Best Bright Data Alternatives in 2026: 7 Tools Compared
Last updated: November 2, 2026. Benchmark figures come from the October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark. Pricing was checked against each vendor's published pages on October 27 and 28, 2026.
What is the best Bright Data alternative?
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 98.6% of requests across 100 real targets in the October 2026 Web Data Frontier Benchmark, compared with Bright Data's 75.4%, while posting a latency score 6.6 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 75.4% of requests: 377 of 500, tenth among seventeen providers. Its 27.88-second latency score ranked fifteenth, slower than the 15.62 seconds it posted in the September 16, 2026 run. The full leaderboard and per-site results are in the October 2026 benchmark post and the public repository.
The right alternative depends on the job:
- String is best when protected pages need to return reliably and you want one API call instead of a proxy portfolio.
- Oxylabs is best when you want Bright Data's product breadth from another enterprise vendor.
- Zyte API is best when you already use Scrapy and want to know a domain's price before sending a request.
- ScraperAPI is best for inexpensive volume on easier targets.
- Firecrawl is best for crawling cooperative sites into markdown, with change monitoring and document parsing layered on top; our Firecrawl alternatives page covers when to leave it.
- Apify is best when the scraper you need already exists as a prebuilt Actor. Our Apify review covers when it is worth the price.
TL;DR
- Bright Data passed 75.4% of benchmark requests, or 377 of 500, and ranked tenth of seventeen.
- String passed 98.6%, or 493 of 500, the highest result in the benchmark, with a 4.24-second latency score, the fastest in the run.
- Bright Data returned content on every attempt for 49 of 100 sites. String did so for 95.
- String passed all 40 requests across the eight social platforms tested. Bright Data passed 35 and returned nothing on YouTube.
- Oxylabs, the closest like-for-like substitute, passed 67.4% with a 16.62-second latency score.
- At $99 per month, String Growth bills $0.16 per 1,000 plain fetches. Bright Data has no plan near $100; Web Unlocker pay-as-you-go costs $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests.
- Every benchmark result comes from a public harness that can be rerun with your own API keys.
Bright Data and six alternatives at a glance
| Provider | Best for | Benchmark success | Latency score | At roughly $100 per month | Main limitation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | Difficult, bot-protected targets that need to return reliably | 98.6% | 4.24s | Growth costs $99. Plain fetches cost $0.16 per 1,000; browser or premium-proxy paths cost $0.80 to $0.90; both together cost $3.25. 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 | 75.4% | 27.88s | No comparable plan. Web Unlocker pay-as-you-go costs $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests; residential proxies cost $8 per GB | No content on 11 of 100 benchmark sites, unpublished premium-domain pricing, and committed plans beginning at $499 |
| Oxylabs | Bright Data-like breadth from another enterprise vendor | 67.4% | 16.62s | Basic costs $100 and covers up to 16 GB of Web Unblocker traffic, the product benchmarked, at $6 per GB. Its Web API /Scrape endpoint lists most sites at $0.90 per 1,000 results, $1.40 with JavaScript rendering, and $0.45 on Amazon | The same per-GB proxy model as Bright Data, and no content returned on 26 of 100 benchmark sites |
| Zyte API | Teams already running Scrapy | 79.6% | 14.43s | 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 | 76.4% | 15.19s | 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 | 81.2% | 8.87s | 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 17 of 100 benchmark sites returned nothing |
| Apify | Renting a prebuilt, site-specific scraper | 79.4% | 24.87s | No $100 tier. Starter costs $19 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 October 30, 2026 Web Data Frontier Benchmark run, with 500 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 October 27 and 28, 2026, at the plan closest to $100 per month billed monthly.
Why people leave Bright Data
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.
Hard sites
Bright Data passed 75.4% of benchmark requests, a respectable result but materially below the 98% advertised on its product page. Nine providers finished ahead of it: String, Scrape.do, Context.dev, Scrapfly, ScrapingBee, Firecrawl, Zyte, Apify, and ScraperAPI.
More important than the aggregate rate is the shape of the failures. Bright Data returned nothing on 11 sites: Temu, Mouser, Louis Vuitton, Canada Goose, Ticketmaster, Yahoo Finance, Indeed, Reuters, eMAG, YouTube, and buybuy BABY. String returned all five attempts on all 11.
