| FMRS | 45 / 100 · D | 75 / 100 · B | 73 / 100 · B |
|---|
| Reliability | 6 / 20 | 13 / 20 | 12 / 20 |
|---|
| Security and permissions | 7 / 20 | 12 / 20 | 13 / 20 |
|---|
| Maintenance | 11 / 20 | 16 / 20 | 16 / 20 |
|---|
| Documentation | 11 / 20 | 17 / 20 | 16 / 20 |
|---|
| Setup experience | 10 / 20 | 17 / 20 | 16 / 20 |
|---|
| Best for | - Security researchers and analysts
- SOC, threat-intelligence, and fraud investigation teams
- Developers who need MCP-based tool orchestration
- OSINT practitioners conducting lawful authorized investigations
| - 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
|
|---|
| Not for | - Unauthorized monitoring of people or organizations
- Illegal data collection, intrusion, or privacy violations
- Users who do not want external APIs, third-party services, or local investigation tools
- Workflows requiring all findings to come from a single verified data source
| - 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)
|
|---|
| Required permissions | - Requires launching a local Python MCP server over stdio.
- The default AI agent requires ANTHROPIC_API_KEY; Ollama or an OpenAI-compatible backend can also be used.
- Optional tools require credentials for HIBP, IPInfo, IP2Location, AbuseIPDB, Shodan, VirusTotal, Censys, GitHub, or Bright Data.
- Requires network access to relevant services; some features depend on holehe, sherlock, sublist3r, and phoneinfoga being available in PATH.
- The REPL saves sessions in ~/.openosint/history/ and reports in reports/.
| - 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
|
|---|
| Risks and side effects | - Use is limited to legal and authorized security research.
- Investigations may process emails, phone numbers, usernames, IPs, breach records, and other sensitive data.
- Third-party APIs may impose rate limits, charges, data-retention terms, or service restrictions.
- Live dork searches and URL scraping use Bright Data APIs, and calls may be billable.
- External sources may be incomplete, outdated, or produce false positives; findings require human verification.
| - 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
|
|---|
| Supported clients | Claude Desktop, Claude Code | Claude Desktop, VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, Amp | Claude Desktop, Claude Code, VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, Amp, Kiro, LM Studio, Antigravity |
|---|
| Tools | 18 | 11 | 4 |
|---|