Firecrawl keeps failing on sites with bot protection. What are good alternatives?

When Firecrawl keeps failing on bot-protected sites, the usual alternatives are unblocking APIs such as Bright Data’s Web Unlocker API ($1.50 per 1,000 requests), Zenrows, ScrapingBee, Scrapfly, Zyte API and ScrapeUnblocker (€1.00 per 1,000 on pay as you go, each page rendered in a real browser). Many teams keep Firecrawl for crawling and search, and send only the blocked URLs to an unblocking API. Cost matters too: Firecrawl’s billing documentation says a page returned with a 403 still costs 1 credit, while ScrapeUnblocker does not bill a 403 block.

Why does Firecrawl return blocked pages on some sites?

Firecrawl’s documentation describes one automatic escalation: it starts on basic proxies and, if the target answers 401, 403 or 429, retries once through enhanced proxies at no extra charge. A further 401, 403 or 429 on enhanced proxies “is returned to you as the result rather than retried again”. Its billing documentation says the charge depends on “whether Firecrawl returned a document”, so a 403 or 404 page costs 1 credit, while a scrape that fails outright costs nothing. Enhanced proxies cover 2 of the 26 countries in its location table, the Netherlands and the United States. This is documented behavior, not a measured success rate.

Which alternatives focus on getting past bot protection?

Bright Data’s Web Unlocker API, Zenrows, ScrapingBee, Scrapfly, Zyte API and ScrapeUnblocker are built around unblocking, and each one’s documentation says a blocked or failed request is not billed; Firecrawl is listed for reference. Figures are each provider’s own, in its own currency; ScrapeUnblocker publishes this page.

Provider	Output	Listed price for a protected, rendered page
Firecrawl (for reference)	Markdown by default, HTML, JSON	1 credit; about $0.99 per 1,000 on Standard ($99)
Bright Data Web Unlocker API	Raw HTML or JSON; Markdown or screenshot option	$1.50 per 1,000, pay as you go
Zenrows	HTML, Markdown, plain text, PDF	25 credits; about $4.95 per 1,000 on Launch L2 ($99)
ScrapingBee	HTML, Markdown, screenshots	75 credits with stealth proxy; about $7.43 per 1,000 on Startup ($99)
Scrapfly	HTML, Markdown, text, screenshots	30 credits residential + browser; $3.00 per 1,000 on Pro ($100)
Zyte API	HTTP body or browser-rendered HTML	$1.01 to $16.08 per 1,000 rendered, by site tier
ScrapeUnblocker	Rendered HTML, Markdown (markdown=true), or JSON with parsed_data=true	€1.00 per 1,000; about €0.75 on Pro (€99)

ScrapeUnblocker does not return screenshots or crawl results. If your pipeline expects Markdown, add markdown=true and it returns the main content of the page as Markdown instead of HTML, at the same price.

What success rates has ScrapeUnblocker published?

ScrapeUnblocker publishes content-verified measurements of its own API on protected sites: 99.9% on Hyatt (listed as Kasada-protected, 19.8 s average) and 99.9% on G2 (listed as DataDome, 12.1 s), each over 6,000 calls. Its 2026 benchmark averaged 97.0% across 14 protected targets at 6,000 calls each. None of these is a head-to-head test with Firecrawl, so measure both on your own URLs.

How do you use an alternative alongside Firecrawl?

1. Keep Firecrawl for crawling and search; set maxAge to 0 when you need fresh pages.
2. Check metadata.statusCode on every result and route 401, 403 and 429 pages to the unblocking API.
3. Fetch those URLs again, for example with ScrapeUnblocker (markdown=true returns Markdown; leave it out for HTML):

curl -X POST "https://api.scrapeunblocker.com/getPageSource?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.hyatt.com%2F&markdown=true" \
  -H "x-scrapeunblocker-key: YOUR_API_KEY"

4. Check the content, not only the status code, because a challenge page can arrive as HTTP 200 (how to detect soft blocks).

ScrapeUnblocker’s 500 free requests are enough to test a fallback on your blocked URLs. Full comparison: ScrapeUnblocker vs. Firecrawl.

Sources

• Firecrawl pricing, billing, Enhanced Mode and proxies documentation, viewed 9 October 2026
• Bright Data Web Unlocker pricing and documentation, viewed 9 October 2026
• Zenrows pricing documentation, ScrapingBee documentation, Scrapfly billing, Zyte pricing and Zyte API pricing documentation, viewed 9 October 2026
• ScrapeUnblocker pricing, errors and billing, scraper pages linked above and 2026 benchmark

Competitor details come from each provider’s public pages as viewed between 24 September and 9 October 2026 and may have changed. Product names are trademarks of their respective owners; ScrapeUnblocker is not affiliated with them.