Bright Data was also inconsistent on 40 additional sites. It passed one of five attempts on American Airlines, AXS, and Bing; two of five on Lowe's and CarGurus; three of five on Skyscanner, Expedia, Saks Fifth Avenue, Coupang, Idealista, StockX, Etsy, the Wall Street Journal, Google, Tripadvisor, Airbnb, Booking.com, Target, Kroger, and Stack Overflow; and four of five on 20 more, including Walmart, eBay, Home Depot, and StubHub.
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.
The shape of the bill
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.
How we tested these web scraping APIs
The October Web Data Frontier Benchmark covered 100 real sites, 17 providers, five attempts per site, and 8,500 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 and the change was merged. Before the September run, a harness change moved ScraperAPI and four other adapters to the settings their vendors document for bot-protected pages. The original benchmark post explains the pass criteria and why the latency score is failure-aware.
String vs Bright Data: 98.6% vs 75.4%
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 $99 per month. Plain fetches on a standard proxy cost $0.16 per 1,000. Premium-proxy fetches cost $0.90, browser requests on a standard proxy cost $0.80, and browser requests on a premium proxy cost $3.25. Starter costs $19 per month and bills $0.25, $2.40, $1.20, and $4.80 for those four paths. The first 20,000 standard fetches are free, blocked requests are not billed, and credits roll over.
Benchmark performance. It passed 100% against AWS WAF, Kasada, and Fastly; 98.7% against Cloudflare; 97.9% against DataDome; 97.8% against PerimeterX; and 97% against Akamai. It returned content on all 100 sites, with partial content on five.
Strengths.
- Highest overall benchmark pass rate.
- Content returned on every attempt at all 11 sites where Bright Data returned nothing.
- Outcome-based billing: blocked requests cost nothing.
- Per-request escalation, so easy pages remain on the inexpensive path.
- Markdown, raw HTML, or a JSON envelope (the default), chosen per request.
- Search, asynchronous sitemap crawling, and remote Chrome over CDP.
Weaknesses.
- No raw proxy-network product.
- No crawl-to-content endpoint, change monitoring, or PDF and DOCX parsing.
- No self-hosted option.
- Kroger passed two of five attempts. Skyscanner, Yellow Pages, MarketWatch, and Barron's each missed one; Bright Data returned Yellow Pages and MarketWatch on all five.
String's MCP server
String's MCP server is listed on the official registry as ai.usestring/web-access. It is available at https://mcp.usestring.ai/v3/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.
Trying String
curl https://request.usestring.ai/v1/fetch \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $STRING_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"url": "https://www.example.com/the-page-that-blocks-you", "format": "markdown"}'
Leave out format and the page comes back in a JSON envelope. The first 20,000 standard fetches are free, and blocked requests are not billed.
What customers say after switching from Bright Data
Bright Data worked, but it was slow on apartments.com because of Akamai: ~25s per page and several retries per URL, so a full cycle took about a day. Our first full cycle on String just finished: 4,646 URLs, 0 failures, ~2h45m. Big difference, thanks!
Andres, a String customer that moved from Bright Data, on Slack.
First full refresh on String (Nov 3): 4,678 community pages across 12 markets, with 99.7% success (4,662 OK, 16 failed). It never had to use the backup.
Speed: that full refresh took about 2h45m. The two runs before it on Bright Data took ~18–20 hours. At ~0.7s per page vs ~25s before, we can refresh more often and add more markets.
Kindly, a String customer that moved from Bright Data, on Slack.
Oxylabs vs Bright Data: the closest like-for-like replacement
Oxylabs is the most direct Bright Data substitute: a large residential proxy network, a managed scraper API, datasets, and an enterprise sales motion.
Pricing. Oxylabs sells one subscription shared across its products. The benchmark ran Web Unblocker, which bills per GB of request and response traffic: the $100 Basic plan covers up to 16 GB at $6 per GB. Its billing docs count any 2xx or 4xx response as successful, so a 403 block page bills. Oxylabs also sells a per-result Web API /Scrape endpoint. On Basic it lists most sites at $0.90 per 1,000 results, Amazon at $0.45, Google at $0.90 without JavaScript, and JavaScript-rendered custom domains at $1.40. Residential proxies cost $6 per GB on Starter, $5 on Basic, and $2.50 from 1,000 GB.
