Best Diffbot Alternatives in 2026: 7 Tools Compared
What is the best Diffbot alternative?
No single tool replaces Diffbot. Zyte is the closest swap for automatic product and article extraction without selectors. String is a web access API for developers and AI agents that returns any page as markdown, HTML or JSON, with proxies and anti-bot handling behind one call; pick it for protected pages, since it passed 98.6% of benchmark requests (as of October 2026). Firecrawl suits clean markdown for LLMs, and Apify suits prebuilt site scrapers. Diffbot is not in the benchmark. Stay on it for its Knowledge Graph of organizations, people and articles, which none of the six replace.
Last updated November 2, 2026. Benchmark figures come from the October 30, 2026 run and /benchmark. Diffbot pricing and docs were checked on October 1, 2026; the other vendors' pricing on September 29, 2026.
TL;DR
- Diffbot bills 1 credit per extracted page and 2 through its proxy. Its credits doc says credits are spent "upon each request", and its list of exceptions does not include a failed page. The first paid plan is $299 a month for 250,000 credits. Diffbot is not in our benchmark.
- String returned 98.6% (as of the October 2026 benchmark run) of 500 benchmark requests, first of 17, and all five attempts on 95 of 100 sites. It bills only for pages that come back.
- Zyte is the closest like-for-like swap: automatic product, article and job extraction from a URL, success-billed. It placed 7th at 79.6% on the HTTP path we tested.
- Product pages: the 17 benchmarked APIs averaged 65.6% on the 37 single-product pages against 74.3% on the rest. String returned 98.4% of product-page requests and all five attempts on 36 of 37.
- Free options: Diffbot's free plan gives 10,000 credits a month. String gives the first 20,000 standard fetches free with no card.
- Near $100 a month: Diffbot has no plan near $100. String Growth is $99, Zyte has a $100 commitment tier, Firecrawl Standard is $99.
- Verify it: the harness and every per-attempt result are public.
At a glance
| Provider | Best for | Benchmark success | Latency score | What $100 a month buys | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | Protected and product pages, pay only on success | 98.6% (1st of 17) | 4.24s | Growth $99: $0.16 per 1,000 standard fetches, $0.90 premium | Pair it with your own extraction or model for typed fields |
| Diffbot | Typed extraction and the Knowledge Graph | Not tested | Not tested | No $100 plan. Free: 10,000 credits. Startup: $299 for 250,000 | Credits spent per request; dynamic proxies only on higher tiers |
| ScraperAPI | High-volume retail and news | 76.4% (9th) | 15.19s | No $100 plan. Startup $149: about $4.47 per 1,000 at the tested setting | The tested anti-bot setting costs 30 credits a request |
| Firecrawl | Markdown and LLM extraction | 81.2% (6th) | 8.87s | Standard $99: $0.99 per 1,000 pages; $4.95 with JSON extraction | Returned 403 and 404 pages bill |
| Apify | Prebuilt scrapers per site | 79.4% (8th) | 24.87s | No $100 plan. Starter $19: $1.50 per 1,000 Web Fetch calls | Store Actors price separately, by their authors |
| Bright Data | Social media and datasets | 75.4% (10th) | 27.88s | No $100 plan. Pay as you go: $1.50 per 1,000 | Premium-domain rate shown only in the dashboard |
| Zyte | Automatic product and article extraction | 79.6% (7th) | 14.43s | $100 tier: $0.10 to $0.95 per 1,000 HTTP responses, plus extraction | Price depends on a per-site difficulty tier |
The latency score is each provider's mean per-site time across the 100 sites. Failed sites count at the time of the successful providers, so a provider that fails more does not look faster for it.
Why people leave Diffbot
Diffbot figures in this section come from its pricing page and docs, checked October 1, 2026.
