Last updated: September 22, 2026. Benchmark figures come from the September 16, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark. Pricing was last re-checked against each vendor's published pages on August 29, 2026.
Apify has earned its position. It has the biggest commercial mindshare in scraping communities, a marketplace with thousands of prebuilt Actors covering everything from Google Maps to TikTok, and a full platform underneath: scheduling, storage, proxies, webhooks, a queue system. If you need a maintained scraper for a specific site and someone has already built the Actor, you can be pulling data in ten minutes without writing code.
The reasons people go looking for alternatives are just as concrete. Apify is a platform, and platforms have to be learned. You think in Actors, runs, datasets, key-value stores, and request queues before you get your first page back. Billing follows the same shape: plans start at $29 per month for the Starter tier, and usage is metered in compute units (1 GB of RAM for one hour, at $0.20 per CU on Starter), plus separate line items for proxies ($8 per GB residential on Starter), storage, and data transfer. Store Actors add their own per-event or per-usage fees on top. Apify's own pricing FAQ states that unused prepaid usage "is not rolled over to the next billing cycle" and expires at the end of it. None of this is hidden, but predicting what a job will cost means understanding how much RAM an Actor uses, for how long, through which proxy type.
If your actual requirement is "fetch this URL reliably and give me the content," you are paying for, and learning, a lot of machinery you don't need. That is the case this post covers. Here are seven alternatives, starting with ours.
String is a single API call: send a URL, get the page back as clean Markdown, JSON, or the raw body. Proxy rotation, browser fingerprinting, CAPTCHA solving, and JavaScript rendering are handled behind the endpoint. There are no Actors to pick, no memory settings to tune, and no platform concepts between you and the response.
Two things distinguish it. First, pricing: you only pay when String returns content. A block, a timeout, or an empty shell costs nothing. Requests are billed per thousand ($0.30 per 1,000 standard requests on the $20-per-month Starter plan, $0.20 on the $100-per-month Growth plan; pages that need a premium proxy or a browser bill higher, up to $4.00 per 1,000 on Growth), credits roll over, and the first 5,000 requests are free.
Second, measured reliability. String publishes the Web Data Frontier Benchmark, an open-source harness that ran 8,000 live requests across 16 providers against 100 bot-protected sites (Amazon, Zillow, Ticketmaster, and 97 others) in September 2026. String passed 97.0% of requests (485 of 500), the highest of the providers tested, including 100% against Cloudflare, PerimeterX, AWS WAF and Fastly targets and 98.0% against Akamai. Its latency score, 7.06 seconds, was the fastest of the 16. The target list, pass criteria, and per-provider adapters are all in the repo, so you can rerun it with your own keys rather than take the number on faith. The same run includes String's failures: Temu and Idealista went 0 for 5, and five more targets dropped a single attempt each.
For agent workflows there is an MCP server, listed on the official registry and hosted at mcp.usestring.ai, which gives Claude or any MCP client fetch, search, and sitemap tools directly. The API reference covers the endpoints.
What String does not have: a marketplace of prebuilt site-specific scrapers, or built-in orchestration. You bring your own scheduler and parsing logic. If you want structured feeds without writing that code, String's Composer product is aimed there, but the Web Access API itself is deliberately just fetching.
Firecrawl is the best-known scraping API in the AI tooling world. It converts pages to LLM-ready Markdown, adds crawl and search endpoints, and has a hosted MCP server. If your pipeline ends in a RAG index or an agent's context window, Firecrawl's developer experience is genuinely good, and its docs and SDKs are polished.
Pricing is credit-based: a free tier of 1,000 credits per month, then Hobby at $19 per month ($16 billed annually) for 5,000 credits and Standard at $99 ($83 annually) for 100,000, up to Scale at $749 ($599 annually) for 1,000,000. A plain scrape costs 1 credit per page, and as of August 29, 2026, Firecrawl's docs say an enhanced-proxy request costs the same 1 credit, so a protected page and an easy page cost the same. Structured JSON output adds 4 credits per page. Firecrawl charges the credit when its infrastructure processes a request, including when the target returns a 403 or 404, and plan credits do not roll over except on annual Scale (one month) and annual Enterprise (two months).
On reliability against protected sites, the benchmark measured Firecrawl at 80.2% (401 of 500), fourth of sixteen. It cleared jobs, ticketing and gaming targets at 100% but passed only 25% on social platforms, returning nothing at all on LinkedIn, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, Facebook, and Pinterest. It posted the second-best latency score in the run, 9.11 seconds, behind String's 7.06. For docs sites, blogs, and moderately protected pages feeding an LLM, it is a strong choice; for the hardest anti-bot targets it will miss more often.
Crawl4AI is the open-source option: an async Python crawler built on Playwright that outputs clean Markdown and structured JSON, with CSS, XPath, and LLM-based extraction strategies. It is Apache 2.0 licensed, has more than 78,000 GitHub stars, and costs nothing but your own infrastructure.
