Best Decodo Alternatives in 2026: 8 Tools Compared

String vs Decodo: 97.0% vs 50.6%, and no bill when a page is blocked

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, and String picks the fetch path for each request.

Pricing. Usage-based: the monthly fee becomes usage credit, and unused credit rolls over. Growth is $99 a month and bills $0.16 per 1,000 plain fetches on a standard proxy, $0.90 on a premium proxy, $0.80 for a browser on a standard proxy, and $3.25 for a browser on a premium proxy. Starter is $19 at $0.25, $2.40, $1.20 and $4.80. Premium rates apply only when a site blocks the standard proxy. Against Decodo's $99 plan, String is cheaper on plain fetches ($0.16 against $0.30) and more expensive on every premium or browser path ($0.90 against $0.70, $0.80 against $0.60, $3.25 against $1.10).

Benchmark success. 97.0%, or 485 of 500, first of 16. String returned all five attempts on 93 sites, partial content on 5, and nothing on 2.

Latency. 7.06 seconds, the fastest of the 16. Decodo's score was 25.41 seconds, fifteenth of 16.

Strengths.

• The highest pass rate in the run, including all five attempts on 36 of the 39 sites where Decodo returned nothing.
• 100% against Cloudflare, PerimeterX, AWS WAF and Fastly, and 98% against Akamai, where Decodo read 46.7%, 82.2%, 30.0%, 0% and 57.0%.
• Blocked requests are not billed. Only 5 of String's failed attempts came back as a 2xx without the real page, against 39 for Decodo.

Weaknesses.

• More expensive than Decodo on premium and browser paths.
• No crawl-to-content endpoint, no site templates or parsers, no self-hosting, and no language SDKs.
• Decodo returned all five attempts on Foot Locker, where String returned four. It was the only site where Decodo beat String.

MCP. String's hosted server is listed in the official registry as ai.usestring/web-access, at https://mcp.usestring.ai/v1/mcp, with fetch, search and sitemap tools (docs).

Try it on the URLs that fail on Decodo today:

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.

Scrapfly vs Decodo: five APIs on one key vs one endpoint and templates

Pricing. Pro is $100 a month for 1,000,000 credits, at $0.10 per 1,000 credits prepaid and $3.50 per 10,000 beyond that. A datacenter HTTP scrape is 1 credit, rendering or the Unblocker is 5, and residential proxies are 25, so the per-1,000-page rates are $0.10, $0.50 and $2.50. Scrapfly says a failed request is "$0, never charged on error," and that upstream 4xx and 5xx responses are free. Credits do not roll over: "Quotas reset at renewal."

Benchmark success. 86.2%, or 431 of 500, second of 16 and 35.6 points above Decodo. It returned nothing on 5 sites against Decodo's 39, and returned all five attempts on 30 of Decodo's 39.

Latency. 19.79 seconds, eleventh of 16, against Decodo's 25.41.

Strengths. The strongest non-String result in the run. Five APIs share one credit pool, with SDKs for Python, TypeScript, Go and Rust, a hosted MCP server, and SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and HIPAA listed on its pricing page. It tied String on DataDome at 92.6%.

Weaknesses. The rate depends on what a page needs. A datacenter fetch is $0.10 per 1,000, the Unblocker is $0.50, and residential proxies are $2.50, so the bill on protected pages is hard to forecast before you run them. Decodo beat it on 14 sites, Zara among them, where Decodo returned all five attempts and Scrapfly none.

Firecrawl vs Decodo: crawl-to-content vs raw retrieval

Pricing. Standard is $99 a month billed monthly, or $83 a month billed annually, for 100,000 credits: $0.99 per 1,000 pages at full use. The enhanced proxy costs the same 1 credit as a basic request. Firecrawl's billing docs say the charge depends on "whether Firecrawl returned a document," so a page that comes back as 403 or 404 costs a credit and a scrape that fails outright costs nothing. Hobby, Standard and Growth credits do not roll over.

Benchmark success. 80.2%, or 401 of 500, fourth of 16. It returned all five attempts on 30 of Decodo's 39 zero sites.

Latency. 9.11 seconds, second fastest of 16.

Strengths. Crawl, map, search, monitor and document parsing on one API, an open-source core, SOC 2 Type II, and fast failures. It scored 93.3% on Cloudflare against Decodo's 46.7%.