Hard sites. Diffbot's own 404 error doc says the error means the site "is slow to load, completely down, or is blocking Diffbot's servers," and its first fix is to add the proxy parameter, which doubles the credit cost. Its proxy doc says the stronger "dynamic proxy servers" are "limited to Professional or Enterprise customers" with pricing "dependent on data volume." A team whose list is mostly protected retail or travel sites ends up paying for the higher tier to reach them.
Pricing. The first paid plan is $299 a month. A developer on r/webscraping put it plainly when asking for an alternative: "I have a small project and don't want to pay $300/month" (thread). Credits also do not roll over: the credits doc says non-enterprise allotments "are refreshed monthly and do not rollover."
Product pages. Diffbot's own docs name product data as a flagship use: DuckDuckGo uses Extract "to structure product data for shopping search" (docs). Product pages are also the hardest page type to fetch, as the section below shows, so a team scraping product pages needs the fetch layer to hold up first.
How we tested these web scraping APIs
The October 30, 2026 run sent 17 web scraping APIs to the same 100 sites, five loads each, 500 requests per provider, with a 90-second timeout. A load counts as a pass only when the response contains a marker string unique to the real page, so a CAPTCHA page, a consent wall or an empty 200 counts as a failure. The adapters and every result are in the public repository.
We build String and we rank first in this run. That is a conflict of interest, and the answer to it is that you can run the harness against your own sites.
Diffbot is not one of the 17, so this page gives it no success rate. The benchmark measures whether the page comes back, not whether a product or article object is extracted correctly, which is the part Diffbot is known for. Read the success rates below as the fetch layer under any extraction.
Each adapter's setting matters. Zyte ran httpResponseBody, the plain HTTP path with no browser rendering and no automatic extraction. ScraperAPI ran ultra_premium, its advanced anti-bot setting. Apify ran its Web Fetch Actor, which always uses Apify's Unblocker. Firecrawl ran its default proxy mode, and Bright Data its Web Unlocker. Zyte's browser path costs more and could score higher; we have not run it.
Chart data
| Provider | Success rate | Passed | Latency score |
|---|---|---|---|
| String | 98.6% | 493/500 | 4.24s |
| Scrape.do | 94.0% | 470/500 | 5.08s |
| Context.dev | 93.0% | 465/500 | 10.96s |
| Scrapfly | 86.8% | 434/500 | 19.62s |
| ScrapingBee | 85.2% | 426/500 | 20.30s |
| Firecrawl | 81.2% | 406/500 | 8.87s |
| Zyte | 79.6% | 398/500 | 14.43s |
| Apify | 79.4% | 397/500 | 24.87s |
| ScraperAPI | 76.4% | 382/500 | 15.19s |
| Bright | 75.4% | 377/500 | 27.88s |
| Decodo | 71.2% | 356/500 | 28.29s |
| Nimble | 68.0% | 340/500 | 22.65s |
| Oxylabs | 67.4% | 337/500 | 16.62s |
| Browserbase | 43.0% | 215/500 | 18.01s |
| ZenRows | 41.8% | 209/500 | 21.91s |
| ScrapingAnt | 40.0% | 200/500 | 18.39s |
| Scrapingdog | 27.6% | 138/500 | 31.52s |
How each alternative handles product pages
Diffbot is best known for reading product pages: name, price, availability, specs. We took the 37 benchmark targets whose URL is a single item's detail page (one SKU, listing or vehicle, from amazon.com and walmart.com to mouser.com and cars.com) and compared them with the other 63 pages, which are searches, categories, profiles, articles and home pages.
- Product pages are harder. The 17 benchmarked APIs averaged 65.6% on the 37 product pages and 74.3% on the other 63.
- Few product pages work everywhere. All five of the non-String alternatives on this page returned all five attempts on only 2 of the 37.
