Best Crawlbase Alternatives in 2026: 7 Tools Compared
What is the best Crawlbase alternative?
The best Crawlbase alternatives in 2026 are String for protected pages that must come back, Scrapfly for several scraping APIs on one key, ScraperAPI for cheap volume on easy pages, Firecrawl for crawl-to-content work, Bright Data for one enterprise contract that covers proxies and datasets, and Oxylabs for grocery, pharmacy and news lists. On the September 2026 benchmark of 100 bot-protected sites, String passed 97.0% of requests, the highest of 16 web scraping APIs. Scrapfly passed 86.2%, ScraperAPI 84.0%, Firecrawl 80.2%, Bright Data 74.6% and Oxylabs 69.0%. Crawlbase is not in the benchmark, so it has no success rate or rank on this page. This page compares all seven on benchmark success, latency, pricing near $100 a month and MCP support, and checks Crawlbase's own published success numbers against the 25 benchmark sites they cover.
Last updated October 27, 2026. Benchmark figures come from the September 16, 2026 run and /benchmark: 100 sites, 16 providers, 5 attempts per site. Pricing, billing rules and Crawlbase's published numbers were checked against each vendor's own pages on October 27, 2026.
TL;DR
- Crawlbase is not in our benchmark. It bills only successful requests, and its billing docs count a target's 404, a 410 and an empty 200 page as successful. Its product page claims a 99% average success rate.
- String passed 97.0% of requests, 485 of 500, first of 16, and returned all five attempts on 93 of 100 sites.
- Crawlbase's scraping cookbook publishes its own August success rate for 25 of our 100 sites, from 90.5% to 100%, average 97.0%. On the same 25 sites, the 16 tested APIs returned 1,403 of 2,000 attempts, 70.2%.
- Crawlbase's pricing page lists eight site-difficulty tiers, from 1x to 20x a standard credit, and JavaScript doubles any tier. Its cookbook prices linkedin.com at 20 credits a request.
- Near $100 a month, Crawlbase Starter is $99 for 200,000 credits, about $0.50 per 1,000 standard pages. String Growth is $99, at $0.16 per 1,000 standard fetches.
- Crawlbase gives up to 5,000 free requests. String gives the first 20,000 standard fetches free with no card.
- The benchmark harness and every per-attempt result are public.
At a glance
| Provider | Best for | Benchmark success | Latency score | What about $100 a month buys (per 1,000) | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | Protected pages that must return content | 97.0% (1st of 16) | 7.06s | Growth $99: $0.16 standard fetch, $0.80 with a browser, $0.90 on a premium proxy, $3.25 with both | No crawl jobs or storage product; no SOC 2 report yet |
| Crawlbase | One credit balance across an API, a proxy, a crawler and storage | Not tested | Not tested | Starter $99: $0.50 standard, $0.99 with JavaScript, $0.74 to $9.90 on harder tiers | Crawlbase sets each site's tier; 404s and empty pages bill; the block resets monthly |
| Scrapfly | Several APIs on one key | 86.2% (2nd) | 19.79s | Pro $100: $0.10 datacenter, $2.50 on the residential pool we tested | Some targets carry Unblocker fees that are not published; 404s bill |
| ScraperAPI | Cheap volume on easy pages | 84.0% (3rd) | 12.97s | No $100 plan. Hobby $49: $0.49 standard. Startup $149: $0.15 standard, $4.47 at the tested setting | Credits per request run from 1 to 75 |
| Firecrawl | Crawl-to-content work | 80.2% (4th) | 9.11s | Standard $99: $0.99 per page | A returned 403 or 404 page bills |
| Bright Data | Proxies, datasets and unblocking on one contract | 74.6% (6th) | 15.62s | No $100 plan. Pay as you go: $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests | Premium-domain rate is not on the public pricing page |
| Oxylabs | Grocery, pharmacy and news lists | 69.0% (9th) | 15.86s | Basic $100: $6.00 per GB, about 16 GB | Billed by traffic; 4xx responses count as successful |
The latency score is each provider's mean per-site time across the 100 sites. A site a provider failed counts at the time of the providers that succeeded, so a provider that fails more does not look faster for it. Pricing is the plan nearest $100 a month, billed monthly.