Benchmark performance. Through Web Unblocker, it passed 67.4% and returned nothing on 26 sites, including Amazon, Facebook, and Booking.com. The benchmark did not test Oxylabs' dedicated Amazon scraper. It returned Skyscanner, Yellow Pages, MarketWatch, and Barron's on all five attempts, four sites where String fell short.
Verdict. Choose Oxylabs when you want Bright Data's product breadth from another vendor. It changes the provider, not the underlying pricing model.
Zyte API vs Bright Data: published domain tiers
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 returned nothing on 14 sites. 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. Zyte also hosts an MCP server at https://mcp.zyte.com/v1/mcp.
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 vs Bright Data: cheap until multipliers apply
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 first ran at the vendor's documented bot-protection settings in September, which accounts for most of its rise from 64.2% in the August run to 84.0%. It passed 76.4% in the October run. It is inexpensive when targets are simple. The headline price becomes less meaningful on the sites most likely to need an unblocker.
Firecrawl vs Bright Data: crawler first, unblocker second
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 finished four places ahead of Bright Data and posted the benchmark's third-fastest latency score. It returned nothing on 17 sites, including LinkedIn, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, Facebook, and Pinterest. 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. For the two side by side on agent workloads, including how long each takes to report a failed call, see Firecrawl vs Bright Data for AI agents.
Apify vs Bright Data: finished scrapers instead of proxy infrastructure
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 joined the benchmark in the September run. The harness calls Apify's Web Fetch Actor, which sends every request through Apify Proxy's Unblocker (adapter source). It finished two places ahead of Bright Data and returned nothing on 12 sites. Its plans meter compute, proxy bandwidth, storage, and Actor-specific fees. Starter costs $19 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.
Where providers specialize
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 | 97.9% | 97% | 98.7% | 97.8% |
| Bright Data | 74.7% | 72% | 74.7% | 86.7% |
| ScraperAPI | 75.8% | 81% | 70.7% | 82.2% |
| Firecrawl | 85.3% | 80% | 98.7% | 100% |
| Apify | 85.3% | 69% | 86.7% | 86.7% |
| Oxylabs | 67.4% | 53% | 68% | 91.1% |
| Zyte | 68.4% | 68% | 92% | 91.1% |
No single aggregate score captures those differences. Bright Data's weakest major wall was Akamai, at 72%, with DataDome and Cloudflare close behind at 74.7%. Firecrawl beat String on PerimeterX and tied it on Cloudflare. Among the providers in this table, ScraperAPI was second only to String on Akamai. Oxylabs and Zyte were both weakest on Akamai. Your own target mix matters more than the market-wide average.
Where Bright Data fails: the flaky middle
Across five attempts per site:
| Outcome across 5 attempts | Bright Data | String |
|---|---|---|
| Content on all five attempts | 49 sites | 95 sites |
| Content on one to four attempts | 40 sites | 5 sites |
| No content on any attempt | 11 sites | 0 sites |
String cleared all five attempts on every site in Bright Data's partial set except Skyscanner and Barron's, where it passed four, and Kroger, where it passed two.
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.
Why pricing is difficult to compare
Every vendor publishes a rate card, but the units differ:
- String bills successful requests based on the fetch path used.
- Bright Data bills proxies by gigabyte and Web Unlocker by successful request, with a separate premium-domain class.
- Oxylabs bills Web Unblocker and proxies by gigabyte and Web API results by request.
- Zyte prices successful responses by domain tier.
- ScraperAPI and Firecrawl sell credits, with some actions consuming multiple credits.
- Apify meters compute, bandwidth, storage, and Actor fees.
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 and Zyte do not bill blocked requests. Oxylabs Web Unblocker counts any 2xx or 4xx response as successful, so a 403 block page bills. Bright Data Web Unlocker normally bills successful requests only, 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.
What $100 a month buys
- String Growth, $99: $0.16 per 1,000 plain fetches; $0.80 to $0.90 with a browser or a premium proxy; $3.25 with both. Blocked requests are free and credits roll over.
- Bright Data: no comparable plan. Web Unlocker pay-as-you-go is $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests; residential proxies are $8 per GB. The first committed plan is $499.
- Oxylabs Basic, $100: up to 16 GB of Web Unblocker traffic, the product the benchmark ran, at $6 per GB. The same plan buys Web API results at $0.90 per 1,000 for most sites, $1.40 rendered, and $0.45 on Amazon, up to 222,000 Amazon results.
- Zyte, $100 commitment: $0.10 to $0.95 per 1,000 HTTP responses, $0.75 to $12.00 rendered, by tier.
- ScraperAPI: no $100 tier. Hobby, $49, implies $0.49 per 1,000 standard pages; Startup, $149, implies $0.15.
- Firecrawl Standard, $99: 100,000 credits, or $0.99 per 1,000 pages at full use.
- Apify: no $100 tier. Starter is $19 and Scale is $199, metered across compute, bandwidth, storage, and Actor fees.
Which Bright Data alternative should you choose?
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. Its own shortlist is covered in the ScraperAPI alternatives comparison.
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.
Switching from Bright Data to String
What carries over. A POST to api.brightdata.com/request keeps its bearer-key shape and becomes a POST to String's /v1/fetch. Drop the zone and format fields. data_format: "markdown" maps to "format": "markdown" and render to "executeJS": true. Code that sends Web Unlocker traffic through the brd.superproxy.io proxy port moves to API calls, because String has no proxy-port interface.
What you rebuild. Scraper APIs and their per-site datasets, Scraper Studio, the Dataset Marketplace, the SERP API, the Browser API, async Unlocker jobs with webhook delivery, and the residential, ISP, datacenter, and mobile proxies. String's /search endpoint covers live Google results, and its remote browser takes Playwright or Puppeteer over CDP. Datasets and raw proxies stay with Bright Data.
Integrations to reconnect. Bright Data publishes Python and JavaScript SDKs, a CLI, a hosted MCP server, and integrations for Zapier, n8n, Make, Clay, LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, and many others. String ships no language SDK, so an SDK call becomes one HTTP POST. Its hosted MCP server runs at mcp.usestring.ai, n8n calls String through the HTTP Request node, and Zapier, LangChain, and the Vercel AI SDK have setup guides in String's docs.
Test on your own failing URLs first. Start with the flaky middle described above: the sites Bright Data returns on some attempts and not others. Bright Data's per-domain success-rate API shows which of your own domains fail. Compare pages returned and cost per usable page, then move only the targets that improve. Leave custom headers off for the test: String does not bill a blocked request unless that request sent custom headers. The first 20,000 String standard fetches are free with no card. The String vs Bright Data page compares the two products in more depth.
FAQ
What is the best Bright Data alternative for bot-protected sites?
String. It returned the most requests across 100 targets, posted the highest rate against Akamai, and tied Firecrawl for the highest against Cloudflare. It did not lead on DataDome, where Context.dev passed 100% to String's 97.9%, or on PerimeterX, where Scrape.do and Firecrawl passed 100% to String's 97.8%.
Is String cheaper than Bright Data?
Unless a page needs a browser and a premium proxy together, yes: String Growth costs $0.16 per 1,000 for a plain fetch and $0.80 to $0.90 with a browser or a premium proxy, compared with Bright Data Web Unlocker's $1.50 pay-as-you-go rate. String's browser-plus-premium-proxy path costs $3.25, however, so the target mix matters. String does not bill blocked requests and rolls credits over.
Which alternative is the closest like-for-like replacement?
Oxylabs. It sells the same broad combination of proxy infrastructure, managed scraping, datasets, and enterprise support.
Does Bright Data charge for failed requests?
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.
Is there a free Bright Data alternative?
Bright Data's Web Unlocker includes 5,000 free requests per month. String includes 20,000 free standard fetches 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. Oxylabs gives $5 of welcome credit toward any product. Apify includes $5 of prepaid usage per month.
Which alternatives have an MCP server?
String, Bright Data, Oxylabs, Firecrawl, Apify, and ScraperAPI publish official MCP servers. Zyte hosts one too.
When is Bright Data still the better choice?
When you need raw proxy infrastructure at scale, multiple web-data products under one contract, or an established compliance and procurement package. It also returned Yellow Pages and MarketWatch on all five benchmark attempts, where String missed one each.
Can I verify the numbers?
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.