Axiom vs Firecrawl
Observability for logs, traces, events — serverless-first, infinite scale
vs. AI-native web scraping + crawling API — LLM-ready data extraction
Pricing tiers
Axiom
Personal (Free)
No credit card. 500 GB/month ingest, 10 GB-hr compute, 25 GB storage, 30-day retention max.
Free
Axiom Cloud
$25/month minimum platform fee. Volume-based ingest + query credits. Always-free allowances: 1 TB/mo ingest, 100 GB-hr queries, 100 GB storage.
$25/mo
RBAC Add-on
+$50/month for role-based access control.
$50/mo
Audit Logs Add-on
+$50/month for audit logs.
$50/mo
Directory Sync Add-on
+$100/month for SCIM.
$100/mo
SSO Add-on
+$100/month for SAML SSO.
$100/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Dedicated cluster option, private connectivity, SLA.
Custom
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
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing personal on Axiom vs free on Firecrawl.
| Metric | Axiom | Firecrawl |
|---|---|---|
| ingest gb month | 500 GB/month | — |
| query compute gb hr | 10 GB-hr/month | — |
| retention max days | 30 days | — |
| storage gb | 25 GB | — |
Features
Axiom · 15 features
- API Tokens — Scoped tokens for ingest or query.
- APL (query language) — Axiom Processing Language — Kusto-inspired pipes (`|`). Fast + expressive.
- AWS Lambda Extension — Native extension to ship Lambda logs + traces.
- Cloudflare Integration — Workers + Pages log drain. Log pull from any Cloudflare zone.
- Dashboards — Visualizations from APL queries: line/bar/pie/heatmap/table.
- Datasets — Logical partitions of data. Schema-free; fields auto-indexed.
- Elastic Bulk API compat — Elasticsearch Bulk API endpoint — drop-in replacement.
- Field Explorer — Auto-detected field stats, histograms, top-values per dataset.
- Monitors (alerts) — Threshold + anomaly-based alerting on APL queries. Route to Slack/PagerDuty/emai…
- next-axiom — Next.js logger with automatic correlation + Web Vitals capture.
- OpenTelemetry-native — Ingest OTLP/HTTP + gRPC. No proprietary agent.
- Saved Queries — Save + share APL queries as starters.
- Stream (live tail) — Live tail of incoming events with filter bar.
- Traces — OpenTelemetry-native. Distributed tracing across services.
- Vercel Integration — One-click: Vercel logs + Web Vitals → Axiom.
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.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Axiom | Firecrawl |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | Axiom CLI | Firecrawl CLI |
| SDK | axiom-go, @axiomhq/js, axiom-py, axiom-rs, next-axiom | firecrawl-go, firecrawl-js, firecrawl-py |
| REST | Axiom REST API, Ingest HTTP endpoint | Firecrawl REST API |
| MCP | Axiom MCP | Firecrawl MCP Server |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Axiom and Firecrawl are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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