- String held up. String returned 98.4% (as of the October 2026 benchmark run) of product-page requests and all five attempts on 36 of 37; on kroger.com it returned two of five. On 14 of the 15 product pages where at least one of the other five alternatives returned nothing, String returned all five attempts.
| Provider | Product pages (37) | All five attempts | Other pages (63) |
|---|---|---|---|
| String | 98.4% | 36 | 98.7% |
| Firecrawl | 81.6% | 30 | 81.0% |
| Apify | 73.0% | 19 | 83.2% |
| Zyte | 71.4% | 22 | 84.4% |
| Bright Data | 68.1% | 12 | 79.7% |
| ScraperAPI | 67.0% | 13 | 81.9% |
For a Diffbot buyer, the extraction is only as good as the page that reaches it. Zyte, the closest like-for-like swap for automatic extraction, returned nothing on 8 of the 37 product pages on the HTTP path we tested, so pair it with its browser path or a stronger fetch layer for product work.
The list of 37 pages and the script are in the editor notes.
String vs Diffbot: page fetch at 98.6% vs typed extraction
Pricing. Growth is $99 a month (as of October 2026): $0.16 per 1,000 standard fetches, $0.90 per 1,000 premium fetches, $0.80 and $3.25 for browser fetches, billed only when content comes back (pricing). The first 20,000 standard fetches are free with no card. Credits roll over.
Benchmark success. 98.6%, 493 of 500, first of 17. All five attempts on 95 sites and partial on the other 5. On the 37 product pages, 98.4%, with all five attempts on 36.
Latency. 4.24s latency score, the fastest of the six on that measure.
Strengths. One endpoint that returns the page as markdown, HTML or JSON, with proxy rotation, fingerprinting and CAPTCHAs handled behind it. A search endpoint for live Google results, an async sitemap crawl for URL discovery, and an MCP server for agents.
Best paired with. String returns the full page as markdown, HTML or JSON, so it pairs well with an LLM or your own parser for typed fields. A setup that works: keep extraction in your own code or model, and use String as the layer that gets the page.
Zyte vs Diffbot: automatic extraction on both sides
Pricing. As checked September 29, 2026, Zyte's $100 tier is a monthly minimum commitment. HTTP responses cost $0.10 to $0.95 per 1,000 depending on a per-site difficulty tier, and browser-rendered ones $0.75 to $12.00 (pricing). Automatic extraction adds $0.0004 to $0.0016 per data type, before volume discount (pricing docs). Billing is per successful response.
Benchmark success. In the October 30, 2026 run, 79.6%, 398 of 500, 7th of 17, on the HTTP path with no browser. All five attempts on 69 sites, nothing on 14. Its weakest systems were Akamai (68.0%) and DataDome (68.4%).
Latency. 14.43s.
Strengths. The closest swap for Diffbot's Extract: Zyte's automatic extraction returns typed data, such as a product or an article, from a URL with no selectors, priced per data type. Billing is per successful response.
Weaknesses. Tier pricing means you learn a site's price after you send traffic. Our HTTP-path number is low against protected sites; the browser path may do better and costs about 7 to 13 times more per request on the $100 tier.
Firecrawl vs Diffbot: LLM extraction instead of trained models
Pricing. As checked September 29, 2026, Standard is $99 a month billed monthly for 100,000 credits, 1 credit per page (pricing). JSON extraction with an LLM adds 4 credits a page, so $4.95 per 1,000 extracted pages (billing docs). A returned 403 or 404 page bills 1 credit.
Benchmark success. In the October 30, 2026 run, 81.2%, 406 of 500, sixth. All five attempts on 80 sites, nothing on 17, including six of the eight social sites.
Latency. 8.87s.
Strengths. Clean markdown by default, extraction to any JSON schema you write, crawl and map endpoints, and an open-source core.
Weaknesses. LLM extraction is schema-by-prompt, so field names and types are yours to keep stable, where Diffbot's ontology fixes them. Returned none of the big social sites in our run.
ScraperAPI vs Diffbot: volume on retail and news
Pricing. As checked September 29, 2026, no plan near $100. Hobby is $49 for 100,000 credits and Startup $149 for 1,000,000 (pricing). The setting we tested, ultra_premium, costs 30 credits a request (credits doc), which is about $4.47 per 1,000 on Startup and $14.70 on Hobby.