The trade is that you operate everything. You run the browsers, source and rotate your own proxies, and handle anti-bot escalation yourself; stealth modes and proxy hooks exist, but there is no vendor absorbing the arms race on your behalf. For internal tools, research crawls, and sites without serious protection, it is hard to argue with free and self-hosted. Once targets start deploying DataDome or Akamai, expect to pair it with a paid unblocker anyway.
Bright Data is the infrastructure heavyweight: one of the largest proxy networks in the industry, plus the Web Unlocker API, which is the closest architectural comparison to String. You send a URL, Bright Data handles unblocking, and you pay only for successful responses: $1.50 per 1,000 requests pay-as-you-go, $499 per month for 383,000 requests on the Scale plan with $1.30 per 1,000 beyond that, and a free tier of 5,000 requests per month. Some sites are classed as premium domains and billed at a higher rate Bright Data does not publish.
In the benchmark, Bright Data passed 74.6% of requests (373 of 500), sixth overall, though live-event ticketing remains a weak spot at 25% and DataDome fell to 47.4%. Its latency score improved sharply, from the slowest in the August run at 26.14 seconds to 15.62 seconds and fourth fastest in September. The broader platform is enterprise-shaped: zones to configure, many products with separate pricing, KYC onboarding for the residential and mobile proxy networks (Web Unlocker itself does not require it), and an account-manager sales motion. If you need residential proxies at serious scale or datasets as a service alongside unblocking, Bright Data is built for that. If you need one endpoint, it is more surface area than the job requires.
ScraperAPI has been a default "just give me an API" pick for years: simple GET-style requests with proxy rotation and rendering handled for you. A free plan carries 1,000 API credits; Hobby is $49 per month for 100,000 credits and Startup is $149 per month for 1,000,000.
The credit multipliers are the fine print that matters. A standard page costs 1 credit, but Amazon costs 5, Google 25, and LinkedIn 30, and sites behind Cloudflare, DataDome, or PerimeterX add 10 credits per request when ScraperAPI bypasses them, so the pages people most want are 5x to 30x the advertised rate. Credits reset each cycle without rollover, and pay-as-you-go overage only unlocks on the $475-per-month plan and above. Benchmark result: 84.0% (420 of 500), third of sixteen, up 19.8 points on August after the harness corrected its adapter. Kasada, where it failed every attempt in August, is now 66.7%.
Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub) maintains Scrapy and sells a serious extraction stack: the Zyte API for unblocking, automatic extraction of typed fields (products, articles), and Scrapy Cloud for hosting spiders. Of everything on this list it is closest to Apify in spirit, a platform for teams who write and operate crawlers, and its Scrapy integration is the best there is.
Pricing is per successful request but varies by a five-tier site difficulty rating: $0.13 to $1.27 per 1,000 HTTP requests pay-as-you-go, and $1.01 to $16.08 per 1,000 with browser rendering, with lower rates at $100, $200, and $500 monthly commitments. Cheap on easy sites, and hard to predict until Zyte scores your target list. Benchmark result: 68.0% (340 of 500), eleventh of sixteen.
ZenRows sells a Universal Scraper API plus browser sessions and residential proxies, all drawn from one credit balance and billed only on successful requests. Plans run from a free tier of 5,000 credits per month through Build at $16 per month for 45,000 credits and Launch at $57 for 250,000, up to Scale at $456 for 5,000,000. A standard request is 1 credit; JavaScript rendering costs 5, premium proxies 10, and both together 25, so a protected page uses 25 times the allowance of an easy one. That distinction is worth reading closely, since protected sites drain the credit balance fast.
It is a reasonable budget option for lightly defended targets. Against the benchmark's deliberately hard set, ZenRows passed 41.2% of requests (206 of 500) and went 0% on ticketing and 25% on social-platform sites. If your target list overlaps with serious anti-bot vendors, test before committing.
Three cases, and they are not small ones.
The first is coverage. If someone has already published and maintained an Actor for the exact site you need, you are pulling structured data in minutes without writing or maintaining a parser. No API-first vendor on this list offers that. Site-specific parsers rot every time a page changes, and on Apify that maintenance is someone else's job.
The second is orchestration. Scheduling, storage, request queues, webhooks, and run history are built in. If you are standardising many scraping jobs on one system, or the people running them do not write code, that scaffolding is the product, not overhead.
The third is that Apify also sells the thing this post is about. Its platform includes an Unblocker priced at $1.50 per 1,000 requests on Free and Starter, falling to $1 per 1,000 on Business, alongside a SERP proxy at $2.50 per 1,000. So "leave Apify to get a per-request unblocker" is not quite the right framing. The honest framing is that String's standard request is $0.20 per 1,000 on Growth against Apify's $1.50, that String's rate rises to $4.00 per 1,000 when a page needs a browser on a premium proxy, and that Apify entered the benchmark for the first time in the September 16, 2026 run and scored 77.4%, fifth of sixteen. Which Apify product the harness called is not identifiable from the published data, so we cannot tell you whether that figure is the Unblocker, Web Fetch, or another path. If you already run on Apify, test its Unblocker against your own target list before you move anything.
