Choosing the best web scraping API in 2026 is harder than it looks, because the category has split three ways. Classic scraping APIs still sell one endpoint that fetches a page through rotating proxies and a headless browser. Large data platforms bundle that endpoint with proxy networks, datasets and hundreds of ready-made scrapers. And a newer wave of AI-first tools skips raw HTML altogether and hands your agent clean Markdown, search results or a remote browser.

The headline prices hide most of the difference. Nearly every vendor bills in credits, and a single request can cost anywhere from 1 to 125 credits depending on whether it renders JavaScript and which proxy pool it uses. Concurrency caps, free tiers that expire, and add-on fees for extraction change the real cost just as much.

This comparison covers the direct scraping APIs, the broader data platforms and the AI and browser tools that increasingly compete for the same budget. Every price, free tier and feature below was checked on each vendor’s own site in September 2026. Pricing in this market changes often, so confirm the current figure on the vendor’s pricing page before you commit.

Web Scraping APIs At A Glance

Direct Scraping APIs

These tools do one job: take a URL, get past the blocks and hand back the page. They compete on price per successful request, concurrency, rendering quality and, increasingly, how well they plug into AI workflows.

1. ScrapingAnt

ScrapingAnt describes itself as web data infrastructure for builders: headless Chrome, a pool of more than 3 million rotating proxies, AI extraction and a hosted MCP server, all behind one API key and one credit pool. Every request runs in a fresh, isolated Chromium instance, so single-page apps, lazy-loaded content and infinite scroll work without extra setup, and you can inject a custom JavaScript snippet or wait for a selector before the page is captured.

The biggest structural difference from the rest of this group is concurrency. ScrapingAnt puts no concurrency cap on any plan, including the $19 tier, and its cluster allocates browsers and proxies per request. Most rivals cap an entry plan at somewhere between 5 and 25 simultaneous requests, which quietly limits how fast you can use the credits you paid for.

• Pricing: Enthusiast $19/mo for 100K credits, Startup $49/mo for 500K, Business $249/mo for 3M, Business Pro $599/mo for 8M, and custom plans from $699/mo for 10M+. You can restart a plan mid-month if you run out.
• Free tier: 10,000 credits every month, not a one-off trial, with no card required. Failed requests cost nothing.
• Rendering and proxies: A default request with Chrome rendering and datacenter proxies costs 10 credits, which works out to 50,000 rendered pages on the $49 plan. Residential and datacenter pools cover 100+ countries, and standalone proxies are also sold by the GB.
• AI and agents: LLM-ready Markdown with a single parameter, an AI Data Scraper that turns a plain-English description into JSON, and an MCP server with HTML, Markdown and text tools for Claude Code, Cursor and Windsurf.
• Best for: Developers and AI teams who want rendered pages at volume without a concurrency ceiling, and one plan that covers API calls, Markdown and agent access.
• Watch for: Residential proxies combined with JavaScript rendering cost 125 credits a request, so reserve that combination for the targets that genuinely need it.

For a deeper look at the product, see our ScrapingAnt review.

2. ScrapingBee

ScrapingBee manages proxies, headless browsers and anti-bot defences behind a single API, and has grown a long list of dedicated endpoints for Google Search, Amazon, Walmart, YouTube and even ChatGPT and Gemini answers. Its auto mode is a thoughtful touch: it tries progressively heavier setups and bills only the cheapest configuration that succeeded.

• Pricing: Hobby $19/mo for 75K credits, Freelance $49 for 250K, Startup $99 for 1M, Business $249 for 3M, Business+ $599 for 8M.
• Free tier: 1,000 credits, no card. Failed requests are not charged.
• Rendering and proxies: JavaScript rendering is on by default at 5 credits. Premium proxies cost 10 credits, or 25 with rendering, and stealth proxies cost 75.
• AI and agents: AI extraction to JSON, Markdown and plain-text output, an official MCP server, and n8n and Make integrations.
• Best for: Developers who want many ready-made endpoints and do not want to guess which proxy tier a site needs.
• Watch for: Stealth requests at 75 credits drain the Hobby plan in about 1,000 pages, and concurrency is capped per plan.