Benchmark success. In the October 30, 2026 run, 76.4%, 382 of 500, ninth. All five attempts on 52 sites.
Latency. 15.19s.
Strengths. Third of 17 on Akamai (81.0%), behind String and Scrape.do, and a low base rate on unprotected pages.
Weaknesses. Credit multipliers make the real rate site-dependent. No general extraction to a typed object.
Apify vs Diffbot: prebuilt scrapers vs one general model
Pricing. Plans are prepaid platform usage. Starter is $19 a month (as of October 2026); the Web Fetch Actor we tested costs $1.50 per 1,000 calls on it, $1.25 on Scale at $199 (pricing). Store Actors set their own prices.
Benchmark success. 79.4%, 397 of 500, eighth, through the Web Fetch Actor.
Latency. 24.87s.
Strengths. Thousands of prebuilt Actors that return typed data for specific sites, including String's own Actors. For a named site with a maintained Actor, that is close to what Diffbot's extraction gives you.
Weaknesses. Each site is a different Actor from a different author, with its own output shape and price. No single model that reads any page.
Bright Data vs Diffbot: social media and bought datasets
Pricing. As checked September 29, 2026, Web Unlocker pay as you go is $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests; the first plan is $499 for 383,000 (pricing). Premium domains bill at a rate shown only in the zone dashboard (features doc). Site-specific Scraper APIs and prebuilt datasets are priced separately.
Benchmark success. In the October 30, 2026 run, 75.4%, 377 of 500, tenth. All five attempts on 7 of the 8 social sites, and nothing on youtube.com.
Latency. 27.88s.
Strengths. Social media coverage, 87.5% and second on this page to String's 100%, success-only billing on the Unlocker, and datasets you can buy instead of collecting.
Weaknesses. 72.0% on Akamai-protected sites. Many products, each with its own pricing model.
Anti-bot coverage
| Anti-bot system (sites) | String | ScraperAPI | Firecrawl | Apify | Bright Data | Zyte |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DataDome (19) | 97.9% | 75.8% | 85.3% | 85.3% | 74.7% | 68.4% |
| Akamai (20) | 97.0% | 81.0% | 80.0% | 69.0% | 72.0% | 68.0% |
| Cloudflare (15) | 98.7% | 70.7% | 98.7% | 86.7% | 74.7% | 92.0% |
| PerimeterX (9) | 97.8% | 82.2% | 100.0% | 86.7% | 86.7% | 91.1% |
| AWS WAF (6) | 100.0% | 76.7% | 83.3% | 63.3% | 73.3% | 70.0% |
| Proprietary or other (27) | 100.0% | 76.3% | 60.0% | 80.7% | 75.6% | 84.4% |
Kasada (3 sites) and Fastly (1) are left out; the samples are too small.
