Firecrawl vs Crawl4AI: Which One Fits Your Stack
Firecrawl vs Crawl4AI, measured the honest way: one run live today, the other priced from its own credit table. Licenses, costs, ops, and the caveats.
Motherlode Lab · · 10 min read
Two things that look alike, told apart by measurement.
X-vs-Y pages that settle the difference on the same target: what each job produces, where each one fails, and the rule that picks between them. Where the answer costs money, both sides are priced from the vendors' own pages.
Markdown vs HTML for LLM Context (Measured on 3 Pages)
Markdown vs HTML for LLM context, measured on three real pages - exact token counts, what each format loses, and when an agent still needs the HTML.
Motherlode Lab · · 7 min read
Octoparse vs ParseHub: Prices and Limits, Verified
Octoparse vs ParseHub with prices verified at both vendors' pages: free-plan caps, the $69 vs $189 jump, Linux support, and where your data lives.
Motherlode Lab · · 9 min read
Puppeteer vs Playwright: Which One for Scraping
Puppeteer vs Playwright, measured on this machine today. Install sizes, a head-to-head scrape, auto-wait, engine coverage, and the stealth-plugin gap.
Motherlode Lab · · 8 min read
Scrapy vs BeautifulSoup: One Parses, One Crawls
Scrapy vs BeautifulSoup tested on the same 10-page crawl: install size, cold start, RAM, the JavaScript test both fail, and the verdict for your project.
Motherlode Lab · · 9 min read
Selenium vs Playwright for Web Scraping: I Ran Both
Selenium vs Playwright for web scraping, measured on the same Chrome build: timed crawls, install sizes, bot leaks, and where each tool still wins.
Motherlode Lab · · 10 min read
Web Scraping vs Web Crawling: The Difference
Web scraping vs web crawling, measured on the same site: one job discovers URLs, the other extracts fields. Outputs, failure modes, and the rules.
Motherlode Lab · · 7 min read