| FMRS | 61 / 100 · C | 75 / 100 · B | 73 / 100 · B |
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| Reliability | 10 / 20 | 13 / 20 | 12 / 20 |
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| Security and permissions | 12 / 20 | 12 / 20 | 13 / 20 |
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| Maintenance | 10 / 20 | 16 / 20 | 16 / 20 |
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| Documentation | 16 / 20 | 17 / 20 | 16 / 20 |
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| Setup experience | 13 / 20 | 17 / 20 | 16 / 20 |
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| Best for | - Users who want self-hosted search infrastructure
- Teams with an existing SearXNG instance and privacy requirements
- MCP clients that need paginated search and URL reading
| - Scenarios needing clean, structured web context fed to an AI assistant
- Users already on the Firecrawl platform who want to call its scraping capability directly via MCP
| - Q&A and research scenarios that need real-time, clean web content
- Users with an existing Exa account who want a zero-deployment remote option
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| Not for | - Users without an accessible SearXNG instance
- Users seeking a native SearXNG plugin installation
- Workflows that require reading PDFs, media, archives, or other binary downloads
| - Simple static-page scraping where you don't want to depend on a third-party API and incur call costs
- Sites that explicitly disallow automated access (robots.txt)
| - Scenarios requiring a strict allowlist of search sources that can't use a third-party search service
- Budget-sensitive, high-volume search scenarios (remote/API calls may incur cost)
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| Required permissions | - Requires access to the configured SEARXNG_URL, which the manifest marks as required and secret.
- May use AUTH_USERNAME and AUTH_PASSWORD for legacy global SearXNG Basic Auth.
- Search queries are passed to external search services, and web_url_read makes requests to user-specified URLs.
| - Requires a Firecrawl API key to call; cost and quota are governed by the Firecrawl account
- firecrawl_agent/firecrawl_interact perform automated browser interaction, which may trigger login or form-submission flows on the target site
| - Requires an Exa API key for full functionality; OAuth login is optional in remote mode
- web_fetch_exa retrieves content from a specified URL; agent_run performs multi-step autonomous actions and needs the user to have clear expectations of Agent behavior
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| Risks and side effects | - Privacy depends on the connected SearXNG instance and its configuration.
- Search queries may be passed to external services used by SearXNG.
- URL reading creates outbound requests; private or internal URLs and redirects are blocked by default, but network deployments should still enable and configure hardening.
- HTML fallback depends on the instance's page structure and may return fewer results without relevance scores or engine names.
| - Bulk crawl/map tools can generate significant request volume against a target site — respect the site's rate limits and terms of service
- firecrawl_agent's interactive action chain is longer — define task boundaries clearly before running it to avoid accidentally triggering actions on a sensitive site
| - The API key should be stored carefully — avoid leaving it in plaintext in client config files on untrusted machines
- agent_run is a multi-step autonomous tool with a longer action chain — try it on low-risk tasks first
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| Supported clients | Claude Desktop, Cursor | Claude Desktop, VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, Amp | Claude Desktop, Claude Code, VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, Amp, Kiro, LM Studio, Antigravity |
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| Tools | 4 | 11 | 4 |
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