Chart data
| Provider | DataDome (19 sites) | Akamai (20 sites) | Cloudflare (15 sites) | PerimeterX (9 sites) | AWS WAF (6 sites) | Kasada (3 sites) | Fastly (1 sites) | Proprietary / other (27 sites) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | 97.9% | 97.0% | 98.7% | 97.8% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% |
| Scrape.do | 97.9% | 87.0% | 93.3% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 92.6% |
| Context.dev | 100.0% | 79.0% | 96.0% | 97.8% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 92.6% |
| Scrapfly | 92.6% | 78.0% | 93.3% | 93.3% | 96.7% | 86.7% | 40.0% | 83.0% |
| ScrapingBee | 85.3% | 74.0% | 97.3% | 88.9% | 63.3% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 88.1% |
| Firecrawl | 85.3% | 80.0% | 98.7% | 100.0% | 83.3% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 60.0% |
| Zyte | 68.4% | 68.0% | 92.0% | 91.1% | 70.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 84.4% |
| Apify | 85.3% | 69.0% | 86.7% | 86.7% | 63.3% | 100.0% | 0.0% | 80.7% |
| ScraperAPI | 75.8% | 81.0% | 70.7% | 82.2% | 76.7% | 53.3% | 100.0% | 76.3% |
| Bright | 74.7% | 72.0% | 74.7% | 86.7% | 73.3% | 66.7% | 100.0% | 75.6% |
| Decodo | 65.3% | 68.0% | 73.3% | 86.7% | 73.3% | 100.0% | 0.0% | 70.4% |
| Nimble | 64.2% | 51.0% | 68.0% | 82.2% | 40.0% | 86.7% | 100.0% | 81.5% |
| Oxylabs | 67.4% | 53.0% | 68.0% | 91.1% | 16.7% | 100.0% | 0.0% | 80.0% |
| Browserbase | 31.6% | 28.0% | 6.7% | 73.3% | 16.7% | 33.3% | 0.0% | 80.7% |
| ZenRows | 52.6% | 57.0% | 33.3% | 73.3% | 36.7% | 60.0% | 0.0% | 17.8% |
| ScrapingAnt | 7.4% | 33.0% | 24.0% | 53.3% | 13.3% | 53.3% | 100.0% | 74.8% |
| Scrapingdog | 16.8% | 27.0% | 29.3% | 6.7% | 13.3% | 20.0% | 0.0% | 46.7% |
Why pricing is hard to compare across these providers
- The unit differs. Diffbot sells credits per API action, Zyte per response, Bright Data per request, Apify per dollar of platform usage.
- Credits vary by setting. Diffbot doubles for its proxy; ScraperAPI's tested setting is 30 credits.
- Rendering is metered differently. Per Zyte's pricing page as checked on September 29, 2026, its browser path costs about 7 to 13 times its HTTP path on the $100 tier.
- Extraction is priced on top. Zyte per data type, Firecrawl 4 credits a page; Diffbot includes it.
- What counts as billable differs. Diffbot and Firecrawl can bill a failed or error page; String, Zyte and Bright Data's Unlocker bill success only.
- Prepaid behavior differs. Diffbot and Firecrawl Standard credits do not roll over; String's do.
- The hardest sites are often custom. Diffbot's dynamic proxies and Bright Data's premium domains are priced outside the public card.
What $100 a month buys
Prices come from each vendor's pricing page (linked in the sources below): Diffbot checked October 1, 2026, the others September 29, 2026.
- String Growth, $99 (as of October 2026): 618,750 standard fetches at $0.16 per 1,000, or 110,000 premium fetches at $0.90, billed on success.
- Diffbot: no $100 plan. Free gives 10,000 credits; Startup at $299 gives 250,000, so $1.20 per 1,000 pages, $2.39 through the proxy.
- Zyte, $100 tier: $0.10 to $0.95 per 1,000 HTTP responses by site tier, plus extraction.
- Firecrawl Standard, $99: 100,000 pages, or 20,000 with JSON extraction.
- ScraperAPI: no $100 plan; at the tested setting, about 3,333 requests on Hobby ($49) or 33,333 on Startup ($149).
- Apify Starter, $19: about 12,667 Web Fetch calls; the next plan is $199.
- Bright Data: no $100 plan; $100 of pay as you go buys about 66,700 successful requests.
String against Diffbot: on standard pages String costs $0.16 per 1,000 against Diffbot's $1.20 on Startup, 7.5 times less. On protected pages, String's premium rate of $0.90 is still below Diffbot's $2.39 through its proxy, and String bills only for pages that come back.
Which Diffbot alternative should you pick?
Pick String when your problem is getting the page at all: protected retail, travel, social and news, billed only on success, with the extraction done by your own code or model.
Pick Zyte when you want the closest thing to Diffbot's Extract: a typed product or article from a URL, no selectors, billed per response.
Pick Firecrawl when you feed pages to an LLM and want markdown or your own JSON schema, and your list is light on social media.
Pick ScraperAPI when you run high volume on US retail and news and can manage per-site credit costs.
Pick Apify when your sites each have a maintained Actor and you want typed output without building it.
