The best Diffbot alternatives in 2026 are String for fetching protected pages at 97.0% success, Zyte for automatic product and article extraction without writing selectors, Firecrawl for clean markdown and LLM extraction, ScraperAPI for high-volume retail and news, Apify for prebuilt site scrapers, and Bright Data for social media and ready-made datasets. Diffbot itself is not in our benchmark, so it has no success rate on this page. It stays the right tool when you want its Knowledge Graph of organizations, people and articles, which none of the six replace. This page compares all seven on the September 2026 web scraping API benchmark, structured extraction, pricing near $100 a month, and the page type Diffbot is best known for. On the 37 single-product pages in the benchmark, String returned all five attempts on 33.
Last updated October 1, 2026. Benchmark figures come from the September 16, 2026 run and /benchmark. Diffbot pricing and docs were checked on October 1, 2026; the other vendors' pricing on September 29, 2026.
| Provider | Best for | Benchmark success | Latency score | What $100 a month buys | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | Protected and product pages, pay only on success | 97.0% (1st of 16) | 7.06s | Growth $100: $0.20 per 1,000 standard fetches, $2.00 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 | 84.0% (3rd) | 12.97s | 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 | 80.2% (4th) | 9.11s | Standard $99: $0.99 per 1,000 pages; $4.95 with JSON extraction | Returned 403 and 404 pages bill |
| Apify | Prebuilt scrapers per site | 77.4% (5th) | 20.64s | 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 | 74.6% (6th) | 15.62s | 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 | 68.0% (11th) | 17.46s | $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.
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.
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 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 16, 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.
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.
| Provider | Product pages (37) | All five attempts | Other pages (63) |
|---|---|---|---|
| String | 95.7% | 33 | 97.8% |
| Firecrawl | 80.5% | 27 | 80.0% |
| ScraperAPI | 79.5% | 22 | 86.7% |
| Bright Data | 68.6% | 22 | 78.1% |
| Apify | 67.6% | 19 | 83.2% |
| Zyte | 58.4% | 18 | 73.7% |
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 14 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.
Pricing. Growth is $100 a month: $0.20 per 1,000 standard fetches, $2.00 per 1,000 premium fetches, $1.00 and $4.00 for browser fetches, billed only when content comes back (pricing). The first 5,000 requests are free with no card. Credits roll over.
Benchmark success. 97.0%, 485 of 500, first of 16. All five attempts on 93 sites, partial on 5, nothing on 2. On the 37 product pages, 95.7%, with all five attempts on 33.
Latency. 7.06s 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.
Pricing. 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. 68.0%, 340 of 500, 11th of 16, on the HTTP path with no browser. All five attempts on 57 sites, nothing on 26. Its weakest systems were AWS WAF (30.0%) and DataDome (50.5%).
Latency. 17.46s.
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.
Pricing. 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. 80.2%, 401 of 500, fourth. All five attempts on 75 sites, nothing on 17, including six of the eight social sites.
Latency. 9.11s.
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.
Pricing. 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. 84.0%, 420 of 500, third. All five attempts on 71 sites.
Latency. 12.97s.
Strengths. Third of 16 on success, strong on Akamai (92.0%) and DataDome (82.1%), and a low base rate on unprotected pages.
Weaknesses. Credit multipliers make the real rate site-dependent. No general extraction to a typed object.
Pricing. Plans are prepaid platform usage. Starter is $19 a month; 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. 77.4%, 387 of 500, fifth, through the Web Fetch Actor.
Latency. 20.64s.
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.
Pricing. 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. 74.6%, 373 of 500, sixth. All five attempts on every one of the 8 social sites.
Latency. 15.62s.
Strengths. Social media coverage, success-only billing on the Unlocker, and datasets you can buy instead of collecting.
Weaknesses. 47.4% on DataDome-protected sites. Many products, each with its own pricing model.
| Anti-bot system (sites) | String | ScraperAPI | Firecrawl | Apify | Bright Data | Zyte |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DataDome (19) | 92.6% | 82.1% | 77.9% | 65.3% | 47.4% | 50.5% |
| Akamai (20) | 98.0% | 92.0% | 84.0% | 75.0% | 79.0% | 64.0% |
| Cloudflare (15) | 100.0% | 89.3% | 93.3% | 93.3% | 88.0% | 58.7% |
| PerimeterX (9) | 100.0% | 88.9% | 93.3% | 88.9% | 100.0% | 88.9% |
| AWS WAF (6) | 100.0% | 83.3% | 83.3% | 66.7% | 86.7% | 30.0% |
| Proprietary or other (27) | 96.3% | 76.3% | 64.4% | 77.8% | 72.6% | 85.2% |
Kasada (3 sites) and Fastly (1) are left out; the samples are too small.
String against Diffbot: on standard pages String costs $0.20 per 1,000 against Diffbot's $1.20 on Startup, six times less. On protected pages, String's premium rate of $2.00 is still below Diffbot's $2.39 through its proxy, and String bills only for pages that come back.
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.
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 97.0% of 500 requests in the September 2026 benchmark, first of 16. For LLM-ready markdown, Firecrawl.
Diffbot's own free plan gives 10,000 credits a month with no card. String gives the first 5,000 requests free with no card, and Firecrawl 1,000 credits a month.
In the September 2026 benchmark, String returned 95.7% of requests on 37 single-product pages and all five attempts on 33 of them. The 16 tested APIs averaged 63.0% on those pages, against 68.7% on the rest. For typed product fields on top, add your own extraction or Zyte's automatic extraction.
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.
None of the six on this page. They fetch and extract pages you name; they do not maintain a graph of organizations and people.
Yes. On standard pages String costs $0.20 per 1,000 on Growth against about $1.20 on Diffbot Startup. On protected pages, String's $2.00 premium rate is below Diffbot's $2.39 through its proxy, and String bills only for pages that come back.
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.
Clone the benchmark harness, add your URLs and run it with your own keys.
Checked October 1, 2026 unless noted.
