Last updated: August 19, 2026. Benchmark figures come from the August 11, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark. Pricing was checked against each vendor's published pages on August 18 and 19, 2026.
The best Bright Data alternatives in 2026 are String, Oxylabs, Zyte API, ScraperAPI, Firecrawl, and Apify.
String is the strongest web scraping API for difficult, bot-protected websites. It passed 97.0% of requests across 99 real targets in the August 2026 Web Data Frontier Benchmark, compared with Bright Data's 78.0%, while posting a latency score 2.6 times faster. Oxylabs is the closest like-for-like replacement: a large proxy network and scraper API sold to the same enterprise buyer. Zyte API is best for Scrapy teams that want published per-domain pricing. ScraperAPI is the budget option for easier targets. Firecrawl is best for turning cooperative websites into markdown. Apify is best when a reliable prebuilt scraper already exists.
Bright Data remains the incumbent for a reason. It operates one of the industry's largest residential proxy networks, its pricing page claims more than 400 million IPs, and it sells proxies, unblocking, datasets, SERP APIs, and scraper APIs under one contract. If you need raw proxy infrastructure at scale, or a vendor whose compliance team has already answered procurement's questions, Bright Data remains a safe choice.
Performance is where the comparison gets more interesting. Bright Data's Web Unlocker page advertises 98% success. In the open benchmark, it passed 78.0% of requests: 386 of 495, fifth among fifteen providers. Its 26.14-second latency score was the slowest in the field. Bright Data returned content on all five attempts for 57 of 99 sites. String did so for 92. The full leaderboard and per-site results are in the August 2026 benchmark post and the public repository.
The right alternative depends on the job:
| Provider | Best for | Benchmark success | Latency score | At roughly $100 per month | Main limitation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | Difficult, bot-protected targets that need to return reliably | 97.0% | 9.98s | Growth costs $100. Plain fetches cost $0.20 per 1,000; browser or premium-proxy paths cost $1.00 to $2.00; both together cost $4.00. Blocked requests are free | No raw proxy-network product, crawl-to-content endpoint, or self-hosted option |
| Bright Data | Proxies, datasets, SERP APIs, and unblocking under one contract | 78.0% | 26.14s | No comparable plan. Web Unlocker pay-as-you-go costs $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests; residential proxies cost $8 per GB | Slowest latency score in the benchmark, unpublished premium-domain pricing, and committed plans beginning at $499 |
| Oxylabs | Bright Data-like breadth from another enterprise vendor | 76.8% | 14.67s | Web Scraper API Starter costs $99 and lists most sites at $1.10 per 1,000 successful results, $1.30 with JavaScript rendering, and $0.45 on Amazon | The same per-GB proxy model as Bright Data, and no content returned on 18 of 99 benchmark sites |
| Zyte API | Teams already running Scrapy | 72.7% | 14.85s | HTTP responses cost $0.10 to $0.95 per 1,000; browser responses cost $0.75 to $12.00, depending on the domain tier | Zyte assigns and periodically reviews each domain's tier |
| ScraperAPI | Cheap volume on cooperative targets | 64.2% | 13.65s | No $100 tier. Hobby costs $49 and implies $0.49 per 1,000 standard pages; Startup costs $149 and implies $0.15. Multipliers make protected sites substantially more expensive | Per-site multipliers reach 30x, and anti-bot bypass adds ten credits per request |
| Firecrawl | Crawling accessible sites into markdown | 78.6% | 9.21s | Standard costs $99 for 100,000 credits, or $0.99 per 1,000 pages at full use | Credits are charged on processed 403 and 404 responses, and 16 of 99 benchmark sites returned nothing |
| Apify | Renting a prebuilt, site-specific scraper | Not tested; Apify is a marketplace and infrastructure platform rather than one general fetch API | Not tested | No $100 tier. Starter costs $29 and Scale costs $199, with prepaid usage applied across compute, bandwidth, storage, and Actor fees | Multiple meters and Actor-specific fees make spend difficult to forecast |
Benchmark figures come from the August 11, 2026 Web Data Frontier Benchmark run, with 495 requests per provider. The latency score is failure-aware: per target, the p75 of a provider's successful attempts; a provider with no successful attempt on a target inherits the p75 of the providers that succeeded. Pricing comes from each vendor's published pages, checked August 18 and 19, 2026, at the plan closest to $100 per month billed monthly.
Bright Data has the widest product surface in this comparison: residential, ISP, datacenter, and mobile proxies; Web Unlocker; SERP API; scraper APIs; and datasets. It is ISO 27001 certified, displays a SOC badge, and uses KYC before opening access to residential and mobile networks. For enterprises that want one vendor and one contract, that breadth is the product.
Teams generally look elsewhere for two reasons: performance on difficult sites and the shape of the bill.
Bright Data passed 78.0% of benchmark requests, a respectable result but materially below the 98% advertised on its product page. Four providers finished ahead of it, and its 26.14-second latency score was the slowest of all fifteen.
More important than the aggregate rate is the shape of the failures. Bright Data returned nothing on 11 sites: Temu, Lowe's, Skyscanner, Expedia, Coupang, Ticketmaster, SeatGeek, Yahoo Finance, Reuters, Verizon, and Target. String returned content on nine of those eleven, including all five attempts on eight. Only Temu and Skyscanner defeated both.
Bright Data was also inconsistent on 31 additional sites. It passed one of five attempts on Best Buy, Kroger, and Carter's; two of five on Home Depot, Instacart, Mouser, StockX, and American Airlines; and three of five on Indeed, Monster, eBay, and Lululemon. String was partial on five sites total.
That middle category matters. A target that works two times out of five creates retry costs and intermittent data gaps, the expensive kind of failure because the pipeline appears healthy until it suddenly is not.
Bright Data sells residential proxies per gigabyte and Web Unlocker per successful request.
Residential pay-as-you-go costs $8 per GB. Committed plans begin at $499 for 141 GB, then $999 for 332 GB and $1,999 for 798 GB. Bandwidth includes request headers, request data, response headers, and response data. Page weight, rendered assets, and retries all affect cost. Unused monthly commitments do not roll over.
Web Unlocker is the closer comparison to a web scraping API. It includes 5,000 free monthly requests. Pay-as-you-go costs $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests, while the $499 Scale plan includes 383,000 requests and charges $1.30 per 1,000 beyond the commitment. Bright Data lists prices starting at $1.00 per 1,000 at larger commitments.
Some sites are categorized as premium domains and billed at a higher, unpublished rate. Web Unlocker normally bills successful requests only, but Bright Data documents one exception: enabling custom headers, cookies, or expect elements causes all requests to be billed, successful or not.
None of this is hidden. It is simply a portfolio of meters when what many teams want is a page.
The August Web Data Frontier Benchmark covered 99 real sites, 15 providers, five attempts per site, and 7,425 live requests. Targets included Amazon, Walmart, Zillow, Ticketmaster, and other websites protected by major anti-bot systems.
Every provider ran through a public adapter using its strongest general anti-bot mode. A request passed only when the response included a marker from the real page. A captcha interstitial returning HTTP 200 still counted as a failure.
Disclosure: String built the benchmark and sells the product that ranked first.
The harness, targets, pass criteria, and provider configurations are public on GitHub. Providers can inspect their adapters, contest results, or submit changes. Firecrawl did exactly that: one of its engineers opened a pull request, the change was merged, and the August results use the subsequent rerun. The original benchmark post explains the pass criteria and why the latency score is failure-aware.
String's Web Access API makes one HTTP call against any URL. Proxy rotation, anti-bot handling, captcha solving, and JavaScript rendering happen behind the endpoint. There is no proxy pool to configure or bandwidth meter to manage.
Pricing. Growth costs $100 per month. Plain fetches on a standard proxy cost $0.20 per 1,000. Premium-proxy fetches cost $2.00, browser requests on a standard proxy cost $1.00, and browser requests on a premium proxy cost $4.00. Starter costs $20 per month and doubles those usage rates. The first 5,000 requests are free, blocked requests are not billed, and credits roll over.
Benchmark performance. String passed 480 of 495 requests, or 97.0%, the highest result among fifteen providers. It passed 100% against Cloudflare, Kasada, and Fastly; 98.0% against Akamai; 97.9% against DataDome; 96.7% against AWS WAF; and 88.9% against PerimeterX. It returned content on all five attempts for 92 sites, partial content for five, and no content for two.
Latency. 9.98 seconds, second in the benchmark and 2.6 times faster than Bright Data's.