Why people leave Crawlbase
Hard sites. Crawlbase says its Crawling API clears "bot walls, CAPTCHAs and rate limits" automatically, through 140 million residential IPs. Its 13 Trustpilot reviews average 4.0, and the praise is mostly for support. One reviewer wrote that a new block was fixed "in less than 24 hours" after a ticket (review). That is a fair point for Crawlbase. It also shows the cost a buyer wants to avoid: a site that changes its defense becomes a ticket and a day of missing data.
Pricing. Crawlbase has one rate card for every product. The difficult part is the site tier. Its pricing page lists eight multipliers, from Standard at 1x to Extreme II at 20x, and says heavily defended sites "carry a higher tier, applied automatically." The API returns the tier in an X-Domain-Complexity header, so you learn a site's price after you send traffic to it. One reviewer called the service "excellent" and the pricing "unacceptable" (review).
What bills. Older comparison pages say Crawlbase bills blocked requests, and ScraperAPI's Crawlbase page still says so. That is out of date. Crawlbase's current docs say a block, a timeout or a site 5xx is free. They also say three things do bill: a 404 or 410 from the site, a redirect, and a cb_status of 207, which the docs define as a 200 "with an empty body".
How we tested these web scraping APIs
The September 16, 2026 run sent 16 web scraping APIs to the same 100 sites, five loads each, 500 requests per provider, with a 90-second timeout. A load passes only when the response contains a marker string from the real page, so a CAPTCHA page, a consent wall or an empty 200 counts as a failure. The adapters, targets and every result are in the public repository, and the run file has every attempt.
We build String and it ranks first in this run. That is a conflict of interest, and the answer to it is a harness you can run against your own sites with your own keys. Any provider can contest its setup. Firecrawl did: its engineer opened a pull request that fixed its configuration, and every run since uses it.
Each adapter's setting matters. Scrapfly ran with its Unblocker on and the residential pool pinned. ScraperAPI ran ultra_premium, its advanced anti-bot setting. Firecrawl ran its default proxy path, Bright Data its Web Unlocker, and Oxylabs its Web Unblocker. On the sites where String and another provider both returned all five attempts, String's mean time was also lower than each one's; Firecrawl was close, at 6.22 seconds against String's 6.08.
Crawlbase has no adapter in the harness, so it has no row. Adding one takes a pull request against the same repository.
String vs Crawlbase: 97.0% measured, and $0.16 for a plain page
String's Web Access API is a web scraping API that takes a URL and returns the page. Proxy choice, anti-bot handling, CAPTCHAs and JavaScript rendering happen behind one endpoint.
Pricing. Growth is $99 a month: $0.16 per 1,000 standard fetches, $0.90 on a premium proxy, $0.80 with a browser and $3.25 with both (pricing). String moves a request to the premium rate only when the site blocks the standard proxy. Blocked requests are free, unused credit rolls over, and the first 20,000 standard fetches are free with no card. A site's 404 bills, as it does on Crawlbase.
Benchmark success. 97.0%, 485 of 500, first of 16. All five attempts on 93 sites, partial content on 5, nothing on 2 (temu.com and idealista.com). String passed 100% on the Cloudflare, PerimeterX and AWS WAF sites, 98.0% on Akamai and 92.6% on DataDome.
Latency. 7.06s, the lowest latency score of the 16.
Strengths. Content on hard targets, with no bill for a blocked page. On the 25 benchmark sites Crawlbase's cookbook covers, String returned 122 of 125 attempts, the most of any tested API. String also searches Google live and lists a site's URLs through an async sitemap crawl. Its hosted MCP server is listed as ai.usestring/web-access in the MCP registry.
Weaknesses. No crawl jobs: the sitemap crawl returns URLs, and each page is its own fetch. No cloud storage and no language SDKs. String has no SOC 2 report yet.
