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Firecrawl Alternative: When Cofferdock Makes Sense (and When It Doesn't)
Short answer: if you only scrape, and a lot (or you need whole-site crawling), Firecrawl is the better choice. If you read a few pages inside flows that also make PDFs, images or screenshots, Cofferdock's URL to Markdown keeps it all in one account.
Firecrawl is a well-known way to turn web pages into Markdown for AI tools and automations. If you are deciding between Firecrawl and Cofferdock, here are the real differences, including the cases where Firecrawl is the better choice.
Prices as listed on each website on 26 October 2026. Check them before you decide.
The free way first
Before paying for any API, check whether the built-in tools in your automation tool are enough:
- n8n: an HTTP Request node gets the page (set Response Format to Text), then the built-in Markdown node in HTML to Markdown mode converts it. You can drop menus and footers with Ignored Elements.
- Make: the HTTP module gets the HTML, and the Text parser module turns it into plain text (not Markdown).
- Zapier: Web Parser by Zapier can return Markdown, and it is aimed at articles.
- Code: the Python library
markdownifyconverts HTML in a few lines.
The limit of the n8n, Make and code options: they do not run the page's JavaScript, so pages that build their content with JavaScript can come back almost empty. For articles and simple pages, the free way is often enough.
Pricing
| Plan | Firecrawl | Cofferdock |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 1,000 credits a month | 50 credits a month |
| Entry | Hobby, $19 a month: 5,000 | Pro, €9 a month: 500 |
| Middle | Standard, $99 a month: 100,000 | Business, €29 a month: 2,000 |
| Large | Growth, $399: 500,000 and Scale, $749: 1,000,000 | Scale, €79 a month: 10,000 |
One page costs 1 credit on both. Per page on the entry plan, Firecrawl is about $0.004 and Cofferdock about €0.018 (on Scale, about €0.008). Both sites also list cheaper yearly prices, so check their pricing pages for those numbers.
Where Firecrawl wins
- Much cheaper per page at volume. If you read thousands of pages a month, its larger plans are hard to beat.
- A bigger free tier: 1,000 credits a month, with no card.
- More than one page at a time. Crawl reads every page of a site in one request, Map lists all the URLs of a site, Search runs a web search with the full page content, and an Agent endpoint lets you describe the data you want.
- Open source. The main repository is licensed AGPL-3.0 and can be self-hosted.
- Very present in n8n. 66 templates in n8n's public library mention it (checked 26 October 2026).
If scraping is all you need, and at volume, Firecrawl is the logical choice.
Where Cofferdock wins
- It isn't just Markdown. The same credits work for every Cofferdock tool: HTML to image, HTML to PDF, screenshots, PDF editing, images, QR codes and validation. If your flow reads a page and then creates a PDF from it, you do it all with one account.
- A simple one-page call, with step-by-step guides for n8n, Make and Zapier.
- It also converts HTML you already have, with no browser needed (
htmlmode). - Failed calls are not charged.
- It opens pages with JavaScript in a real browser, keeps the main content (using the same detection as Firefox's reader view) and returns the page's metadata: title, description, author, date and more.
- Its limit: one page per call. It cannot crawl a whole site, and it cannot read pages that need a login.
An example call on Cofferdock
curl -X POST "https://api.cofferdock.com/web-to-markdown" \
-H "x-api-key: YOUR_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"url": "https://example.com/article"}'The answer comes back as JSON, with the text in content and the page title in title.
In short
- Lots of scraping, or whole-site crawling: Firecrawl.
- Pages read inside flows that also make PDFs, images or screenshots, or something simple to set up in n8n, Make or Zapier: Cofferdock.
FAQ
Can Cofferdock crawl a whole website? No. Each call reads one page. To cover a site, make a list of URLs in your flow and loop over it.
Is Firecrawl open source? Its main repository is licensed AGPL-3.0, and it can be self-hosted. Its SDKs are MIT.
Does Cofferdock run JavaScript? Yes. It opens the page in a real browser, so it also reads sites that build their content with JavaScript.
Related guides
Try it yourself
Try Cofferdock's URL to Markdown on the free plan, no card needed, or read the tool page.