Firecrawl is a production-grade web scraping, crawling, and structured data extraction platform designed to feed AI agents and LLMs with clean, markdown-formatted web data. The system exposes a multi-version REST API (v0, v1, v2) with endpoints for scraping single URLs, crawling entire sites, mapping site structures, searching the web, extracting structured JSON, monitoring page changes, and running autonomous AI agents. It supports multiple output formats including markdown, HTML, screenshots, PDF parsing, product/menu extraction, and branding detection. The architecture is a microservices-style monolith with a Node.js/Express API server at its core, backed by Redis for job queues and caching, PostgreSQL for persistent state, ClickHouse for analytics, Bigtable for job access logs, and GCS for blob storage. Background workers handle crawl orchestration, PDF processing, webhook delivery, and billing via RabbitMQ and FoundationDB queues. The platform integrates with external services for threat protection (Google Web Risk, Zscaler), billing (Autumn), search (SearXNG, DuckDuckGo, X Search), and LLM-based extraction (OpenAI, Anthropic). Nine official SDKs (Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, Rust, Elixir) wrap the API with typed models, error handling, and async support, making it accessible across ecosystems. The codebase is extensive and well-tested, with over 2,000 files spanning controllers, scrapers, transformers, services, and utilities, but shows signs of technical drift through deprecated v0/v1 endpoints, multiple parallel implementations of similar logic (e.g., extract pipelines), and configuration sprawl across environment variables.
ScrapeGraphAI is a Python library that extracts structured data from websites and local documents using LLM-driven graph pipelines. Instead of a traditional web scraper with hardcoded selectors, users define extraction through natural-language prompts and optional Pydantic schemas; the library then executes a directed graph of nodes such as fetching, parsing, chunking, and answer generation. The public API is a set of graph classes (SmartScraperGraph, SearchGraph, JSONScraperGraph, CSVScraperGraph, SpeechGraph, ScriptCreatorGraph, etc.) in scrapegraphai/graphs, each composing reusable nodes from scrapegraphai/nodes and running them on a BaseGraph execution engine. It is consumed programmatically in Python and supports many LLM providers (OpenAI, Ollama, Groq, Mistral, Anthropic, DeepSeek, xAI, NVIDIA, MiniMax) and multiple fetching backends (Playwright, Selenium, Chromium, BrowserBase, Scrape.do). The architecture is a lightweight DAG framework: nodes have typed inputs/outputs, can branch conditionally, iterate, merge results, and accumulate cost/token metadata; BaseGraph walks the graph, handles state, and collects execution information. The repository also contains document loaders, model token/cost registries, prompt templates, telemetry, proxy rotation, screenshot-scraping utilities, a GraphBuilder that constructs graphs from natural language, and integrations such as Burr and Indexify. While the README aggressively promotes a commercial hosted API at scrapegraphai.com, the repository itself is a self-contained open-source library with examples and tests. The codebase is generally well structured and modular, with clear separation between graphs, nodes, prompts, helpers, utils, and models. It shows signs of rapid growth: some typos, duplicated test fixtures, hardcoded model pricing tables, a Python version mismatch between pyproject and Dockerfile, and dependency fragility around LangChain and optional browser/OCR packages. These issues are manageable but give the codebase a medium technical drift. Overall it is an active, useful library for LLM-based extraction, and several utilities are good candidates for reuse outside the project.