Crawl4AI vs Parallel in 2026

Keep both calls and change two addresses

A Crawl4AI agent still needs a search API to find its URLs, and a Parallel agent pays per URL for the page text. On SpecStream the same key does both. Each call keeps its path, its body and its parser; the address and the key change.

# Crawl4AI server, before and after
curl -X POST http://localhost:11235/crawl \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CRAWL4AI_API_TOKEN" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping"]}'
curl -X POST https://api.specstream.ai/crawl4ai/crawl \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SPECSTREAM_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping"]}'

# Parallel search, before and after
curl -X POST https://api.parallel.ai/v1/search \
  -H "x-api-key: $PARALLEL_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"search_queries": ["open source web crawlers for LLMs"], "mode": "fast"}'
curl -X POST https://api.specstream.ai/parallel/v1/search \
  -H "x-api-key: $SPECSTREAM_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"search_queries": ["open source web crawlers for LLMs"], "mode": "fast"}'

Every parameter is in the Crawl4AI migration guide and the Parallel migration guide.

Run the test yourself in one minute

This finds pages with one search, reads three pages through the Crawl4AI route and lists what each call cost. It spends about $0.0034 of the $10 a new account gets.

# 1. Find pages: the Parallel call
time curl -s -X POST https://api.specstream.ai/parallel/v1/search \
  -H "x-api-key: $SPECSTREAM_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"search_queries": ["open source web crawlers for LLMs"], "mode": "fast"}' \
  | jq '.results[] | {url, title}'

# 2. Read pages: the Crawl4AI call
time curl -s -X POST https://api.specstream.ai/crawl4ai/crawl \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SPECSTREAM_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls": ["https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping", "https://www.python.org/about/", "https://docs.crawl4ai.com/"]}' \
  | jq '.results[] | {url, status_code, chars: (.markdown.raw_markdown | length)}'

# 3. What each call cost
curl -s "https://api.specstream.ai/v1/account/requests" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SPECSTREAM_API_KEY" | jq .

The request log lists every call with its endpoint, status, latency_ms and price_usd, charged or not.

One price a page, whatever the page needs

Crawl4AI's hosted API charges by what a page takes: 0.1 credit for a plain page, 0.5 in a real browser and 2 for a hard site, from a month's credits that do not carry over. Parallel charges $1 per 1,000 URLs for Extract on top of its search. On SpecStream every page with text costs $0.0008, a page with no text is not charged, and a search of up to 10 results costs $0.001, from a balance that never expires.

What each path reads and returns

On /crawl4ai, /crawl takes 1 to 100 urls a call and returns results[] with url, html, markdown.raw_markdown, links, metadata and status_code; each page answers on its own, so one missing page leaves the rest. cleaned_html, fit_markdown, media, screenshot and pdf are not returned, and errors keep Crawl4AI's {"detail": ...} body.

On /parallel/v1/search, search_queries, mode, advanced_settings.max_results up to 100, source_policy with include_domains, exclude_domains and after_date, the excerpt settings and session_id work as on Parallel. The reply has search_id, session_id and results[] with url, title, publish_date and excerpts. warnings and usage are not returned.

Scored on the official benchmarks

The Search API scores a 97.9 F-score on all 1,000 official SimpleQA Verified questions, 978 of them correct, and 64.0 item F1 and 43.4 row F1 on all 200 official WideSearch tasks. The Extract API behind the Crawl4AI route scores 0.908 F1 on WCXB. Every score and its method is on the benchmarks page.

A search on /parallel/v1/search runs the fast search unless it asks for advanced. On November 9, 2026 production took 1 to 20 fast searches a second and answered 718 of 720, with a median of 0.82 s at 1 a second and 1.07 s at 20 a second.

You decide what is kept, on each key

Create a key with zero_retention and a call made with it keeps no request text and no answer after the reply. spend_cap_cents is the most the key can spend.

curl -X POST https://api.specstream.ai/v1/account/keys \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SPECSTREAM_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "production", "scopes": ["account:read", "finds:spend"], "spend_cap_cents": 500000, "zero_retention": true}'

Search, pages, crawls and rows on the same key

The same key reads up to 20 pages a call with the Extract API at $0.80 per 1,000 pages, maps and crawls sites with POST /v1/map and POST /v1/crawl, searches the live web with GET /v1/web-search, and runs Deep Search, which returns every match for a request in plain words as structured rows at 5¢, 15¢ or $1 a row.

SpecStream

The live web data engine for teams and agents. Pages and crawls at $0.80 per 1,000 pages through its own API or the Crawl4AI, Firecrawl, Spider and Jina routes, search from $1 per 1,000 through its own API or the Parallel, Exa, Tavily and Brave routes, and every match as structured rows at 5¢, 15¢ or $1 a row.

Firecrawl

A hosted crawler sold in monthly credit plans, Hobby at $19 a month for 5,000 credits, with Scrape and Crawl at 1 credit a page. SpecStream answers Firecrawl's calls at https://api.specstream.ai/firecrawl for $0.0008 a page. Firecrawl vs Crawl4AI.

Tavily

Search for agents sold by credit: a basic search is 1 credit at $0.008 a credit pay as you go, with 1,000 free credits every month. SpecStream answers Tavily's POST /search at https://api.specstream.ai/tavily, in Tavily's JSON, at $0.001 a search.

Spider

A crawling API paid as you go from $1 per GB. SpecStream answers Spider's scrape and search at https://api.specstream.ai/spider, each page with text at $0.0008.