Try it on a page that fails for you today. The default response is a JSON envelope, so ask for markdown by name:
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"}'
Scrapfly vs Crawlbase: two credit menus, one of them measured
Pricing. Pro is $100 a month for 1,000,000 credits, $0.10 per 1,000. A datacenter request is 1 credit; the residential pool the benchmark used is 25, or $2.50 per 1,000, and a browser adds 5. The Unblocker docs say some targets carry fees that "are not publicly documented". Credits do not roll over. The billing docs exclude 404, 410 and other listed 4xx codes from failure protection, and switch the protection off when 30% or more of your scrapes over 24 hours are blocked without the Unblocker.
Benchmark success. 86.2%, 431 of 500, second of 16. All five attempts on 71 sites, nothing on 5, google.com among them.
Latency. 19.79s, 11th of 16.
Strengths. Scrapfly returned all five attempts on five of the six cookbook sites where the tested field averaged 51.3% or less, including allegro.pl, where the field averaged 25.0%. It passed 96.7% on AWS WAF and 92.6% on DataDome. It runs an MCP server and sells crawler, screenshot and extraction APIs on the same key. Our String vs Scrapfly page compares the two directly.
Weaknesses. Slow responses, 0 of 5 on google.com, and a per-target fee you learn from your logs.
ScraperAPI vs Crawlbase: per-site credit costs on both sides
Pricing. No plan near $100. Hobby is $49 for 100,000 credits and Startup $149 for 1,000,000. The credits doc sets 1 credit for a normal page, 5 for Amazon and Walmart, 25 for Google and Bing, 30 for LinkedIn and for ultra_premium, and 75 for ultra_premium with rendering. At the tested setting that is $4.47 per 1,000 on Startup. It bills 200 and 404 responses, and credits do not roll over. Its Crawlbase comparison sells "flat, predictable pricing" against Crawlbase's tiers, but ScraperAPI also prices by site and by mode.
Benchmark success. 84.0%, 420 of 500, third of 16. All five attempts on 71 sites, nothing on 9, including instagram.com, facebook.com and x.com.
Latency. 12.97s.
Strengths. A low base rate on easy pages and 92.0% on Akamai. On the 25 cookbook sites it returned 110 of 125 attempts, second to String. ScraperAPI publishes an MCP server. Our ScraperAPI alternatives page covers it from the other side.
Weaknesses. Social networks: 62.5% on the eight in the run. The real rate per site depends on its credit multiplier.
Firecrawl vs Crawlbase: crawl-to-content, one credit per page
Pricing. Standard is $99 billed monthly for 100,000 credits, $0.99 per 1,000 pages whether the site is protected or not. Its billing docs charge a credit when the target returns a 403 or 404; a scrape that returns no document is free. JSON extraction adds 4 credits a page. Credits do not roll over below annual Scale.
Benchmark success. 80.2%, 401 of 500, fourth of 16. Nothing on 17 sites, including linkedin.com, reddit.com, yelp.com and trustpilot.com.
Latency. 9.11s, second-lowest of 16.
Strengths. Crawl, map and extract next to scrape, fast responses, 93.3% on Cloudflare and PerimeterX, and an open-source core with an MCP server.
Weaknesses. Social platforms passed 25% in the run. On the 25 cookbook sites it returned 82 of 125 attempts, the fewest of the six. Our Firecrawl alternatives page goes further.
Bright Data vs Crawlbase: pay as you go on a larger contract
Pricing. No plan near $100. Web Unlocker pay as you go is $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests; the first plan is $499 for 383,000. The free tier is 5,000 requests a month. Its features doc says premium domains bill at a higher rate shown in the zone's estimated cost, and zones with custom headers or cookies bill 100% of requests, failed ones included.
Benchmark success. 74.6%, 373 of 500, sixth of 16. Nothing on 16 sites, including yelp.com, allegro.pl, ticketmaster.com and bing.com.
Latency. 15.62s.
Strengths. 100% on PerimeterX, all five attempts on each of the 8 social sites, and one contract for proxies, datasets, SERP APIs and unblocking. Bright Data runs an MCP server. Our Bright Data alternatives page covers the rest.
Weaknesses. 47.4% on DataDome, and an unpublished rate on the premium domains a hard list contains.