3. ScraperAPI

Founded in 2018, ScraperAPI is one of the best-known names in the category and has the widest paid ladder here, running from $49 a month up to plans with 21.5 million credits. Its structured endpoints for Amazon, Google, Walmart and eBay return parsed data, and DataPipeline schedules bulk jobs without code.

• Pricing: Hobby $49/mo for 100K credits and 20 threads, Startup $149 for 1M, Business $299 for 3M, then Scaling, Professional and Advanced up to $1,975 for 21.5M.
• Free tier: 5,000 credits over a 7-day trial, no card.
• Rendering and proxies: Rendering costs 10 credits, premium plus rendering 25, and ultra premium plus rendering 75. The network lists more than 40 million proxies in 50+ countries, though the two cheapest plans are limited to US and EU geotargeting.
• AI and agents: An AI Parser for schema-based extraction, an async API, a crawler, an MCP server and LangChain and n8n support.
• Best for: Ecommerce and SERP teams that want parsed data and scheduled pipelines from a long-established vendor.
• Watch for: The highest entry price in the group, and Google requests cost 25 credits each.

4. ZenRows

ZenRows, based in Bilbao, has repositioned as AI web data infrastructure, with products named Fetch, Extract, Browser Sessions and Batch. It targets heavily protected sites and says it handles Cloudflare, DataDome, Akamai and PerimeterX. Browser Sessions drive real browsers through logins and hold the same IP for up to ten minutes.

• Pricing: Build $16/mo for 45K credits, Launch $57 for 250K, Growth $165 for 1.2M, Scale $456 for 5M.
• Free tier: 5,000 credits a month with 5 concurrent requests, no card.
• Rendering and proxies: Standard 1 credit, JavaScript rendering 5, premium proxies 10, both 25. Residential access starts on the Growth plan.
• AI and agents: Markdown, JSON, plain text and PDF output, plus an MCP server for Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code and more.
• Best for: Protected targets and logged-in flows.
• Watch for: Geotargeting needs premium proxies, which multiply the cost 10 to 25 times.

5. Scrapfly

Scrapfly offers the broadest toolkit of the pure-play APIs: a scraping API, a cloud browser with full Chrome DevTools Protocol access, screenshot and extraction APIs and a crawler in beta, all on one key. It also carries SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and HIPAA, which matters for regulated buyers.

• Pricing: Discovery $30/mo for 200K credits, Pro $100 for 1M, Startup $250 for 2.5M, Enterprise $500 for 5.5M.
• Free tier: 1,000 credits, no card, no time limit.
• Rendering and proxies: Datacenter HTTP 1 credit, rendering or unblocking 5, residential 25. Datacenter, residential and mobile pools across 190+ countries.
• AI and agents: LLM extraction by prompt, Markdown output, an MCP server and CrewAI, LangChain and LlamaIndex integrations.
• Best for: Teams that need browser automation, extraction and compliance paperwork from one vendor.
• Watch for: Low concurrency on entry plans: 5 on the $30 plan and 20 on the $100 plan.

6. Scrape.do

Scrape.do pairs a low entry price with ready-made scraper APIs that return parsed JSON for Google Search, Maps, Shopping, Flights and News, as well as Amazon, Walmart and YouTube. It charges only for successful responses, and blocks and timeouts cost nothing.

• Pricing: Hobby $29/mo for 250K credits, Pro $99 for 1.25M, Business $249 for 3.5M, Advanced $699 for 10M.
• Free tier: 1,000 credits, no card.
• Rendering and proxies: Datacenter 1 credit, with rendering 5, residential or mobile 10, residential with rendering 25. Some domains carry fixed prices, from 10 credits for Google to 200 for a few retail sites.
• AI and agents: Markdown output. No official MCP server was listed at the time of writing.
• Best for: Cost-conscious teams scraping search and retail data.
• Watch for: Domain-specific pricing can make hard retail targets expensive.

