Freecrawl

Open-source web scraping API with anti-bot bypass. Drop-in Firecrawl alternative. AI-first: MCP server, OpenAI tool definitions, REST API — any AI model can use it. No API keys, no credits, no limits.

Quick Start

pip install -r requirements.txt
patchright install chromium
python -m freecrawl serve  # REST API on :9100

AI Integration

MCP Server (Claude, Cursor, any MCP client)

{"mcpServers":{"freecrawl":{"command":"python","args":["-m","freecrawl.mcp_server"]}}}

OpenAI Tool Definitions

from freecrawl.ai_tools import get_tools
tools = get_tools()  # 9 tool definitions, pass to any LLM

REST API

curl -X POST http://localhost:9100/v1/scrape \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com","formats":["markdown"]}'

Features

Feature	Status
Scrape (URL→Markdown/HTML/text)	✅
Anti-bot bypass (Cloudflare, DataDome)	✅
Auto-escalation engine chain	✅
Crawl (BFS + sitemap)	✅
Search (DuckDuckGo/SearXNG)	✅
Map (fast URL discovery)	✅
Batch scrape (parallel)	✅
LLM extraction (structured JSON)	✅
Change tracking (diff)	✅
PDF parsing	✅
CSS extraction	✅
Screenshots	✅
JS actions (click/scroll/type)	✅
Product/Menu/Branding extractors	✅
Summary (LLM)	✅
Proxy rotation	✅
MCP server	✅
OpenAI tool definitions	✅
Docker deployment	✅
CLI tool	✅

Architecture

Engine Chain (auto-escalation):
  httpx (fast) → flaresolverr (Cloudflare) → patchright (DataDome/Akamai)

License

MIT