A visual and easy-to-use web scraping app. Please, roast it a bit so I can work on improving it. Thanks.
2023 · mrscraper.com · its alternatives →
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Our most accurate Search API for AI agents.
Jul 2026 · docs.firecrawl.dev · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, This is Jan, founder of Apify, a web scraping and automation platform. Drawing on our team's years of experience, today we're launching Crawlee [1], the web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js that's designed for the fastest development and maximum reliability in production. For details, see the short video [2] or read the announcement blog post [3]. Main features: - Supports headless browsers with Playwright or Puppeteer - Supports raw HTTP crawling with Cheerio or JSDOM - Automated parallelization and scaling of crawlers for best performance - Avoids blocking using…
2022 · crawlee.dev · its alternatives →
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Alright so if you run a self-hosted blog, you've probably noticed AI companies scraping it for training data. And not just a little (RIP to your server bill). There isn't much you can do about it without cloudflare. These companies ignore robots.txt, and you're competing with teams with more resources than you. It's you vs the MJs of programming, you're not going to win. But there is a solution. Now I'm not going to say it's a great solution...but a solution is a solution. If your website contains content that will trigger their scraper's safeguards, it will get dropped from their data…
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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AnyCrawl▲13Anycrawl is a high-performance alternative to Firecrawl
2025 · anycrawl.dev · its alternatives →
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Web Scraper API▲287Scrape the web at scale without getting blocked
2021 · datashake.com · its alternatives →
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JDoodleClaw▲120The most user-friendly OpenClaw. Securely hosted.
Mar 2026 · jdoodle.com · its alternatives →
- 19OS
Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful, but they’re limited by fixed context windows and outdated knowledge. What if your AI could access live search, structured data extraction, OCR, and more—all through a standardized interface? We built the JigsawStack MCP Server, an open-source implementation of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that lets any AI model call external tools effortlessly. Here’s what it unlocks: - Web Search & Scraping: Fetch live information and extract structured data from web pages. - OCR & Structured Data Extraction: Process images, receipts, invoices, and handwritten…
2025 · its alternatives →
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- 21WM
2025 · npmjs.com · its alternatives →
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Give LLMs access to web accessibility testing APIs
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Learn how to scrape webpages using Puppeteer and Serverless Functions built with OpenFaaS.
2020 · openfaas.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Hi HN, I built webctl because I was frustrated by the gap between curl and full browser automation frameworks like Playwright. I initially built this to solve a personal headache: I wanted an AI agent to handle project management tasks on my company’s intranet. I needed it to persist cookies across sessions (to handle SSO) and then scrape a Kanban board. Existing AI browser tools (like current MCP implementations) often force unsolicited data into the context window—dumping the full accessibility tree, console logs, and network errors whether you asked for them or not. webctl is an attempt…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →