Firecrawl
Advanced web scraping for content extraction, crawling, and search for AI agents.
Mind the Product take
Firecrawl turns your AI agent into a research machine. Need to analyze a competitor's pricing page, scrape job listings to understand market trends, or extract structured data from a messy website? Firecrawl handles the heavy lifting of web scraping - anti-bot detection, JavaScript rendering, clean content extraction - so your agent can focus on the analysis. Essential for competitive intelligence and market research workflows.
How product builders use Firecrawl
- 1Scrape competitor websites for pricing, feature, and positioning analysis
- 2Extract structured data from job boards to understand hiring trends
- 3Build market research reports from multiple web sources automatically
- 4Monitor competitor changelog pages for new feature launches
- 5Gather customer reviews from multiple platforms for sentiment analysis
Getting started
From the official Firecrawl README
Firecrawl MCP Server
A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that brings Firecrawl to MCP-compatible AI agents — search, scrape, and interact with the live web for clean, agent-ready context.
Big thanks to @vrknetha, @knacklabs for the initial implementation!
Features
- Search the web and get full page content
- Scrape any URL into clean, structured data
- Interact with pages — click, navigate, and operate
- Deep research with autonomous agent
- Automatic retries and rate limiting
- Cloud and self-hosted support
- SSE support
Play around with our MCP Server on MCP.so's playground or on Klavis AI.
Hosted MCP (keyless free tier)
Connect to the remote hosted server with no setup:
https://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcp
On the keyless free tier, scrape, search, and interact work without an API key (rate-limited). Other tools such as crawl, map, agent, and extract still need a key.
Prefer an API key or OAuth whenever the human can sign up. It unlocks the full tool set and higher limits. With a key, use:
https://mcp.firecrawl.dev/{FIRECRAWL_API_KEY}/v2/mcp
See the MCP server docs and the agent onboarding guide for setup details.
Running with npx
env FIRECRAWL_API_KEY=fc-YOUR_API_KEY npx -y firecrawl-mcp
Manual Installation
npm install -g firecrawl-mcp
Running on Cursor
Configuring Cursor 🖥️ Note: Requires Cursor version 0.45.6+ For the most up-to-date configuration instructions, please refer to the official Cursor documentation on configuring MCP servers: Cursor MCP Server Configuration Guide
To configure Firecrawl MCP in Cursor v0.48.6
- Open Cursor Settings
- Go to Features > MCP Servers
- Click "+ Add new global MCP server"
- Enter the following code:
{ "mcpServers": { "firecrawl-mcp": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "firecrawl-mcp"], "env": { "FIRECRAWL_API_KEY": "YOUR-API-KEY" } } } }
To configure Firecrawl MCP in Cursor v0.45.6
- Open Cursor Settings
- Go to Features > MCP Servers
- Click "+ Add New MCP Server"
- Enter the following:
- Name: "firecrawl-mcp" (or your preferred name)
- Type: "command"
- Command:
env FIRECRAWL_API_KEY=your-api-key npx -y firecrawl-mcp
If you are using Windows and are running into issues, try
cmd /c "set FIRECRAWL_API_KEY=your-api-key && npx -y firecrawl-mcp"
Replace your-api-key with your Firecrawl API key. If you don't have one yet, you can create an account and get it from https://www.firecrawl.dev/app/api-keys
After adding, refresh the MCP server list to see the new tools. The Composer Agent will automatically use Firecrawl MCP when appropriate, but you can explicitly request it by describing your web scraping needs. Access the Composer via Command+L (Mac), select "Agent" next to the submit button, and enter your query.
Running on Windsurf
Add this to your ./codeium/windsurf/model_config.json:
{
"mcpServers": {
"mcp-server-firecrawl": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "firecrawl-mcp"],
"env": {
"FIRECRAWL_API_KEY": "YOUR_API_KEY"
}
}
}
}
Running with Streamable HTTP Local Mode
To run the server using Streamable HTTP locally instead of the default stdio transport:
env HTTP_STREAMABLE_SERVER=true FIRECRAWL_API_KEY=fc-YOUR_API_KEY npx -y firecrawl-mcp
Use the url: http://localhost:3000/mcp
Installing via Smithery (Legacy)
To install Firecrawl for Claude Desktop automatically via Smithery:
npx -y @smithery/cli install @mendableai/mcp-server-firecrawl --client claude
Running on VS Code
For one-click installation, click one of the install buttons below...
For manual installation, add the following JSON block to your User Settings (JSON) file in VS Code. You can do this by pressing Ctrl + Shift + P and typing Preferences: Open User Settings (JSON).
{
"mcp": {
"inputs": [
{
"type": "promptString",
"id": "apiKey",
"description": "Firecrawl API Key",
"password": true
}
],
"servers": {
"firecrawl": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "firecrawl-mcp"],
"env": {
"FIRECRAWL_API_KEY": "${input:apiKey}"
}
}
}
}
}
Optionally, you can add it to a file called .vscode/mcp.json in your workspace. This will allow you to share the configuration with others:
{
"inputs": [
{
"type": "promptString",
"id": "apiKey",
"description": "Firecrawl API Key",
"password": true
}
],
"servers": {
"firecrawl": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "firecrawl-mcp"],
"env": {
"FIRECRAWL_API_KEY": "${input:apiKey}"
}
}
}
}
Environment Variables
Required for Cloud API
FIRECRAWL_API_KEY: Your Firecrawl API key- Required when using cloud API (default)
- Optional when using self-hosted instance with
FIRECRAWL_API_URL
FIRECRAWL_API_URL(Optional): Custom API endpoint for self-hosted instances- Example:
https://firecrawl.your-domain.com - If not provided, the cloud API will be used (requires API key)
- Example:
MCP OAuth (Bearer access tokens)
Hosted Firecrawl can issue OAuth access tokens (fco_…) via the authorization server on firecrawl.dev. This MCP server forwards whichever credential it resolves to the Firecrawl API as Authorization: Bearer ….
- HTTP stream transports (
CLOUD_SERVICE=true,HTTP_STREAMABLE_SERVER=true, orSSE_LOCAL=true): Clients should sendAuthorization: Bearer <fco_access_token>on MCP requests. An OAuth bearer token takes precedence overx-firecrawl-api-key/x-api-keywhen both are present. - stdio: Use
FIRECRAWL_OAUTH_TOKENfor a static access token, or keep usingFIRECRAWL_API_KEYfor an API key.
Use access tokens (fco_…) only. Refresh tokens (fcr_…) must be exchanged at the token endpoint, not passed to the scrape/search API.
Configuration Examples
For cloud API usage:
export FIRECRAWL_API_KEY=your-api-key
For self-hosted instance: