Firecrawl vs MarkItDown

A label partly reflects how much of each tool is visible and scannable, not only how risky it is. A tool without a lockfile cannot get a dependency check.

• Firecrawl: no issues found
• MarkItDown: code and instruction-file checks found nothing, but there is no runtime lockfile or manifest, so dependencies were not checked

Firecrawl scores 24 points higher in Week 45: Firecrawl 78, MarkItDown 54 out of 100. The score combines maintenance, adoption and docs (percentiles of public GitHub signals): Firecrawl 80, 81 and 69; MarkItDown 16, 83 and 69. Community (20% weight) is not measured yet. It is not a hands-on test, so a higher score does not say which tool suits your project.

Safety labels from the automated scan of 2 Nov 2026: Firecrawl: No issues found, no issues found in this week’s scan; MarkItDown: No dependencies scanned, code checks clean, no lockfile to check. “No dependencies scanned” means the code checks were clean but there is no lockfile, so dependencies could not be checked; it is not a clean bill. It is an automated scan, not a manual audit.

By GitHub stars: Firecrawl 197,743, MarkItDown 193,454. Adoption score (percentile among all 52 tracked tools): Firecrawl 81, MarkItDown 83. Stars are one public signal and do not measure real-world use.

Firecrawl: AGPL-3.0; MarkItDown: MIT. Read each licence text before commercial use.

Pick Firecrawl if recent activity and releases matter most to you (maintenance 80); you want the tool whose automated scan found no issues. Pick MarkItDown if you want the more widely adopted option (adoption 83); you need a permissive open-source licence (MIT). This comes from measured public data and licences only, not from hands-on testing.