7. Scrapingdog

Scrapingdog, founded in India in 2020, has the widest menu of dedicated endpoints in this group: Google Search including AI Overviews, Maps, News and Trends, plus Amazon, Walmart, eBay, LinkedIn, YouTube, X and TikTok. Its open-source MCP server exposes 35 tools.

• Pricing: Lite $40/mo for 200K credits, Standard $90 for 1M, Pro $200 for 3M, Premium $350 for 6M, Business $500 for 9M, with much larger tiers above that.
• Free tier: 100 credits, no card.
• Rendering and proxies: Basic request 1 credit, rendering 5, premium proxy or geotargeting 10. The network lists 40 million+ rotating IPs.
• AI and agents: LLM-ready Markdown, an AI Parser and a plain-English AI mode.
• Best for: Teams that want a parsed endpoint for almost every major site.
• Watch for: The smallest free allowance here, and 5 concurrent requests on the Lite plan.

8. Scraping Fish

Scraping Fish takes the opposite approach to credit multipliers: every successful request costs the same flat $0.002, with rendering, browser actions, sessions and screenshots included. Requests are sold in packs, and failed requests are not charged.

• Pricing: $0.002 per successful request, bought in packs with optional auto-renewal.
• Free tier: No self-serve trial; you request a starter pack from support.
• Rendering and proxies: JavaScript rendering and scripted actions are included. It runs on mobile proxies, currently based in Poland.
• AI and agents: Structured JSON through extraction rules, but no Markdown output, AI extraction or MCP server.
• Best for: Budget forecasting, where knowing the exact cost per page matters more than extras.
• Watch for: The company states it does not offer anti-bot bypass or CAPTCHA solving, and there is no country targeting.

9. Zyte API

Zyte, the company behind the open-source Scrapy framework, prices by site difficulty rather than by credit multiplier. Its API combines automatic ban avoidance, pre-warmed headless browsers and AI extraction for products, articles, job postings and search results, and lets you describe custom fields in plain language.

• Pricing: Pay as you go, or monthly commitments of $100, $200 or $500. Simple HTTP requests start around $0.10 to $0.13 per 1,000, while browser-rendered requests on the hardest sites reach about $12 to $16 per 1,000.
• Free tier: $5 of credit for 30 days.
• Rendering and proxies: Residential, datacenter and mobile IPs are chosen automatically, with country targeting.
• AI and agents: AI extraction and LLM-friendly page content. Zyte offers a Claude Code plugin and remote browsers for agents rather than a hosted MCP server.
• Best for: Scrapy teams and anyone scraping difficult targets at scale.
• Watch for: Costs are hard to predict before you know how Zyte grades your target sites.

Broader Web Data Platforms

These vendors sell a scraping API as one product among many, next to large proxy networks, datasets and marketplaces of ready-made scrapers. They suit teams that want one supplier for everything, at the price of more complex billing.

10. Bright Data

Bright Data, founded in 2014 as Luminati, runs the largest proxy network in the market, with 400 million+ residential IPs across 195 countries. Its line-up spans Web Unlocker, a SERP API, a hosted Browser API, a crawler, 50+ ready-made scrapers for sites such as LinkedIn, Amazon, Instagram and Zillow, and prebuilt datasets.

• Pricing: Web Scraper API and Web Unlocker from $1.50 per 1,000 on pay as you go, with Scale plans from $499/mo. The Browser API is billed by the GB.
• Free tier: 5,000 records or requests a month on each product, no card.
• AI and agents: Markdown output on Unlocker and the Browser API, and a mature MCP server with search, crawl and navigation tools.
• Best for: Enterprises that need global coverage, compliance processes and datasets as well as APIs.
• Watch for: Each product is billed separately, which makes total cost harder to track.

11. Oxylabs

Vilnius-based Oxylabs, founded in 2015, prices its Web Scraper API per 1,000 successful results, with separate rates for Amazon, Google and other sites. OxyCopilot writes request code and parsers from a prompt, and the AI Studio suite adds AI scraping, crawling and search tools.

