Firecrawl Architecture Selection

Overview

Turn workload, freshness, compliance, throughput, and recovery requirements into an explicit architecture decision. Prefer the smallest Firecrawl surface that meets the outcome.

Prerequisites

• The target repository or integration path and the requested operator outcome.
• The source authorization, data classification, and environment policy.
• Current Firecrawl documentation, credentials only when needed, and an owner for approvals.

Current Contract

Scrape is a synchronous single-resource primitive; crawl and batch scrape support asynchronous jobs, pagination, webhooks, and status retrieval; map discovers URLs without retrieving page content; search discovers external sources; parse handles local file bytes. The default self-hosted Compose stack does not provide every Cloud capability and is not a production security design.

Authentication