A free, local alternative to Firecrawl
Scrape, crawl, map, search and extract — the same jobs, run on your machine with no credits, no account and no API key.
wigolo and Firecrawl, side by side
Firecrawl is a web data API for scraping, crawling, mapping, searching and interacting with pages, sold as a hosted service on monthly credits. Its core is open source (AGPL-3.0) and can be self-hosted with Docker Compose.
wigolo is a free, open-source server that gives any AI agent the same web jobs from your own machine: search across 18 engines, fetch, crawl, extract, a persistent local cache, find-similar, research and autonomous gathering. There is no account and no metered bill.
| wigolo | Firecrawl | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Your machine, or your own server | Their cloud, or self-hosted with Docker Compose |
| Account / API key | None | Required for the hosted API |
| Cost per query | $0, unlimited | Metered on the hosted API (see pricing below) |
| Where your queries go | Straight to the search engines it queries and the pages it fetches — no vendor in between, no account attached | To the vendor on the hosted API, tied to your account |
| Persistent local memory | Every page lands in a local cache with keyword + semantic re-query, offline | — |
| Evidence format | Verbatim excerpts pinned to byte-offset source spans, with an explainable score per result | Results with snippets or page content |
| Agent surfaces | MCP (stdio + HTTP), REST, CLI, TypeScript & Python SDKs, LangChain, CrewAI, LlamaIndex, Vercel AI SDK | Hosted API, SDKs, MCP server |
| Pricing | Free | Free plan: 1,000 credits a month. Hobby from $16/month billed yearly. 1 credit per scraped page; search is 2 credits per 10 results |
| Licence | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 (self-hosted core) |
| Web search | 18 engines fused, reranked on-device | Search endpoint |
| Scrape / crawl / map | fetch, crawl (bfs, dfs, sitemap, map) | scrape, crawl, map |
| JS-heavy pages | HTTP first, escalating to a headless browser engine when a page needs it | Browser rendering |
Firecrawl details as published by Firecrawl, checked September 2026: Firecrawl pricing, Firecrawl self-hosting guide. Check their site for current terms.
Moving from Firecrawl
Each Firecrawl endpoint has a wigolo tool that does the same job. Wire wigolo into your agent over MCP and it discovers these tools on its own; frameworks and scripts use the REST API or the TypeScript and Python SDKs.
| Firecrawl | wigolo tool | Notes |
|---|---|---|
scrape | fetch | clean markdown; section to pull one part of a page |
crawl | crawl | bfs / dfs / sitemap strategies, robots.txt respected |
map | crawl | strategy: "map" returns URLs only |
search | search | multi-query, per-result evidence scores |
extract / JSON format | extract | schema, tables, metadata, selector modes |
interact | fetch | actions for click, type and scroll steps |
agent | agent / research | |
monitor | watch | interval checks, diffs, webhook delivery |
Full parameters for every tool: tool reference.
Questions
Is wigolo a drop-in Firecrawl replacement?
The jobs map one to one — scrape → fetch, crawl → crawl, map → crawl with the map strategy, search → search, extract → extract, monitor → watch — but the API shape is wigolo's own. Point your agent at wigolo over MCP and it discovers the tools itself.
Firecrawl is open source too — what's the difference?
Self-hosting Firecrawl means running its service stack with Docker Compose, including its queue and database services. wigolo is a single local server you start with npx wigolo init: it adds a persistent local knowledge cache, multi-engine search fused and reranked on-device, and byte-offset source spans on every excerpt.
Does wigolo need an API key?
No. Search, fetch, crawl, extract and the cache run keyless on your machine. An LLM key (or a local model) is optional and only adds answer synthesis to research and agent runs.
Which agents does it work with?
Any MCP client. npx wigolo init --agents=<agent> wires Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, VS Code, Windsurf, Zed and Antigravity in one command; frameworks and self-hosted automations use the REST API or the SDKs.
Is it really free?
Yes — wigolo is open source (AGPL-3.0) with no paid tier and no metered bill. It runs on hardware you already have, so there is nothing to charge per query. Companies that want to embed it without AGPL obligations can take a commercial license.