Pick Bright Data when your list is social media, or you would rather buy a dataset than collect one.
Stay on Diffbot when you use the Knowledge Graph for organizations, people or articles, or you need one model that types any page without prompts. None of the six replace those.
Switching from Diffbot to String
What carries over. The URL list. Diffbot's Extract APIs fetch and type a page in one call. String fetches the page and returns markdown, raw HTML, or the fields you name in a jsonSchema. A Product or Article API call becomes a String fetch with a schema for the fields you actually use.
What you rebuild. The Knowledge Graph, Enhance, the Natural Language API, and Crawl API jobs have no String equivalent. Typed extraction with no schema, Diffbot's core feature, also stays behind: String's extraction fills the schema you write. If your product reads organizations or people from the Knowledge Graph, keep Diffbot for that and move only page fetching.
Integrations to reconnect. Diffbot publishes Python and TypeScript libraries, agent skills, an MCP server, and a LangChain package. 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 product and article URLs where Diffbot returns empty or partial records and run them through String with the schema you need. Count filled fields per page and cost per usable record, and include the extraction fee, which String meters on top of the request. 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 ranking of 17 web scraping APIs puts every tested API side by side.
FAQ
What is the best Diffbot alternative?
It depends on what you use Diffbot for. For typed product and article extraction from a URL, Zyte is the closest swap. For getting pages from protected sites, String returned 98.6% of 500 requests in the October 2026 benchmark, first of 17. For LLM-ready markdown, Firecrawl.
Is there a free alternative to Diffbot?
Diffbot's own free plan gives 10,000 credits a month with no card. String gives the first 20,000 standard fetches free with no card, and Firecrawl 1,000 credits a month.
Which Diffbot alternative is best for product pages?
In the October 2026 benchmark, String returned 98.4% of requests on 37 single-product pages and all five attempts on 36 of them. The 17 tested APIs averaged 65.6% on those pages, against 74.3% on the rest. For typed product fields on top, add your own extraction or Zyte's automatic extraction.
Does Diffbot charge for failed requests?
Diffbot's credits doc says credits are consumed "upon each request made to a Diffbot API," and lists exceptions that do not include a failed page extraction. String, Zyte and Bright Data's Web Unlocker bill only successful responses.
Which alternative has a knowledge graph like Diffbot?
None of the six on this page. They fetch and extract pages you name; they do not maintain a graph of organizations and people.
Is String cheaper than Diffbot?
Yes, per each vendor's pricing page (Diffbot checked October 1, 2026). On standard pages String costs $0.16 per 1,000 (as of October 2026) on Growth against about $1.20 on Diffbot Startup. On protected pages, String's $0.90 premium rate is below Diffbot's $2.39 through its proxy, and String bills only for pages that come back.
Which Diffbot alternatives work with AI agents over MCP?
String, Firecrawl and Bright Data each run an MCP server; String's is listed in the official MCP registry. Diffbot publishes agent skills for agent harnesses.
How can I check these results myself?
Clone the benchmark harness, add your URLs and run it with your own keys.
Sources
Checked October 1, 2026 unless noted.
- String, /benchmark and the October 2026 results post
- Benchmark harness repository and the October 30, 2026 run file
- Diffbot pricing
- Diffbot credits
- Diffbot using proxies
- Diffbot 404 could not download page
- Diffbot documentation
- Diffbot agent skills
- Zyte pricing and Zyte API pricing docs (Sep 29)
- Firecrawl pricing and billing docs (Sep 29)
- ScraperAPI pricing and credits doc (Sep 29)
- Apify pricing (Sep 29)
- Bright Data Web Unlocker pricing, features doc and Scraper APIs (Sep 29)
- Benchmark adapters: Zyte, ScraperAPI, Apify, Firecrawl
- r/webscraping thread on a Diffbot alternative
- MCP registry entry for String
- Related String pages: best web scraping APIs, Zyte alternatives, Firecrawl alternatives, Apify alternatives, validate scraped data quality