Weaknesses. Social media. Firecrawl scored 25.0% across eight social platforms and Decodo scored 80.0%. Decodo returned all five attempts on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, The New York Times and aa.com, where Firecrawl returned none. Firecrawl also bills x.com requests at 30 credits.

Bright Data vs Decodo: one enterprise contract vs one cheap endpoint

Pricing. No plan near $100. Pay as you go is $1.50 per 1,000 requests, with "Pay only for success," and Scale starts at $499 for 383,000 requests. Two caveats change the real bill. Bright Data bills premium domains at a higher rate that appears only in the zone's "Estimated cost" section, and it updates that domain list quarterly with 30 days' notice. With custom headers, cookies or expect elements enabled, "you'll be billed for 100% of the requests (both successful and failed)." Because the premium rate is unpublished, Bright Data is not ranked as the cheapest option anywhere on this page.

Benchmark success. 74.6%, or 373 of 500, sixth of 16. It returned all five attempts on 24 of Decodo's 39 zero sites.

Latency. 15.62 seconds, fourth fastest of 16.

Strengths. Proxies, datasets, SERP APIs and unblocking under one contract, ISO 27001, a hosted MCP server, and 100% on PerimeterX and social media.

Weaknesses. DataDome, at 47.4%, the same as Decodo. Decodo returned all five attempts on Louis Vuitton, Canada Goose, Etsy and Yahoo Finance, where Bright Data returned none. Its pay-as-you-go rate is above Decodo's top $1.10 rate.

Context.dev vs Decodo: one flat credit vs four rates

Pricing. Pro is $90 a month for 100,000 credits, or $0.90 per 1,000 pages, with $2.00 per 1,000 credits of overage. Context.dev says "JS rendering, anti-bot bypass, and proxies are included in the base scrape price." Browser actions raise a scrape to 2 credits and JSON extraction to 5. On failures, Context.dev's pricing FAQ says "Most failed requests are not billed" and "Not-found responses (404) are billed at the request's base price."

Benchmark success. 72.0%, or 360 of 500, eighth of 16. It returned all five attempts on 26 of Decodo's 39 zero sites.

Latency. 16.32 seconds, sixth fastest of 16.

Strengths. The most predictable bill on this page. Decodo prices premium plus rendering at almost four times its standard rate, $1.10 against $0.30; Context.dev prices every page the same. It has SDKs in five languages and an MCP server.

Weaknesses. 43.2% on DataDome, below Decodo's 47.4%. Decodo returned all five attempts on Expedia, Louis Vuitton and Etsy, where Context.dev returned none.

Oxylabs vs Decodo: bandwidth billing vs per-request billing

Pricing. Oxylabs now sells one subscription across its products. On Basic, $100 a month, Web Unblocker costs $6 per GB, up to 16 GB; Starter, $30, is $7.20 per GB up to 4 GB. There is no per-page rate to set beside Decodo's, because the bill depends on page weight. Oxylabs says "We will only charge you for successfully extracted data. Failed scraping attempts won't be included into your traffic usage calculation" (Web Unblocker FAQ).

Benchmark success. 69.0%, or 345 of 500, ninth of 16. It returned all five attempts on 17 of Decodo's 39 zero sites, the fewest in this group.

Latency. 15.86 seconds, fifth fastest of 16.

Strengths. 86.7% on PerimeterX and 86.7% on Kasada, ISO/IEC 27001:2022, an MCP server, and a bill that suits small pages.

Weaknesses. 33.3% on AWS WAF and 0% on the one Fastly site. Decodo returned all five attempts on StockX, Zara and Facebook, where Oxylabs returned none. Both returned 0 of 5 on amazon.com through the general path; each vendor sells a dedicated Amazon product the benchmark did not test, and it may do better.

Zyte vs Decodo: a vendor-assigned tier vs a published card

Pricing. Zyte API starts "From $0.06 per 1,000 successful responses," and the real rate depends on a tier. At the $100 monthly commitment, the five HTTP tiers run $0.10, $0.17, $0.33, $0.53 and $0.95 per 1,000, and the browser tiers run $0.75 to $12.00. Zyte's pricing docs say "Tier assignment is automatic," and "We review tier assignments quarterly. Affected customers receive 2 weeks notice of any tier changes." Unsuccessful responses are free. The commitment is paid at the start of the month, and "If usage is below the commitment, no refund is provided."

Benchmark success. 68.0%, or 340 of 500, eleventh of 16 and 17.4 points above Decodo.

Latency. 17.46 seconds, seventh of 16.

Strengths. The lowest published rate on this page for easy pages, $0.10 per 1,000 on tier 1. 100% on Kasada and 88.9% on PerimeterX. The strongest Scrapy integration for teams that already run spiders.

Weaknesses. You cannot price a list before you sign up, because Zyte assigns the tier. That is the mirror image of Decodo: Decodo publishes four rates and defaults to premium, while Zyte publishes five and tells you which one applies afterwards. Zyte scored 30.0% on AWS WAF, the same as Decodo.

The anti-bot cut

Success rates by protection vendor, from the September 16 run. Site counts are in the column headers.

Fastly protects one site and is left out of the table. Kasada protects three, so read that column as an anecdote.

Decodo's strongest columns are Kasada at 93.3%, tied with String, and PerimeterX at 82.2%, above Context.dev's 66.7%. Its weakest are AWS WAF at 30.0%, the proprietary group at 41.5%, and Cloudflare at 46.7%. By industry, Decodo is strongest on fashion and luxury at 83.6%, ahead of Scrapfly, Bright Data, Context.dev, Oxylabs and Zyte, and on social media at 80.0%, ahead of Firecrawl's 25.0%. If your list is mostly fashion and luxury retail, Decodo's overall rank understates it.

Decodo has no fast path: zero pages under five seconds

Across all 100 sites, no site where Decodo returned content had an average response time under five seconds. Its fastest site with content was eBay, at 5.7 seconds. Decodo was the only provider of the 16 with zero such sites. String had 70, Zyte 43, and Firecrawl 38.

Decodo did have six sites under five seconds. On all six it returned nothing: arXiv at 2.5 seconds, Delta at 3.0, TradingView at 3.5, Allmenus at 4.5, GitHub at 4.6 and Rightmove at 4.8. Decodo's quickest answers were its failures.

The easy sites show the same shape. On the 30 sites where the 16 providers averaged 80% success or better, Decodo returned none in under five seconds, and its median was 20.7 seconds. String's median on the same 30 sites was 1.65 seconds, and Zyte's was 1.4.

This is the difference between a hard-site tax and a floor. A provider that slows down on protected pages makes a trade you can reason about: route the easy half of the list somewhere fast. Decodo charged roughly 20 seconds whether the page was easy or not, so there was no easy half to route.

Two limits on this number. It is a per-site average over five attempts, not a per-request timing. And it says nothing about throughput: Decodo's $99 plan allows 50 requests per second, so a batch job can hide a slow floor behind concurrency. An agent loop or a live lookup cannot, because one page's latency is the user's wait.

Why pricing is hard to compare across these providers

The rate cards do not describe the same thing, so no single number ranks them. Seven reasons:

1. The unit differs. Decodo, String and Zyte bill per request. Scrapfly, Firecrawl and Context.dev sell credits. Oxylabs bills Web Unblocker per gigabyte. Bright Data bills per successful request, with an unpublished class for premium domains.
2. A credit is not a page. One Context.dev credit is one scrape. One Scrapfly credit is a datacenter fetch, and the same page on residential proxies is 25. A Firecrawl page in JSON format is 5 credits, and an x.com request is 30.
3. Browser and proxy choices move the rate. Decodo's premium-plus-rendering rate is almost four times its standard rate, and premium is its default. String's browser-on-premium path is about 20 times its plain fetch.
4. What counts as billable differs. String does not bill a blocked request, but bills a site's own 404. Decodo bills a 2xx or 4xx response that returns a result. Firecrawl bills a returned 403 or 404 page. Context.dev bills a 404. Scrapfly calls upstream 4xx and 5xx free. Bright Data bills every request once custom headers or cookies are on.
5. The vendor may decide the rate. Zyte assigns a tier per site and reviews it quarterly. Bright Data reclassifies premium domains quarterly.
6. Annual prices pose as monthly. Firecrawl's $83 is the annual rate; the monthly rate is $99. Context.dev's annual billing saves two months.
7. Prepaid balances behave differently. String's credit rolls over. Scrapfly's, and Firecrawl's below Scale, reset each month. Zyte's commitment is not refunded when usage falls short.