Oxylabs vs Crawlbase: traffic billing against request billing
Pricing. Oxylabs now sells one subscription across its products. On Basic, $100 a month, Web Unblocker costs $6.00 per GB, about 16 GB. The cost per page moves with page weight, so it does not convert cleanly to a per-1,000 rate. Its billing docs bill request and response traffic and count every 2xx and 4xx response from the target as successful.
Benchmark success. 69.0%, 345 of 500, ninth of 16. Nothing on 24 sites, including amazon.com, booking.com, trustpilot.com and apartments.com.
Latency. 15.86s.
Strengths. 100% on the five grocery sites and the pharmacy site, 95.6% on news and finance, and 86.7% on PerimeterX. Oxylabs publishes an MCP server. Our Oxylabs alternatives page goes further.
Weaknesses. 33.3% on AWS WAF and 57.3% on Cloudflare. A traffic bill is hard to compare with a per-request one.
Anti-bot coverage
Success rate by the protection in front of each site, September 16 run.
| Provider | DataDome (19) | Akamai (20) | Cloudflare (15) | PerimeterX (9) | AWS WAF (6) | Proprietary or other (27) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | 92.6% | 98.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 96.3% |
| Scrapfly | 92.6% | 81.0% | 90.7% | 84.4% | 96.7% | 83.0% |
| ScraperAPI | 82.1% | 92.0% | 89.3% | 88.9% | 83.3% | 76.3% |
| Firecrawl | 77.9% | 84.0% | 93.3% | 93.3% | 83.3% | 64.4% |
| Bright Data | 47.4% | 79.0% | 88.0% | 100.0% | 86.7% | 72.6% |
| Oxylabs | 65.3% | 67.0% | 57.3% | 86.7% | 33.3% | 82.2% |
| Crawlbase | Not tested | Not tested | Not tested | Not tested | Not tested | Not tested |
Kasada (3 sites) and Fastly (1) are left out; the samples are too small.
How do Crawlbase's own success numbers compare with an independent test?
Crawlbase publishes a scraping cookbook: 356 site recipes, each with an August 2026 success rate, a browser share and a credit price, measured on its own customers' traffic. Few vendors publish this much, and it lets a buyer check one vendor's numbers against another source. We matched the cookbook to our 100 benchmark sites with Crawlbase's own counting rule, which keys a site by its registrable name.
Twenty-five of our 100 sites have a cookbook page. Crawlbase reports 90.5% to 100% on all 25, an average of 97.0%. On the same 25 sites, the 16 APIs we tested returned 1,403 of 2,000 attempts, 70.2%. The field did better there than on our other 75 sites (65.4%), so the cookbook sites are a little easier than the rest of the run.
These are the six cookbook sites where the tested field averaged 51.3% or less:
| Site | Crawlbase cookbook, August | Tested field, Sep 16 | String | Scrapfly | ScraperAPI | Firecrawl | Bright Data | Oxylabs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| allegro.pl | 99.7% | 25.0% | 4/5 | 5/5 | 0/5 | 1/5 | 0/5 | 0/5 |
| yelp.com | 99.4% | 33.8% | 4/5 | 5/5 | 5/5 | 0/5 | 0/5 | 1/5 |
| trustpilot.com | 90.9% | 38.8% | 5/5 | 5/5 | 5/5 | 0/5 | 5/5 | 0/5 |
| buybuybaby.bedbathandbeyond.com | 100% (bedbathandbeyond.com) | 47.5% | 5/5 | 5/5 | 4/5 | 5/5 | 0/5 | 5/5 |
| apartments.com | 99.1% | 50.0% | 5/5 | 5/5 | 5/5 | 5/5 | 5/5 | 0/5 |
| google.com | 97.0% | 51.3% | 5/5 | 0/5 | 5/5 | 4/5 | 3/5 | 5/5 |
Across all 25 cookbook sites, attempts returned out of 125: String 122, ScraperAPI 110, Scrapfly 109, Bright Data 97, Oxylabs 92, Firecrawl 82.
