Turn websites into usable data with one API. Start with a single scrape request, then move into search, map, crawl, extract, browse (interactive browser automation), or MCP only when your workflow actually needs them.
Fastest first win: one URL, one markdown response
Works for: agents, ETL, RAG, structured extraction
If this request works, you already understand the core CRW model: known URL in, clean content out. Everything else in the docs builds on that.
```bash
curl -X POST https://fastcrw.com/api/v1/scrape \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"url": "https://example.com",
"formats": ["markdown"]
}'
```
```json
{
"success": true,
"data": {
"markdown": "# Example Domain\n\nThis domain is for use in illustrative examples...",
"metadata": {
"title": "Example Domain",
"sourceURL": "https://example.com",
"statusCode": 200,
"elapsedMs": 32
}
}
}
```
## Start here
:::cards
::card{icon="code" title="Scrape a page" href="#scraping" description="Use one URL and get markdown, HTML, links, or JSON back."}
::card{icon="search" title="Search the web" href="#search" description="Find URLs first, then scrape only the results you care about."}
::card{icon="cursor" title="Browse interactively" href="#mcp" description="Drive a real browser from your agent — multi-step flows, clicks, stateful sessions (v0.4.0)."}
::card{icon="plug" title="Add MCP tools" href="#mcp" description="Give Claude, Cursor, Codex, and other hosts live web access."}
:::
## Choose your path
:::cards
::card{icon="rocket" title="Cloud API" href="#quick-start" description="The fastest first run: get a key, copy one request, and move."}
::card{icon="plug" title="MCP" href="#mcp" description="Best when your agent runtime already expects MCP tools."}
::card{icon="box" title="Self-host" href="#self-hosting" description="Best when you want your own infrastructure, auth, and deployment controls."}
:::
## Why teams switch to CRW
CRW is meant to feel easy on day one without closing off the more serious use cases:
- one API surface for single-page scrape, discovery, bounded crawl, and extraction,
- Firecrawl-compatible request shapes where they matter,
- low-ops self-hosting when you need infra control,
- and a built-in MCP server for agent workflows.
## Benchmarks
Tested against [Firecrawl scrape-content-dataset-v1](https://huggingface.co/datasets/firecrawl/scrape-content-dataset-v1) on 1,000 real-world URLs:
| Metric | CRW | Firecrawl | Crawl4AI |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Coverage (1K URLs)** | **92.0%** | 77.2% | — |
| **Avg Latency** | **833ms** | 4,600ms | — |
| **Idle RAM** | **6.6 MB** | ~500 MB+ | — |
| **Cold start** | **85 ms** | 30–60 s | — |
| **Dependencies** | single binary | Node + Redis + PG + RabbitMQ | Python + Playwright |
## What to read next
- [Quick Start](#quick-start) for the fastest first request
- [API Overview](#rest-api) for the endpoint map
- [Scrape](#scraping) for the canonical single-page flow
- [Authentication](#authentication) for key handling and self-host auth