Firecrawl vs Perplexity: 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.
Firecrawl
Cost / 1k (list)$0.85
Quality86% (indicative)
Strong classesacademic, news
Perplexity
Cost / 1k (list)$5.00
Qualitynot measured
Pick Firecrawl if… pick Perplexity if… or route both
Pick Firecrawl when your queries are page content and scraping. Pick Perplexity when your queries are cited answer synthesis. 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.