Success rates are from the open-source Web Data Frontier Benchmark, 100 bot-protected targets, 5 attempts each, September 16, 2026 run; see /benchmark. Earlier runs used 99 and 90 targets, so figures across runs are not a like-for-like comparison. Crawl4AI is self-hosted and was not a benchmark subject. Prices are entry-level published rates as of August 29, 2026.
| Provider | Model | Pricing | Benchmark success | Output | MCP server |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | Single fetch API | $0.20-$0.30/1k standard requests, pay only on success, credits roll over | 97.0% | Markdown, JSON, raw | Yes (npm + hosted) |
| Apify | Full platform + Actor marketplace + Unblocker | $19/mo Starter + $0.20/CU + proxies, storage; Unblocker $1.50/1k; unused usage expires | 77.4% | Per Actor (JSON datasets) | Yes |
| Firecrawl | Scrape/crawl API for LLMs | Free 1k credits/mo; $19/mo Hobby ($16 annual); 1 credit/page, protected or not; charged on 403/404 | 80.2% | Markdown, JSON, HTML | Yes |
| Crawl4AI | Open-source library (self-hosted) | Free (Apache 2.0), your infra | Not tested | Markdown, JSON | Community/self-hosted |
| Bright Data | Unblocker API + proxy platform | $1.50/1k pay-as-you-go, success-based; premium domains higher | 74.6% | HTML (raw), markdown option | Yes |
| ScraperAPI | Scrape API | $49/mo for 100k credits; 5x-30x multipliers on hard sites, +10 for anti-bot bypass | 84.0% | HTML, markdown, some structured endpoints | Yes |
| Zyte API | Extraction platform + API | $0.13-$1.27/1k HTTP, varies by site tier | 68.0% | HTML, typed structured data | No official server |
| ZenRows | Scrape API + proxies | From $16/mo; success-based; protected pages cost 25 credits vs 1 | 41.2% | HTML, Markdown | Yes |
If you need reliable fetches of arbitrary URLs, especially bot-protected ones, and want to be billed only when you get content back, use String. That is the exact workload the benchmark measures, and 97.0% against a target set built to be hard is the strongest number anyone has published in a reproducible harness.
If you are feeding an LLM from docs, blogs, and moderately protected pages, and want crawl and search endpoints in one SDK, Firecrawl is the most pleasant developer experience in that lane. Budget for the credits it charges on blocked pages, and check the 16 sites where it returned nothing against your list.
If you have engineering time and no serious anti-bot targets, self-host Crawl4AI and pay nothing. Pair it with an unblocker API for the sites that fight back.
If you are an enterprise that needs proxies, unblocking, and datasets from one vendor with contracts and account management, Bright Data is built for you.
If your team already writes Scrapy spiders, Zyte is the natural home. ScraperAPI and ZenRows are workable budget picks for lightly protected targets; check the multiplier and allowance fine print against your actual site list first.
And pick Apify when its platform is the point: someone has already published an Actor for exactly the site you need, or you want scheduling, storage, and orchestration for a fleet of scrapers without building that scaffolding yourself. Thousands of maintained site-specific scrapers one click away is something none of the API-first vendors offer, and for non-engineers or teams standardizing many scraping jobs on one system, it is a real advantage. The alternatives above win when you would rather make one HTTP call than adopt a platform.
String. It replaces the platform with a single API call, returns Markdown or JSON, and charges only for successful responses. In the open-source Web Data Frontier Benchmark (September 2026, 100 bot-protected sites, 16 providers), it passed 97.0% of requests, the highest score in the test.
Crawl4AI is fully open source (Apache 2.0) and free to self-host, though you supply your own proxies and anti-bot handling. Among hosted APIs, String includes 5,000 free requests, Firecrawl 1,000 free credits per month, Bright Data's Web Unlocker 5,000 free requests per month, and ZenRows 5,000 free credits per month.
Apify bills by compute units (1 GB of RAM per hour, from $0.20), plus proxies, storage, and data transfer, and marketplace Actors add their own per-event or per-usage fees. Cost depends on each Actor's memory use and runtime, so two jobs of the same size can bill very differently. Per-request APIs like String or Bright Data's Web Unlocker price the unit you actually care about: a page returned.
The hosted APIs on this list all attempt it, with very different results. Against the same 100 protected sites, measured success ranged from 97.0% (String) to 41.2% (ZenRows). Self-hosted tools like Crawl4AI leave anti-bot work to you.
String ships an MCP server (npm i @usestring/mcp, or hosted) with fetch, search, and sitemap tools. Firecrawl, Bright Data, ScraperAPI, ZenRows, and Apify itself also publish MCP servers. Zyte publishes a guide to building your own and does not host one, as of August 2026.