• Pricing: Micro $49/mo for up to 98K results, Starter $99, Advanced $249. On Micro, Amazon costs $0.50 per 1,000, Google $1.00 and other sites $1.15.
• Free tier: Up to 2,000 results, no card.
• AI and agents: Markdown output, an MCP server and LangChain and LlamaIndex integrations.
• Best for: Teams with steady Google and Amazon workloads who value success-only billing.
• Watch for: Headless Browser and Web Unblocker are separate products with separate bills.

12. Decodo

Decodo, the former Smartproxy, has one of the clearest price tables in the market: a fixed rate per 1,000 requests by proxy tier and whether JavaScript is rendered. It returns HTML, JSON, CSV, screenshots or LLM-ready Markdown and ships more than 100 templates.

• Pricing: Starter $19/mo for 38K standard requests, Professional $49 for 163K, Enterprise $99 for 707K. Standard requests cost $0.50 per 1,000 and premium requests with rendering $1.50.
• Free tier: 2,000 standard requests, no card, plus a 14-day money-back guarantee on paid plans.
• AI and agents: An MCP server and a LangChain integration.
• Best for: Buyers who want to read the price of a request straight off a table.
• Watch for: Premium requests with rendering cost three times the standard rate.

13. Apify

Apify, founded in Prague in 2015, is a cloud platform and a marketplace of roughly 77,000 ready-made scrapers called Actors. You can run someone else’s Actor or build and host your own with Crawlee, its open-source scraping library. The Website Content Crawler turns whole sites into Markdown for retrieval pipelines.

• Pricing: Starter $19/mo, Scale $199, Business $999, each including usage credit, then compute units, proxy data and any per-Actor fees.
• Free tier: $5 of platform credit a month, no card.
• AI and agents: A hosted MCP server plus LangChain, LlamaIndex and vector database integrations.
• Best for: Teams that would rather find an existing scraper than write one.
• Watch for: Costs stack across compute, proxies and Actor prices, and third-party Actor quality varies.

AI Data Tools And Browser Infrastructure

These products are not scraping APIs in the classic sense, but they increasingly win the same budget, especially inside AI agent projects. Each solves part of the problem well and leaves the rest to you.

14. Firecrawl

Firecrawl, a Y Combinator company founded in 2022, turns pages and whole sites into clean Markdown or JSON for LLMs through scrape, crawl, map and search endpoints. Its core is open source under AGPL-3.0, though the hosted version includes features the self-hosted one lacks.

• Pricing: Hobby $19/mo for 5,000 credits, Standard $99 for 100K, Growth $399 for 500K, Scale $719 for 1M.
• Free tier: 1,000 credits a month, no card.
• Credit costs: 1 credit per scraped page, with structured JSON adding 4 more per page.
• AI and agents: An official MCP server, a CLI and SDKs in six languages.
• Best for: Crawling documentation or content sites into a knowledge base.
• Watch for: Its enhanced proxy mode covers only two countries, so it is weaker on geo-sensitive or heavily protected targets.

15. Browserless

Browserless hosts real Chrome for Puppeteer, Playwright and raw CDP connections, and adds REST endpoints for content, screenshots, PDFs and a smart-scrape route that escalates from a plain fetch to a proxied browser with CAPTCHA solving.

• Pricing: Prototyping $30/mo for 20,000 units, Starter $168 for 180,000, Scale $420 for 500,000. One unit is up to 30 seconds of browser time.
• Free tier: 1,000 units, no card.
• Extras: Residential proxies cost 6 units per MB and CAPTCHA solves 10 units each.
• Best for: Teams with existing Puppeteer or Playwright code that want to stop running browsers themselves.
• Watch for: Billing is time-based, so slow pages cost more, and parsing is still your job.

16. Browserbase

Browserbase builds cloud browsers for AI agents, with session replay, live view and Stagehand, its open-source agent SDK. It also sells a Fetch API that returns Markdown or JSON and a Search API.

• Pricing: Developer $20/mo for 100 browser hours, Startup $99 for 500 hours, with proxy data and Fetch or Search calls billed on top.
• Free tier: 1 browser hour and 1,000 Fetch calls.
• AI and agents: An MCP server built on Stagehand, plus LangChain, CrewAI and Mastra integrations.
• Best for: Agents that must click, log in and navigate like a person.
• Watch for: The low-cost Fetch API does not run JavaScript, so dynamic pages need full browser sessions.

