Firecrawl and Tavily nail URL-to-markdown for AI agents. UnifAPI bundles scrape with social, SERP, and news behind one key, one bill, $0.001 per record.

Firecrawl and Tavily are URL-to-markdown specialists: hand them a link, get back clean, LLM-ready text, often with structured extraction on top. They're the cleanest answer in the agent ecosystem for "read this page for me." UnifAPI ships scrape too — but as part of a unified surface that also covers social platforms, search, and news, all behind one API key at a flat $0.001 per record.

Where Firecrawl and Tavily win

Both vendors focus on one thing and do it well: turn an arbitrary URL into something an LLM can read. Firecrawl emphasizes structured extraction ("give me the product name and price from this page as JSON"), site crawling ("map every page under this domain"), and a clean markdown output. Tavily emphasizes RAG-friendly search-and-summarize on top of the open web, with an answer-engine flavor.

If your agent's job is to read pages and your inputs are URLs, both are excellent. The DX is tight, the markdown is genuinely clean, and the structured-extraction shortcut beats writing your own selectors.

Why agents end up needing more

Most agents start with "read this page" and end up needing "find the pages worth reading." That second half is where scrape vendors hand off to either a search API or a social-platform API. "Summarize what TikTok creators are saying" doesn't start with a URL — it starts with a query against TikTok. "Find the top Reddit threads about X" doesn't start with a URL either.

Once the agent needs to discover URLs as well as read them, you're suddenly running two vendor integrations: a scrape specialist plus a search or social API. That's the boundary where UnifAPI takes over.

What UnifAPI bundles in

UnifAPI is one auth header across social (14 live platforms — TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter/X, Threads, Reddit, plus seven Chinese platforms), with search (Google + Bing SERP, Google Trends), scrape (URL-to-markdown, URL-to-data), and news search on the roadmap. Same envelope, same pagination, same rate sheet.

For an agent that wires together social discovery → URL extraction → page read → summarization, UnifAPI keeps the integration count at one. The scrape endpoint is one of many siblings rather than a standalone service.

Pricing comparison

Firecrawl bills credits per page scraped, with tier plans ($16 / month for 3K credits at the entry tier, scaling up). Tavily bills similarly with monthly call quotas. Both have generous free tiers for evaluation.

UnifAPI is flat $0.001 per record returned, no tier. A scrape that returns one markdown page is one record. A search that returns 10 results is 10 records. The math is easy to estimate before you ship.

How to decide

Pick Firecrawl if your inputs are mostly URLs, structured extraction is your core need, and your team is happy operating two or three specialist vendors for the discovery half. Pick Tavily if you specifically want answer-engine semantics out of the box.

Pick UnifAPI if your agent already needs social or search inputs alongside scrape and you'd rather not maintain three vendors. The scrape capability is on the roadmap behind the same key and envelope as the rest — one bill, one shape, no per-vendor reconciliation.

Browse the catalog at unifapi.com/apis, see pricing at unifapi.com/pricing, or wire the MCP server in three minutes at unifapi.com/mcp.