The two sources count different things, and neither proves the other wrong. The cookbook counts every request from every Crawlbase account in the month, retries included, on the URLs those customers chose. It counts a site's 404 or 410, and an empty 200 page, as a success. And a site gets a page only when it "answers at 90% or better", so every published rate is 90% or higher. Our benchmark sends five attempts to one fixed, often protected, page per site and passes a response only when a marker from the real page is in it.
What the comparison does show: a vendor's own traffic number describes the pages its customers already fetch well. It does not tell you how the vendor does on the page you need. Several widely scraped sites in our run have no cookbook page, including zillow.com, instagram.com, facebook.com, ticketmaster.com, indeed.com and glassdoor.com. For those, the only evidence is a test on your own list.
Why pricing is hard to compare across these providers
- The unit differs. Crawlbase, Scrapfly, ScraperAPI and Firecrawl sell credits; String and Bright Data price requests; Oxylabs prices gigabytes.
- Credits vary by site. Crawlbase has eight tiers from 1x to 20x; ScraperAPI charges 1 to 75 credits; Scrapfly adds unpublished fees on some targets.
- Browsers cost extra. 2x on Crawlbase, 5x a standard fetch on String, plus 5 credits on Scrapfly.
- Output formats can cost extra. Firecrawl's JSON extraction adds 4 credits a page.
- What bills differs. Crawlbase, String, Scrapfly and ScraperAPI bill a site's 404; Firecrawl bills a 403 and a 404; Oxylabs counts every 4xx; Crawlbase also bills an empty 200 page; Bright Data's standard zones bill successful requests only.
- Prepaid blocks behave differently. Crawlbase, Scrapfly, ScraperAPI and Firecrawl Standard reset each month; String's credit rolls over.
- The hardest rates are unpublished. Bright Data's premium domains and Scrapfly's per-target fees, and every vendor's enterprise contract.
What $100 a month buys
- String Growth, $99, bills $0.16 per 1,000 standard fetches, $0.80 with a browser, $0.90 on a premium proxy, $3.25 with both.
- Crawlbase Starter, $99, buys 200,000 credits: about $0.50 per 1,000 standard pages, $0.99 with JavaScript, $0.74 on a Moderate site such as yelp.com, $2.23 on walmart.com at 4.5 credits, and $9.90 on linkedin.com at 20.
- Scrapfly Pro, $100, bills $0.10 per 1,000 datacenter requests, $2.50 on the residential pool.
- ScraperAPI has no $100 plan: Hobby is $49 at $0.49 per 1,000 standard, or Startup is $149 at $0.15 standard and $4.47 at the tested setting.
- Firecrawl Standard, $99, bills $0.99 per 1,000 pages.
- Bright Data has no $100 plan; $100 of pay as you go buys about 66,700 successful requests.
- Oxylabs Basic, $100, buys about 16 GB of Web Unblocker traffic at $6.00 per GB.
String against Crawlbase at this level, in both directions. On a standard page String costs less: $0.16 per 1,000 against about $0.50. With a browser String costs less: $0.80 against $0.99. On a Moderate site where String needs its premium proxy, Crawlbase costs less: $0.74 against $0.90. On a Complex I site or harder, Crawlbase costs $1.49 or more per 1,000 before JavaScript, more than String's $0.90 premium fetch. The web scraping API pricing page compares every tested provider.
Which Crawlbase alternative should you pick?
Pick String when protected pages must return content and a blocked request should cost nothing.
Pick Scrapfly when you want several APIs on one key and can accept slow responses.
Pick ScraperAPI when most of your list is easy pages and volume price matters more than social coverage.
Pick Firecrawl when you need crawl, map and extraction at speed, and your list has little social media.
Pick Bright Data when you want proxies, datasets and unblocking under one enterprise contract.
Pick Oxylabs when your list is grocery, pharmacy or news and you accept traffic billing.
Stay on Crawlbase when you use its crawler, proxy and storage on one balance, your sites sit in the Standard tier, and its support has fixed your blocks fast enough. The ranking of 16 web scraping APIs puts every tested API side by side.
Switching from Crawlbase to String
What carries over. The URL list and the code that reads HTML or markdown. A GET to api.crawlbase.com with token and url becomes a POST to String's /v1/fetch with the key in an Authorization header. Crawlbase's format=md maps to "format": "markdown", and you must set it, because String returns a JSON envelope by default. country maps to countryCode. You do not choose a Normal or a JavaScript token: String renders pages that need a browser without being asked.
