Context7 helps with docs.
Firecrawl helps with docs, repo, issues, and more.

Context7 is a documentation-only MCP: Upstash's index of up-to-date library docs for over 126,000 libraries, plugged into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and other MCP-aware agents. The Firecrawl Developer Index is a broader developer retrieval surface. It indexes documentation, READMEs, GitHub issues, and merged pull requests, and lets you filter by result type, repo, language, topic, license, and star count. On the open DevDex benchmark, the Developer Index leads at 63.1% overall Recall@10, versus 16.8% for Context7, which returns nothing on roughly 78% of repository queries and 52% of issue and pull request queries by design.

DevDex is Firecrawl's open developer retrieval benchmark. One agent (Claude Opus 4.8) drives every system through the same harness with a single search tool and ten results per call, then scores whether the right answer is cited across three tracks: repository (finding the repo behind a described capability), issue-to-fix (finding the issue or pull request that fixed a bug), and documentation (finding the doc page that answers a how-to). On 1,179 tasks, the Firecrawl Developer Index scores 76.1% on repository, 66.0% on issue-to-fix, and 47.2% on documentation, for 63.1% overall Recall@10. Context7 scores 0.8%, 2.9%, and 46.6% for 16.8% overall. Full harness and a 594-item public sample are on GitHub at firecrawl/benchmark-devdex.

Yes. The Developer Index treats GitHub issues, merged pull requests, READMEs, and curated documentation as first-class inputs, so an agent asking "which PR changed the retry behavior in openai-python" or "which issue tracks the current TypeScript regression in facebook/react" gets a direct citation. Each result carries a stable id like issue:owner/repo#123 plus matched passages in markdown, so the agent can cite exactly what it read. Context7 is a docs index by design and does not index issues or pull requests.

The Developer Index sits alongside the rest of Firecrawl: /scrape for clean markdown from any URL, /search for whole-web queries (with page content in the same call), /crawl for full-site traversal, /parse for uploaded PDFs, DOCX, XLSX, and HTML files, /monitor for scheduled change detection, and /agent for autonomous multi-step web tasks. Context7 is purpose-built as a docs MCP; anything beyond documentation lookup needs another tool.

Under a minute. Run npx -y firecrawl-cli@latest setup developer-index to install the Developer Index skill, or npx -y firecrawl-cli@latest init --all --browser to install the wider Firecrawl CLI across every detected agent on the machine (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, OpenCode). Firecrawl runs keyless with 1,000 free credits a month, so no signup is required. Context7 also installs quickly as an MCP server; the setup shape is similar.

Yes. The Developer Index takes result_type to scope to doc, issue, pull_request, or readme; repos and sources to scope to specific repositories or documentation sites; and repository attributes including language, topic, license, min_stars, archived, and fork. Every result carries a stable id like issue:owner/repo#123 for reproducible citations. Context7 exposes a simpler docs lookup without those filters.

Firecrawl's MCP server plugs into Claude Code, OpenAI Codex CLI, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, Zed, and OpenCode. A native Claude Code plugin is available at claude.com/plugins/firecrawl. Context7 also ships as an MCP that works across the same agents; both are MCP-native.

Firecrawl /search handles open-web queries and can return full-page markdown for each hit through scrapeOptions, so a coding agent that needs an outside blog post or vendor page can stay on the same API and key. Context7 is scoped to documentation, so an open-web question requires wiring in a second search tool.

Firecrawl runs keyless with 1,000 free credits a month and no signup. Paid plans (annual billing) start at $16 per month for 5,000 credits, $83 per month for 100,000 credits, and $333 per month for 500,000 credits, with one credit unit across /scrape, /crawl, /search, /browse, /parse, and the Developer Index. Context7 has a free tier with rate limits and paid plans on top; both are approachable to start.

Yes. Some teams keep Context7 for pure documentation lookups on a small set of libraries and add the Firecrawl Developer Index for the broader surface (repos, issues, merged PRs, docs) plus Firecrawl's open-web endpoints. If you want a single tool that covers the full agent context need in one MCP, the Developer Index is designed for that path.

Install the Firecrawl CLI: npx -y firecrawl-cli@latest setup developer-index adds the Developer Index skill to your coding agent, and npx -y firecrawl-cli@latest init --all --browser installs the wider Firecrawl toolset. Update any prompts or agent policies that mentioned Context7 by name to reference the Developer Index tool. Most agents pick up the new MCP after a restart. Keep Context7 side by side if you want to run both while you migrate.

Yes. Firecrawl is SOC 2 Type II compliant with GDPR compliance and a DPA available. Enterprise plans include zero data retention and a 99.9% SLA. Self-hosting under AGPL-3.0 is available for air-gapped environments, and the managed cloud has served more than 5 billion requests to date for over 150,000 companies.