What $100 a month buys

At the plan nearest $100, per 1,000 pages, on each vendor's own terms:

• String Growth, $99: $0.16 plain fetch, $0.90 premium fetch, $0.80 browser, $3.25 browser on premium. Blocked requests are free, and credit rolls over.
• Decodo, $99: $0.30 standard, $0.60 standard with rendering, $0.70 premium, $1.10 premium with rendering. Up to 330,000 pages at the standard rate.
• Scrapfly Pro, $100: $0.10 datacenter, $0.50 with rendering or the Unblocker, $2.50 residential. Failures are free; no rollover.
• Firecrawl Standard, $99 billed monthly: $0.99 flat at full use. Returned 403 and 404 pages are billed.
• Context.dev Pro, $90: $0.90 flat, protection included. A 404 is billed.
• Oxylabs Basic, $100: Web Unblocker at $6 per GB, up to 16 GB. No per-page rate.
• Zyte, $100 commitment: $0.10 to $0.95 across five HTTP tiers, assigned by Zyte.
• Bright Data: no plan near $100. $1.50 on pay as you go, with premium domains higher at an unpublished rate.

String against Decodo at this level, in both directions. A page that clears on a plain fetch costs $0.16 on String and $0.30 to $0.70 on Decodo, depending on whether you set the standard pool. A page that needs a browser on a premium proxy costs $3.25 on String and $1.10 on Decodo. Decodo is cheaper on every premium or browser path. If the 39 Decodo attempts that came back as a 2xx without the real page were billed, which Decodo's response-code rule allows, its benchmark configuration cost about $1.27 per 1,000 usable pages rather than $1.10. Decodo returned nothing on 39 of the 100 sites, and no rate applies to those pages.

Which Decodo alternative should you pick?

Pick String when your list is protected and the pages have to come back. It passed 97.0% against Decodo's 50.6%, and returned all five attempts on 36 of the 39 sites Decodo could not return.

Pick Scrapfly when you want one key for scraping, screenshots, extraction, crawling and a cloud browser, and latency is not the binding constraint. It placed second at 86.2%.

Pick Firecrawl when the job is crawl-to-content on cooperative sites and you want fast failures. Do not pick it for social media, where Decodo did better.

Pick Bright Data when proxies, datasets and SERP data under one contract matter more than the published unit price.

Pick Context.dev when one predictable per-page number in the budget matters more than a higher pass rate.

Pick Oxylabs when your blocks are PerimeterX and your pages are small enough for bandwidth billing to work in your favor.

Pick Zyte when most pages are easy and you have mapped your targets to its tiers.

Stay on Decodo when your list is mostly fashion and luxury retail, premium-plus-rendering price decides the purchase, a 20-second median is acceptable, and you need its templates, raw proxy pools or ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certificate. Leave it if your list includes ticketing or government sites, which Decodo blocks by policy.

Switching from Decodo to String

What carries over. A POST to data.decodo.com/v1/scrape, or to the legacy scraper-api.decodo.com/v2/scrape, becomes a POST to String's /v1/fetch with a bearer key. Keep the URL list and the code that reads HTML or Markdown. Decodo's markdown: true maps to "format": "markdown", because String returns a JSON envelope by default. headless: "html" maps to "executeJS": true, and browser actions map to String's actions. You can usually drop proxy_pool: String picks the proxy class per request and bills the path it used.

What you rebuild. Decodo's 100+ target templates and their parsers, async tasks and batches with callbacks, the /crawl endpoint, and the residential, mobile, ISP and datacenter proxy pools have no String equivalent. String's /search endpoint and asynchronous sitemap crawl cover search and URL discovery, and jsonSchema extraction covers the fields you name. If a Decodo template returns a site well today, keep Decodo for that site; running both is a reasonable end state.

Integrations to reconnect. Decodo publishes Python, TypeScript and Go SDKs, a CLI, a hosted MCP server, and n8n, Zapier, LangChain and LlamaIndex integrations. String ships no language SDK, so an SDK call becomes one HTTP POST. String's 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 Decodo today, and the ones where Decodo bills a 2xx or 4xx that holds no data, and run them through String. In the September run Decodo returned nothing on 39 of 100 sites, and String returned 36 of those on every attempt. 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 Decodo page compares the two products in more depth.