Strengths.
Weaknesses.
String's MCP server is listed on the official registry as ai.usestring/web-access. It is available at https://mcp.usestring.ai/v1/mcp or locally through npm i @usestring/mcp, authenticated with STRING_AI_API_KEY. It exposes fetch, search, and sitemap tools using the same infrastructure and pricing as direct API calls.
Bright Data also publishes an official MCP server, so MCP support is not the deciding difference.
POST https://request.usestring.ai/v1/fetch
{"url":"https://www.example.com/the-page-that-blocks-you"}
Markdown returns by default. The first 5,000 requests are free, and blocked requests are not billed.
Oxylabs is the most direct Bright Data substitute: a large residential proxy network, a managed scraper API, datasets, and an enterprise sales motion.
Pricing. Its Web Scraper API bills successful results. The $99 Starter plan lists most sites at $1.10 per 1,000 results, Amazon at $0.45, Google at $0.90, and JavaScript-rendered requests at $1.30. Residential proxies remain separately priced per GB, starting around $6.
Benchmark performance. Oxylabs passed 76.8% of benchmark requests with a 14.67-second latency score. It returned nothing on 18 sites, but it produced the strongest PerimeterX result in the benchmark at 97.8%.
Verdict. Choose Oxylabs when you want Bright Data's product breadth from another vendor. It changes the provider, not the underlying pricing model.
Zyte maps each domain and request type to one of five public pricing tiers. Pay-as-you-go HTTP responses cost $0.13 to $1.27 per 1,000; browser responses cost $1.01 to $16.08. A $100 monthly commitment lowers those ranges to $0.10 to $0.95 and $0.75 to $12.00.
Zyte passed 72.7% with a 14.85-second latency score. It is the strongest fit for teams already running Scrapy and the clearest alternative for buyers who want to see a domain's rate before requesting it.
The tradeoff is that Zyte assigns the tier and reviews assignments quarterly. A domain can move with two weeks' notice, so published does not mean permanently fixed.
ScraperAPI is the budget option for easier targets. Hobby costs $49 for 100,000 credits, Startup costs $149 for one million, and Business costs $299 for three million. Credits reset monthly.
A standard request costs one credit. Amazon costs five, Google and Bing cost 25, and LinkedIn costs 30. Bypassing Cloudflare, DataDome, or PerimeterX adds ten credits. Premium proxies and JavaScript rendering add their own multipliers.
ScraperAPI passed 64.2% with a 13.65-second latency score. It is inexpensive when targets are simple. The headline price becomes less meaningful on the sites most likely to need an unblocker.
Firecrawl is optimized for turning websites into markdown. It adds crawl-to-content, change monitoring, document parsing, SDKs, MCP support, and an open-source AGPL core.
Standard costs $99 for 100,000 credits. A plain scrape costs one credit; JSON output adds four. Firecrawl bills when its infrastructure processes a request, including target 403 and 404 responses, and most plan credits do not roll over.
Firecrawl passed 78.6%, one place ahead of Bright Data, and posted the benchmark's fastest latency score at 9.21 seconds. It returned nothing on 16 sites, including LinkedIn, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, and Facebook. A Firecrawl engineer wrote in the adapter pull request that ten benchmark sites are blocked by policy.
Choose Firecrawl when crawl-to-markdown is the actual job. Do not choose it primarily as a social-platform unblocker.
Apify operates a marketplace of prebuilt scrapers called Actors and provides infrastructure for building custom ones. If a reliable Actor already exists for a target, renting the finished pipeline can be easier than assembling proxies and an unblocker.
Apify was not included in the benchmark because it is not one general fetch API. Its plans meter compute, proxy bandwidth, storage, and Actor-specific fees. Starter costs $29 and Scale costs $199; unused prepaid usage expires monthly.
Choose Apify when a maintained, site-specific scraper already exists or when the workload is intermittent. String also publishes Actors in the Apify Store, so the two products can be complementary.
