Which should I use to scrape an entire website?

Firecrawl. It is built for depth: map a domain to enumerate its URLs, run an asynchronous crawl over the relevant subtree, and extract typed structured data against a schema. Exa is search-first — it finds and returns clean content for the most relevant pages rather than exhaustively crawling a whole site.

Do they support remote endpoints and self-hosting?

Both offer remote endpoints and local stdio packages, authenticated with an API key rather than OAuth. Firecrawl additionally supports pointing at a self-hosted Firecrawl instance via FIRECRAWL_API_URL, while Exa's hosted endpoint at https://mcp.exa.ai/mcp uses an EXA_API_KEY (via x-api-key header) that also raises rate limits.

Firecrawl vs Exa

Firecrawl MCP and Exa MCP both turn the live web into model-ready data, but they start from different problems. Firecrawl is a web-data API built for scraping and crawling: an agent can scrape a single URL into clean markdown, batch-scrape a known list, map a domain to enumerate its URLs, crawl a site asynchronously, extract typed structured data with an LLM pass, run an autonomous research agent, and stand up monitors that re-scrape on a schedule and diff each snapshot. It runs locally over stdio (npx firecrawl-mcp) with a FIRECRAWL_API_KEY, points at a self-hosted instance via FIRECRAWL_API_URL, and also offers a hosted Streamable HTTP endpoint. Exa is a search engine built for AI: its web search returns clean, ready-to-use content instead of links, a fetch tool pulls a full page, and an advanced search adds domain, date, and content filters. Exa offers a hosted remote endpoint and a local stdio package, authenticated with an EXA_API_KEY. Here is a fair look at how they differ.

How they compare

Dimension	Firecrawl	Exa
Core capability	Scraping and crawling at depth: turn a URL, a list, or a whole domain into clean markdown or typed structured data, with site mapping and async crawls.	AI-native search and fetch: a neural web search that returns ready-to-use page content, plus a full-page fetch for known URLs.
Going wide vs. going deep	Goes deep on a target: map a domain, crawl a subtree, and extract a schema-typed dataset from many pages of one or more sites.	Goes wide across the web: find the most relevant sources for a query and pull their content, rather than exhaustively crawling a site.
Standout extras	Structured extraction against a schema, an autonomous research-agent tool, and scheduled monitors that diff snapshots and fire a webhook or email on change.	Clean-content-first results that skip a separate scraping step, with an opt-in advanced search for tight domain and date control.
Deployment and auth	Local stdio via npx (firecrawl-mcp) with a FIRECRAWL_API_KEY, a self-host option via FIRECRAWL_API_URL, and a hosted Streamable HTTP endpoint.	Hosted remote endpoint at https://mcp.exa.ai/mcp plus a local stdio package; an EXA_API_KEY authenticates and raises rate limits. No OAuth on either.
Best-fit task	Building a structured dataset from a site, scraping known pages into clean markdown, or watching pages for changes on a schedule.	Research and discovery — finding the best sources for a question and getting clean content back to reason over, with no scraping step.

Verdict

Pick by whether you are crawling targets or discovering sources. Reach for Firecrawl MCP when you know what you want to ingest and need depth: scraping known pages into clean markdown, mapping and crawling a domain, extracting schema-typed data across many pages, or running scheduled monitors that diff snapshots and alert on change — and it self-hosts when you want to avoid the cloud. Reach for Exa MCP when the task is search and discovery: finding the most relevant sources for a query and getting clean, ready-to-use content back without a separate scrape, with an advanced search for tight domain and date control. In short: Firecrawl if your job is to crawl and structure web data at depth; Exa if your job is to find and read the right sources. The two pair well — Exa to discover the URLs, Firecrawl to crawl and extract them at scale. Both run locally or remotely with API-key auth and offer a free tier.

FAQ

Which should I use to scrape an entire website?: Firecrawl. It is built for depth: map a domain to enumerate its URLs, run an asynchronous crawl over the relevant subtree, and extract typed structured data against a schema. Exa is search-first — it finds and returns clean content for the most relevant pages rather than exhaustively crawling a whole site.
Do they support remote endpoints and self-hosting?: Both offer remote endpoints and local stdio packages, authenticated with an API key rather than OAuth. Firecrawl additionally supports pointing at a self-hosted Firecrawl instance via FIRECRAWL_API_URL, while Exa's hosted endpoint at https://mcp.exa.ai/mcp uses an EXA_API_KEY (via x-api-key header) that also raises rate limits.