Firecrawl's search MCP had 680,952 npm downloads

680,952. That is how many times the npm package firecrawl-mcp was downloaded from October 14 through November 12, 2026.

The next three official search MCP packages in that window were exa-mcp-server at 164,636, @brave/brave-search-mcp-server at 162,285, and @perplexity-ai/mcp-server at 132,575. tavily-mcp had 84,003. The point responses carried HTTP Date Fri, 13 Nov 2026 13:47:02 GMT.

The last seven days of the same window, November 6 through November 12, keep Firecrawl first at 200,147 and then change the order. Perplexity had 55,781. Brave had 50,312. Exa had 44,387. Tavily had 19,428.

Stars, read at 13:43 GMT the same afternoon, still put Exa second and Tavily ahead of Brave. The November 12 price and limit report is that star table, plus the call prices. This note is the file requests. The call fee, including the tokens you keep, is the web search API cost calculator. Claude's and OpenAI's own web_search tools are a different object. The November 12 search found no official MCP repo for those two, and they are not in this table.

The 30-day count and the 7-day count

A download is a file request on npm. It counts npx, a CI job, and a dependency. It does not count a person. The 7-day window sits inside the 30-day window. Per star is the 30-day total divided by stargazers_count from the 13:43 GMT pass.

200,147 divided by 680,952 is 0.294. 55,781 divided by 132,575 is 0.421. 44,387 divided by 164,636 is 0.270. 50,312 divided by 162,285 is 0.310. 19,428 divided by 84,003 is 0.231. 334 divided by 2,724 is 0.123. 542 divided by 1,858 is 0.292.

You.com's 100.9 downloads per star sits on 27 stars. Brave's 102.9 sits on 1,577 stars and 162,285 downloads. The small denominator is why You.com is in the table and out of the sentence that calls Brave the busiest package per star among the five that cleared 10,000 downloads.

Perplexity passed Exa in seven days

Over 30 days Exa leads Brave by 2,351 downloads. 164,636 minus 162,285 is 2,351. That is 1.4 percent of Brave's total. Over the last seven days Brave leads Exa, 50,312 to 44,387, and Perplexity leads both.

Perplexity's seven-day total is 42.1 percent of its 30-day total. Exa's is 27.0 percent. A week that holds two-fifths of the month is a faster recent fetch rate, on this registry, for this package name. It is still a file request. The npm document's repository field is git+https://github.com/perplexityai/modelcontextprotocol.git, which is the official repo. The count is not a second package that happens to share a word.

The star table from November 12 had Firecrawl at 7,803, Exa at 5,227, Perplexity at 2,621, Tavily at 2,486, and Brave at 1,569. This pass, at 13:43 GMT on November 13, has 7,815, 5,231, 2,624, 2,489, and 1,577. The star order did not move. The install order did, inside the week.

Brave has fewer stars than Tavily and more installs

Tavily's repository had 2,489 stars. Brave's had 1,577. Brave's 30-day downloads were 1.93 times Tavily's. 162,285 divided by 84,003 is 1.932. The seven-day multiple is larger: 50,312 divided by 19,428 is 2.59.

Downloads per star make the same split. Brave is at 102.9. Tavily is at 33.7. Exa, second in stars and second in the 30-day count, is at 31.5, the lowest of the five large packages. A star on Exa or Tavily is a weaker signal of a recent npm fetch than a star on Brave, inside this set, on this date.

That is a reason to read the install column before you pick a default MCP server for a harness. It is not a reason to ignore the bill. Brave's search API price, Tavily's credit, and Exa's list price are on the November 12 report. Firecrawl leading the download table does not make Firecrawl the cheap call.

Three starred repos are not in the npm table

The November 12 table has ten repositories. Seven have an npm package whose registry metadata points back at that repository. Three do not.

Jina's 909 stars would put it sixth if this page ranked the ten by stars and then pretended every row was an npm package. It is sixth by stars. It is absent from the download ranking because the package is marked private. Parallel's README tells a coding agent to add a hosted URL. A star there bookmarks that instruction. It does not increment linkup-mcp-server or firecrawl-mcp.

The version on main and the version npm will install

Four packages agree with themselves. firecrawl-mcp 3.40.0 was published 2026-11-12T03:24:52.205Z, and that string is the version on main. exa-mcp-server 3.4.3 was published 2026-11-03T01:19:27.949Z. @brave/brave-search-mcp-server 2.1.4 was published 2026-09-17T14:48:15.965Z. @youdotcom-oss/mcp 4.0.7 was published 2026-10-28T00:01:42.756Z.

Three disagree.

The npm versions map for Perplexity ends at 1.3.0. Tavily's ends at 0.2.22. Linkup's latest is 3.4.0, which is ahead of the 3.0.0 string sitting on main, not behind it. A default npx install receives the dist-tag. A clone of main can carry the other string. Pin the version you ran when you write the eval down. The MCP config generator writes the client file. It does not choose between these two strings for you.

What this means if you are wiring search

Use the 30-day column when you want the package machines fetched all month. Use the 7-day column when you want the week that just finished. On November 13 those two columns agree on Firecrawl and disagree on Perplexity, Brave, and Exa.

If the harness needs the official MCP package people already resolve from npm, start with firecrawl-mcp and then decide whether the last week is enough reason to try @perplexity-ai/mcp-server beside it. If you were about to pick Tavily because 2,489 stars beat Brave's 1,577, read 84,003 against 162,285 first. Then read the price. Installs are not a rate card.

If the harness should call a hosted URL and never npm install a search server, Jina, SerpAPI, and Parallel are in that group, and this table is the wrong ranking for them. Claude's and OpenAI's built-in web search tools are in that group too. Their fee, $10 per 1,000 calls on the pages read November 12, is the price report, and the token cost of the tool definition is 8 tokens or 17.