Success by anti-bot vendor, across the 63 benchmark sites these four systems protect:
| Provider | DataDome (19 sites) | Akamai (20) | Cloudflare (15) | PerimeterX (9) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | 98% | 98% | 100% | 89% |
| Bright Data | 82% | 60% | 85% | 69% |
| Oxylabs | 77% | 67% | 77% | 98% |
| Firecrawl | 90% | 72% | 100% | 84% |
| Zyte | 81% | 58% | 61% | 87% |
| ScraperAPI | 55% | 85% | 60% | 58% |
No single aggregate score captures those differences. Bright Data's weakest major wall was Akamai. Oxylabs led PerimeterX. ScraperAPI performed relatively well on Akamai and poorly on DataDome. Your own target mix matters more than the market-wide average.
Across five attempts per site:
| Outcome across 5 attempts | Bright Data | String |
|---|---|---|
| Content on all five attempts | 57 sites | 92 sites |
| Content on one to four attempts | 31 sites | 5 sites |
| No content on any attempt | 11 sites | 2 sites |
Bright Data's partial set includes Best Buy, Kroger, Carter's, Home Depot, Instacart, Mouser, StockX, American Airlines, Indeed, Monster, eBay, and Lululemon. String cleared all five attempts on each except Mouser, where it passed four.
The operational issue is not simply that a request fails. It is that intermittent success drives retries, increases cost, and creates pipelines that appear healthy until a missing page matters.
Every vendor publishes a rate card, but the units differ:
The units are not constant. A gigabyte buys fewer heavy pages than light ones. ScraperAPI pages can consume one to 30 credits before additional anti-bot charges. Zyte's most expensive tiers cost many times its cheapest. Browser rendering, extraction, output format, and page actions add separate meters across the market.
Billing rules differ too. String, Zyte, and Oxylabs' scraper API bill successful results. Bright Data Web Unlocker normally does as well, but bills every request once certain options are enabled. Proxy products bill transferred bytes whether the page ultimately works or not. Firecrawl bills processed 403 and 404 responses. ScraperAPI bills 200 and 404 responses.
The practical answer is to price your own target list. Success on that list will determine more of the final bill than the advertised unit rate.
Choose String when protected pages need to return reliably and you want one API instead of a proxy portfolio.
Choose Oxylabs when you want the same enterprise product shape from another vendor.
Choose Zyte when you already use Scrapy or want published per-domain pricing.
Choose ScraperAPI when the targets are cooperative and volume is the primary constraint.
Choose Firecrawl when the job is crawling accessible sites into markdown, especially when change monitoring or document parsing matters.
Choose Apify when a maintained scraper already exists as an Actor.
Stay with Bright Data when you need raw residential, ISP, datacenter, or mobile IPs at substantial scale; when datasets, SERP API, and unblocking need to sit under one contract; or when its existing compliance posture is a hard procurement requirement.
Bright Data is a proxy platform with an unblocker attached. The right decision depends on which of those two products you are actually buying.
String. It passed 97.0% of requests across 99 targets, compared with Bright Data's 78.0%, and led the benchmark against Cloudflare, Akamai, and DataDome. Oxylabs remains stronger on PerimeterX.
On pages that clear through a plain fetch, yes: String Growth costs $0.20 per 1,000 compared with Bright Data Web Unlocker's $1.50 pay-as-you-go rate. String's most expensive browser-plus-premium-proxy path costs $4.00, however, so the target mix matters. String does not bill blocked requests and rolls credits over.
Oxylabs. It sells the same broad combination of proxy infrastructure, managed scraping, datasets, and enterprise support.
Web Unlocker normally bills successful requests only. When custom headers, cookies, or expect elements are enabled, Bright Data says all requests are billed. Proxy products charge per gigabyte transferred, including failed attempts and retries.
Bright Data's Web Unlocker includes 5,000 free requests per month. String includes 5,000 free requests without a card. ScraperAPI includes 1,000 free credits plus a seven-day trial with 5,000. Firecrawl includes 1,000 free credits monthly. Zyte provides $5 in initial credit. Apify includes $5 of prepaid usage per month.
String, Bright Data, Oxylabs, Firecrawl, Apify, and ScraperAPI publish official MCP servers. Zyte publishes a guide for building one but does not host an official server.
When you need raw proxy infrastructure at scale, multiple web-data products under one contract, or an established compliance and procurement package. It also matched String across the eight social platforms in the benchmark.
Yes. The harness, target list, pass criteria, and provider adapters are public at github.com/usestring/web-data-frontier-benchmark. Start with a subset because a full run creates thousands of billable requests.