FAQ

What is the best Decodo alternative for Cloudflare-protected sites?

String. In the September 2026 Web Data Frontier Benchmark it passed 100% of requests across 15 Cloudflare sites, against Decodo's 46.7%. Firecrawl passed 93.3% and Context.dev 96.0%. Across all 100 sites, String passed 97.0% and Decodo 50.6%.

Why is Decodo slow even on easy pages?

Decodo does not publish a cause, and we do not know it. The run shows a floor rather than a hard-site tax: no site where Decodo returned content had an average response time under five seconds, and Decodo was the only one of 16 providers with none. On the 30 sites where the field averaged 80% or better, its median was 20.7 seconds against String's 1.65.

What is Decodo's real success rate?

It depends on the test. Decodo advertises a 99.92% residential proxy success rate, and its FAQ says the test sent 500 requests per endpoint to ipinfo.io, which is not a protected page. It cites Proxyway's 2025 research for "over 80% success on the hardest targets." On our 100 protected sites, with premium proxies and rendering, Decodo passed 50.6%.

Is there a free Decodo alternative?

Several have free allowances. String gives the first 20,000 standard fetches free with no card. Scrapfly gives 1,000 credits with no card and no time limit. Firecrawl and Context.dev each give 1,000 credits a month. Bright Data gives 5,000 requests a month. Oxylabs gives a $5 welcome credit and Zyte a $5 credit. Decodo's own free plan covers up to 10,000 pages a month.

What is the cheapest Decodo alternative?

No single answer holds, because the vendors bill different units. At the $100 level, Zyte bills $0.10 per 1,000 on its easiest tier and Scrapfly $0.10 for a datacenter fetch. String Growth bills $0.16 for a plain fetch, below Decodo's $0.30 standard rate. On the protected path Decodo is cheapest at $1.10 with premium proxies and rendering. Bright Data is excluded because it does not publish its premium-domain rate.

Is String cheaper than Decodo?

On plain fetches, yes: String Growth bills $0.16 per 1,000 against $0.30 on Decodo's $99 plan, and $0.70 if you leave Decodo on its default premium pool. On premium and browser paths, no: Decodo bills $0.70 to $1.10 where String bills $0.80 to $3.25. String does not bill blocked requests; Decodo bills a 2xx or 4xx that returns a result.

Which Decodo alternatives have an MCP server?

All seven, and Decodo itself. String's server is ai.usestring/web-access in the official registry, with fetch, search and sitemap tools. Scrapfly, Firecrawl, Bright Data, Context.dev, Oxylabs and Zyte each document their own, as does Decodo.

Can I verify these numbers myself?

Yes. The harness, the 100 targets, the pass criteria and every provider adapter are open on GitHub, and the harness runs with your own API keys. The September 16, 2026 run file holds every attempt. A full run makes thousands of billable requests, so start with a subset of your own URLs.

Sources

Checked October 27, 2026 unless noted.

Benchmark

1. Web Data Frontier Benchmark leaderboard and the September 2026 results post
2. Benchmark harness repository
3. September 16, 2026 run file
4. Decodo adapter
5. Firecrawl adapter correction, pull request 6

Decodo

6. Web Data API
7. Web Data API pricing
8. Web Data API billing
9. Web Data API response codes
10. Migrating to Web Data API
11. Web Scraping API page
12. Residential proxy pricing and test method
13. Security and compliance
14. MCP server
15. AI integrations
16. Proxyway web scraping API report 2025

String

17. Pricing
18. Web Access API
19. MCP server docs
20. Integrations
21. Structured extraction

Other vendors

22. Scrapfly pricing
23. Scrapfly Unblocker
24. Firecrawl pricing
25. Firecrawl billing
26. Bright Data Web Unlocker pricing
27. Bright Data Web Unlocker features
28. Context.dev pricing
29. Context.dev MCP
30. Oxylabs Web Unblocker pricing
31. Oxylabs Web Unblocker
32. Oxylabs MCP
33. Zyte pricing
34. Zyte API pricing docs

Related String pages: String vs Decodo, the 16 web scraping APIs ranked, Firecrawl alternatives, Bright Data alternatives, Oxylabs alternatives, Zyte alternatives.