If you've ever tried to pull data off a website — prices, listings, articles, anything — you know the annoying part isn't reading the page, it's everything around it: rendering JavaScript, dodging bot blockers, and rewriting your code every time the site's HTML changes. A new wave of tools handles that layer for you and hands back clean, structured data (often already formatted for feeding straight into an LLM). Here are 8 real options, from managed APIs to free local tools, based on what's actually in each product today.
1. Firecrawl — the default choice for AI pipelines
Firecrawl turns entire websites into clean markdown or JSON, and it's built specifically with LLM consumption in mind — the output format is designed to be dropped straight into a RAG pipeline or an agent's context. It's open source (AGPL-3.0) with a genuinely large community (~40k GitHub stars), and it handles JavaScript-heavy pages, not just static HTML.
Pricing: Free tier at 1,000 pages/month, then Hobby $16/mo (5K pages) up to Scale $599/mo (1M pages), with custom Enterprise above that.
Watch out for: pricing scales directly with page volume, so high-frequency crawling gets expensive fast, and its proxy/anti-bot infrastructure is less mature than dedicated scraping platforms like Bright Data. The AGPL license also has copyleft implications if you self-host and modify it commercially.
Best for: teams building RAG pipelines, research agents, lead enrichment, or competitive intelligence tools.
2. Context.dev — pay only for pages that actually scrape
Context.dev is a Y Combinator-backed, SOC 2 Type I-certified service that turns messy pages into structured data without you managing any scraping infrastructure — no proxies, no headless browsers, no anti-bot cat-and-mouse. It ships SDKs in 5 languages plus a native MCP server, so an AI agent can call it directly.
Pricing: Free (500 credits), Developer $25/mo (10K credits), Pro $149/mo (200K credits), Scale $499/mo (1M credits). You're only billed for pages successfully scraped.
Watch out for: the credit model can get pricey at intensive usage compared to running your own infra at scale, and there's no persistent free tier for production use — the Pro tier's 200K credits for $149/mo is also a narrow band for heavier volume.
Best for: developers and teams building AI agents or data pipelines who don't want to own scraping infrastructure at all.
3. Tabstack — privacy-first, backed by Mozilla
Tabstack reads and interacts with web pages through a single API call — extraction, clean-text conversion, browser automation, and even cited multi-source search in one product. It's backed by Mozilla with a real commitment to not training on customer data, and it respects robots.txt by default. It can auto-generate JSON Schema, Zod, or Pydantic schemas straight from any page.
Pricing: Free 10,000 credits, then pay-as-you-go at $0.35/1,000 credits, Team $99/mo (500K credits), Pro $499/mo (3M credits).
Watch out for: it's young — the open-source CLI has just 11 GitHub stars — and it's less known than Firecrawl in the developer community. It also comes out of Mozilla's experimental arm, so long-term backing is worth watching.
Best for: teams building products that depend on live web data — price monitoring, lead enrichment, market research, internal automation agents.
4. Fitter — free, local, no scraping code
Fitter turns any website or API into structured JSON by describing what you want in a config file — no scraping code to write or maintain. It's completely free (MIT license), runs 100% locally with no third-party API dependency, and ships as a lightweight ~7MB WebAssembly binary. It supports HTTP, headless browser, and JSON/XML/HTML/XPath/PDF parsing, plus an MCP server mode for AI agents.
Pricing: Free, open source.
Watch out for: it's still sensitive to target site structure changes like any scraper, there's no managed infrastructure (proxy rotation, IP management), and the community is modest compared to something like Scrapy.
Best for: developers and AI agents who want structured extraction without writing or paying for scraper code.
5. browse.sh — pre-built recipes so agents don't fumble
browse.sh is a different angle entirely: instead of scraping raw HTML, it's a library of 400+ ready-made "how-to" recipes for AI agents navigating real sites (travel, e-commerce, government portals, and more). The pitch is that an agent following a known recipe uses up to 50x fewer tokens than one improvising its way around a new site from scratch, and it has explicit guardrails against automatic payments or account creation.
Pricing: Not publicly listed — the skills catalog is public on GitHub (~3,658 stars), but real-world cost, especially via Browserbase Cloud, isn't published.
Watch out for: the open-source status is ambiguous (public catalog, unclear license on the main CLI), and scaling usage likely pushes you toward Browserbase's paid cloud product.
Best for: teams building agents that need to interact reliably and repeatedly with the same real-world sites.
6. BrowserOS — a free, open-source AI browser
BrowserOS is a regular web browser with an AI assistant built in — tell it in plain English to summarize a page, fill a form, or run a multi-step task, and it does it locally without a subscription. It's open source (AGPL-3.0), works with 11+ LLM providers so you're not locked to one vendor, and can run fully offline with local models via Ollama. BrowserClaw lets external coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor) control a real browser through MCP.
Pricing: Free and open source; you only pay if you choose a paid model provider (OpenAI, Anthropic) — local Ollama models are free.
Watch out for: it's a Chromium fork maintained by a small open-source team, so it has fewer security guarantees than a mainstream browser, and agent quality depends heavily on which model you plug in.
Best for: privacy-conscious developers who want an AI agent acting on web pages without a proprietary cloud service.
7. Orchestra — no-code, one-time purchase, real Playwright code out
Orchestra is a desktop app where you build a web automation by pointing and clicking — filling forms, scraping data, clicking through flows — and it hands you real, ready-to-use Playwright code at the end instead of locking your work behind a subscription. It includes 43 visual instruments and live variable tracking, and runs offline for up to 7 days.
Pricing: $129 one-time payment (14-day free trial), licensed for 3 devices, no recurring fees.
Watch out for: no native cloud execution — it depends on your local machine — and it has a smaller ecosystem than an established RPA player like UiPath. Little public info on the team behind it.
Best for: developers, QA engineers, and ops teams who need to automate recurring web tasks without a subscription or code from scratch.
8. Kampala — turns real app traffic into a working API
Kampala takes a different approach: it watches an app's network traffic while you use it normally, then generates a working, typed API from what it observed — auth and rate-limiting included. That makes it useful for legacy systems with no API at all (insurance portals, carrier systems, old internal tools), and it has an MCP interface so a coding agent like Claude Code can build the integration directly.
Pricing: Not public — sales-only, aimed at enterprise use cases (healthcare, logistics, hospitality, insurance).
Watch out for: no published pricing means a sales call just to evaluate it, it's a very young product (YC W26 batch) with little track record, and results depend on the target app's traffic patterns.
Best for: developers and startups needing programmatic access to internal or legacy systems that don't expose an API.
Quick comparison
| Tool | Type | Pricing | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Firecrawl | Managed API | Free–$599/mo | RAG pipelines, LLM-ready output |
| Context.dev | Managed API | Free–$499/mo | Zero-infra structured extraction |
| Tabstack | Managed API | Free–$499/mo | Privacy-first, multi-endpoint |
| Fitter | Local/open source | Free | No-code local extraction |
| browse.sh | Agent recipes | Unpublished | Token-efficient repeat navigation |
| BrowserOS | AI browser | Free | Local, privacy-first browsing agent |
| Orchestra | No-code desktop | $129 one-time | No-subscription visual automation |
| Kampala | Traffic-to-API | Custom/sales | Legacy systems with no API |
There's no single "best" here because these tools solve slightly different problems. If you're feeding a RAG pipeline or an agent's context window, Firecrawl or Context.dev are the safest starting points. If you want zero cost and don't mind running things yourself, Fitter or BrowserOS get you there for free. And if the problem isn't scraping public pages but wiring up an API for a system that never had one, Kampala is solving a genuinely different problem than the rest of this list.