Brave Search vs Firecrawl: which search API for your agent?
Compared on the same 170-query benchmark (judge κ=0.78). On list price, Firecrawl is ~5.9× cheaper.
Brave Search
Cost / 1k (list)$5.00
Quality87% (indicative)
Strong classespage lookup, direct answer, web
Firecrawl
Cost / 1k (list)$0.85
Quality86% (indicative)
Strong classesacademic, news
Pick Brave Search if… pick Firecrawl if… or route both
Pick Brave Search when your queries are an independent web index with privacy. Pick Firecrawl when your queries are page content and scraping. On plain web/news lookups, a cheaper engine usually matches both — so don't hard-code one.
Don't pick one — route to the cheapest that clears your bar.
GroundRoute sends each query to the best-value engine and caches the result. You keep half of what the cache saves you, never more than going direct.