17. Tavily

Tavily, now owned by Nebius, is a search engine built for AI agents, with extract, crawl, map and research endpoints on top. It is fast and cheap for grounding an LLM answer in current web results.

• Pricing: Project $30/mo for 4,000 credits, Bootstrap $100 for 15,000, Startup $220 for 38,000, Growth $500 for 100,000, or $0.008 per credit on pay as you go.
• Free tier: 1,000 credits a month, no card.
• AI and agents: An MCP server and integrations with LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, n8n and Zapier.
• Best for: Agents that need to search the web rather than scrape one specific site.
• Watch for: No browser control, proxy options or anti-bot handling, so it cannot replace a scraper for a defined target.

How To Choose The Right Web Scraping API

Price The Request You Will Actually Make

Plan prices are only meaningful once you know the cost of your typical request. A rendered page through standard proxies costs 5 to 10 credits at most vendors, while a rendered page through residential proxies costs 25 or more. Run your real target URLs on each free tier and read the credit counter before you compare plans.

Check Concurrency Before Credits

A large credit allowance is little use if the plan only lets you run five requests at once. If you need results quickly, compare concurrency limits alongside credits. ScrapingAnt is the outlier here with no concurrency cap on any plan.

Decide How Your Data Will Be Used

If the data feeds an LLM or an agent, look for Markdown output and an MCP server. If it feeds a price tracker or a SERP dashboard, parsed endpoints for Google and Amazon save more time than raw HTML. If you already maintain Puppeteer or Playwright scripts, hosted browser infrastructure may be enough.

Match The Vendor To Your Scale

Direct scraping APIs are the fastest route from a free account to production. Data platforms make sense once you need datasets, many site-specific scrapers or enterprise contracts. For related options, see our lists of proxy-backed data extraction services and cloud-based scraping tools for ecommerce monitoring.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is A Web Scraping API?

A web scraping API is a service that fetches a web page for you through rotating proxies and, when needed, a headless browser, then returns the HTML, Markdown or structured data. It replaces the proxy management, browser fleet and block handling you would otherwise build yourself.

Which Web Scraping API Has The Best Free Tier?

ScrapingAnt offers 10,000 credits every month with no card and no expiry clock, which is enough for about 1,000 rendered pages a month. ZenRows gives 5,000 credits a month, and Bright Data gives 5,000 records a month per product. Most other free tiers are one-off trials.

Do Failed Requests Cost Credits?

At most of the scraping APIs in this comparison, including ScrapingAnt, ScrapingBee, ZenRows, Scrapfly, Scrape.do and Scrapingdog, blocked or failed requests are not charged. Some tools still bill for 404 responses, so check the definition of a successful request on each pricing page.

Which Scraping APIs Work With AI Agents?

ScrapingAnt, ScrapingBee, ScraperAPI, ZenRows, Scrapfly, Scrapingdog, Bright Data, Oxylabs, Decodo, Apify, Firecrawl, Browserless, Browserbase and Tavily all offer MCP servers or native agent integrations. The difference is what the agent gets back: a rendered page, clean Markdown, a search result or a live browser.

Is Web Scraping Legal?

Scraping publicly available data is generally lawful in many jurisdictions, but terms of service, copyright, and personal data rules such as GDPR still apply. Review your use case with counsel before scraping personal data or content behind a login.

Conclusion

The best web scraping API depends less on headline price than on the request you make most often, how fast you need results and where the data goes next. Direct APIs such as ScrapingAnt, ScrapingBee, ZenRows and Scrapfly are the quickest way to production. Platforms such as Bright Data, Oxylabs and Apify suit teams that need scale and ready-made scrapers. AI tools such as Firecrawl and Tavily are strongest when the output feeds a model.

For teams that want rendered pages at volume, Markdown and agent access on one plan, and no ceiling on parallel requests, ScrapingAnt is the strongest place to start, and its monthly free credits make it easy to test on your own targets before you spend anything.