What you rebuild. The Enterprise Crawler with its webhooks, Cloud Storage, the Smart AI Proxy endpoint, screenshots on the Crawling API, and Crawlbase's site scrapers and autoparse JSON. On String you parse the page yourself or describe the fields in a jsonSchema. String's sitemap crawl lists a site's URLs, and each URL is then its own fetch. If you depend on the crawler or storage, keep Crawlbase for that and move the failing fetches.
Integrations to reconnect. Crawlbase ships SDKs for Python, Node, Ruby, PHP, Go, Java and .NET, an MCP server, and LangChain, Zapier and n8n integrations. 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. Take the URLs that fail on Crawlbase today, and the ones it bills at a high tier, and run them through String. 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.
FAQ
What are the best Crawlbase alternatives?
String, Scrapfly, ScraperAPI, Firecrawl, Bright Data and Oxylabs. In the September 16, 2026 benchmark of 100 bot-protected sites, they passed 97.0%, 86.2%, 84.0%, 80.2%, 74.6% and 69.0% of requests. Crawlbase was not tested.
Which Crawlbase alternative works on Cloudflare-protected websites?
String passed 100% on the 15 Cloudflare sites in the September 16 run. Firecrawl passed 93.3%, Scrapfly 90.7% and ScraperAPI 89.3%.
Are Crawlbase's published success rates accurate?
They are accurate for what they count. Crawlbase's cookbook reports 90.5% to 100% on the 25 of our benchmark sites it covers, average 97.0%. It measures all its customers' traffic and counts a 404 or an empty page as a success. On the same 25 sites, the 16 APIs we tested returned 70.2% of attempts on fixed, protected pages. Test your own URLs before you trust either number.
Is there a free Crawlbase alternative?
Most have a free allowance. String gives the first 20,000 standard fetches free with no card. Bright Data gives 5,000 Web Unlocker requests a month, Firecrawl 1,000 credits a month and Scrapfly 1,000 credits. Crawlbase itself gives up to 5,000 free requests.
Is String cheaper than Crawlbase?
On standard pages, yes: $0.16 per 1,000 on String Growth against about $0.50 on Crawlbase Starter. With a browser, String is $0.80 against $0.99. On a Moderate-tier site where String needs a premium proxy, Crawlbase is cheaper, $0.74 against $0.90. On LinkedIn, Crawlbase's 20-credit price is $9.90 per 1,000.
Does Crawlbase charge for failed requests?
No. Crawlbase bills when its own status is 200 or 207 and the site returned 200, 201, a redirect, 404 or 410. Blocks, timeouts and site 5xx errors are free. A 404, a 410 and an empty 200 page (status 207) are billed.
Which Crawlbase alternatives have MCP servers?
All six. String, Scrapfly, ScraperAPI, Firecrawl, Bright Data and Oxylabs publish MCP servers. Crawlbase has one too.
When is Crawlbase still the better choice?
When you use its crawler, proxy and cloud storage on one balance, most of your sites sit in the Standard tier, and its support fixes new blocks fast enough for your pipeline. Clone the benchmark harness, add your URLs and run it with your own keys to check.
Sources
Checked October 27, 2026.
- String: /benchmark, the September 2026 results post, the benchmark method post, pricing and the fetch API reference
- Benchmark harness repository and the September 16, 2026 run file
- Crawlbase: pricing, Crawling API docs and billable requests, Crawling API product page, scraping cookbook, cookbook method, Web MCP server
- Trustpilot: Crawlbase reviews, review of July 10, 2026, review of May 14, 2026
- Scrapfly: pricing, billing, Unblocker
- ScraperAPI: pricing, credits, Crawlbase comparison
- Firecrawl: pricing, billing
- Bright Data: Web Unlocker pricing, Web Unlocker features
- Oxylabs: Web Unblocker pricing, billing
- Related String pages: String vs ScraperAPI, Scrape.do alternatives, best web scraping APIs