Extraction tools cannot be compared by HTTP 200s. The same 20 URLs must be scored for body text, headings, tables, code, links, metadata, noise, latency, and cost. This article publishes the corpus, adapter contract, and gates, but no winner without a same-version raw run across all four paths.
Firecrawl puts single-page scraping, site discovery, whole-site crawling, and JSON extraction behind one API. Cloud removes browser, proxy, and worker operations; self-hosting gives infrastructure control, but not the complete Cloud feature set.
The Tool Gateway routes four tool categories — web search (Firecrawl), image generation (nine FAL models), TTS (OpenAI), and cloud browser (Browser Use) — through Nous infrastructure, replacing four signups with one OAuth. It's per-tool rather than all-or-nothing, and `use_gateway: true` overrides any direct key in your `.env` — the precedence rule people most often get wrong.
When using AI agents like Claude Code or Cursor, built-in WebFetch / WebSearch often gets blocked by Cloudflare, geo-restrictions, or rate limits. Connecting a search MCP server is the most direct fix. This post compares the options actually available in 2026.