Best Nimble Alternatives in 2026: 8 Tools Compared

String vs Nimble: 97.0% against 66.3%, and all six review sites

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.

Pricing. Usage-based rather than prepaid credits. Growth costs $100 a month and bills $0.20 per 1,000 fetch requests on a standard proxy, $2.00 on a premium proxy, $1.00 for a browser request on a standard proxy, and $4.00 with both. Starter costs $20 a month at $0.30, $3.00, $1.50 and $6.00. The first 5,000 requests are free with no card, blocked requests are not billed, and unused credits roll over. Against Nimble's flat $1.00, String is cheaper on a plain fetch, level on a standard browser request, and more expensive once a premium proxy is involved.

Benchmark success. 97.0%, or 480 of 495, first of fifteen. String returned content on all five attempts for 92 sites, partial content on 5, and nothing on 2. On the 35 Akamai and Cloudflare sites it passed 98.9%, and on the other 64 it passed 95.9%.

Latency. 9.98 seconds against Nimble's 18.41. On the 56 sites where both providers passed every attempt, String's median per-target latency was 2.85 seconds against Nimble's 4.00, and Nimble was slower on 39 of the 56.

Strengths. Coverage. String returned all five attempts on 16 of the 18 Akamai and Cloudflare sites where Nimble returned nothing, and partial content on the other two. It passed 100% against Cloudflare, 98.0% against Akamai and 97.9% against DataDome, where Nimble reads 34.7%, 44.0% and 71.6%.

Weaknesses. Far less product surface than Nimble. String has no research agents, no crawl-to-content endpoint and no SOC 2 report, where Nimble lists SOC 2 Type II. Nimble also beat String on neimanmarcus.com and booking.com, and String costs more than Nimble on the premium path.

MCP. String ships a hosted MCP server for fetch, search and crawl, so an agent can call it without local setup.

Try it on your own list:

curl -X POST https://api.usestring.ai/v1/fetch \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $STRING_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://www.homedepot.com/"}'

Scrapfly vs Nimble: 82.0%, and 17 of the 29 sites Nimble missed

Pricing. Pro is $100 a month for 1,000,000 credits at $0.10 per 1,000 credits prepaid, with overflow at $3.50 per 10,000. A datacenter HTTP scrape is 1 credit, rendering or the Unblocker is 5, and residential proxies are 25, so the comparable per-1,000-page rates are $0.10, $0.50 and $2.50. Failed requests are never charged. Credits do not roll over: quotas reset at renewal.

Benchmark success. 82.0%, or 406 of 495, second of fifteen and 15.7 points above Nimble. It returned nothing on 8 sites against Nimble's 29.

Latency. 18.35 seconds against Nimble's 18.41. On the 45 sites both passed every attempt, Scrapfly's median was 10.50 seconds against Nimble's 4.00, so Nimble is the faster of the two on pages both return.

Strengths. The strongest non-String result in the run, several APIs on one key, and SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and HIPAA attestations. It returned all five attempts on 17 of Nimble's 29 zero-content sites, and Nimble returned all five on only one of Scrapfly's. It passed 80.0% on the Akamai and Cloudflare group.

Weaknesses. Its anti-bot mode can move a request to the residential pool without a published schedule, which is the difference between $0.10 and $2.50 per 1,000. Nimble's one flat Extract rate is easier to forecast.

Context.dev vs Nimble: one flat credit, and the best Akamai and Cloudflare result after String

Pricing. Developer is $25 a month for 10,000 credits and Pro is $149 for 200,000, so there is no plan at $100. Pro works out at $0.745 per 1,000 pages and overage runs $9 per 10,000 credits. One credit is one scrape "always," with proxies, JavaScript rendering and anti-bot bypass included. Browser actions cost 2 credits and enriched calls 5. Blocked requests are not billed. The free tier is 1,000 credits every month.

Benchmark success. 79.2%, or 392 of 495, third of fifteen.

Latency. 12.68 seconds against Nimble's 18.41. On the 49 sites both passed every attempt, Context.dev's median was 4.60 seconds against Nimble's 4.00.

Strengths. It is the direct fix for Nimble's weak spot. Context.dev passed 86.3% on the Akamai and Cloudflare group, second only to String, and returned all five attempts on 13 of the 18 sites in that group where Nimble returned nothing. Like Nimble, it prices a protected page the same as any other, and it ships an official MCP server.

Weaknesses. It is weaker than Nimble off that group, at 75.3% against 80.6%. Nimble returned all five attempts on 7 sites where Context.dev returned nothing. Context.dev is weak on Kasada at 33.3%, and its ladder skips the $100 mark.

Firecrawl vs Nimble: crawl-to-content, and a perfect Cloudflare record

Pricing. Standard is $99 a month billed monthly for 100,000 credits, or $0.99 per 1,000 pages. The pricing page defaults to the annual view at $83; the monthly figure is $99. Firecrawl's billing rule changed on September 4, 2026: a scrape that returns no document is free, while a page that responds with an error status such as 403 or 404 is still returned to you and costs a credit. Credits do not roll over below annual Scale.

Benchmark success. 78.6%, or 389 of 495, fourth of fifteen.

Latency. 9.21 seconds, the best latency score in the run. On the 44 sites both passed every attempt, Firecrawl's median was 3.50 seconds against Nimble's 4.05, the only alternative here other than String that is faster than Nimble on shared pages.

Strengths. A perfect 100% against Cloudflare, where Nimble reads 34.7%, and 84.0% across the Akamai and Cloudflare group. Good crawl-to-content ergonomics, an open-source core, SOC 2 Type II, and an MCP server. It returned all five attempts on 18 of Nimble's 29 zero-content sites.

Weaknesses. The two tools fail in opposite places. Firecrawl's weakest column is the in-house bucket at 59.2%, where Nimble reads 86.9%, and Nimble returned all five attempts on 9 sites where Firecrawl returned nothing. Firecrawl went to zero on 16 sites, and blocked pages that return a document are billed. Our Firecrawl alternatives page covers its other weak spots.

Bright Data vs Nimble: a product catalogue against an agent platform

Pricing. No plan near $100. Pay as you go is $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests, and the committed tiers start at $499 for 383,000 requests. Two caveats change the real bill: premium domains are charged at a higher rate that appears only in the zone's estimated-cost panel, and zones using custom headers or cookies are billed for 100% of requests. Because that premium rate is unpublished, Bright Data is not ranked as the cheapest option anywhere on this page.

Benchmark success. 78.0%, or 386 of 495, fifth of fifteen.

Latency. 26.14 seconds, the slowest latency score in the run. On the 44 sites both passed every attempt, Bright Data's median was 11.35 seconds against Nimble's 4.00.

Strengths. Scale and breadth. Proxies, datasets, SERP APIs and unblocking sit under one contract, with an MCP server and the compliance surface enterprise buyers ask for. It is the strongest of this group on AWS WAF at 93.3%.

Weaknesses. It does little for Nimble's weak spot. Bright Data passed 70.9% on the Akamai and Cloudflare group and returned all five attempts on only 6 of the 18 sites there where Nimble returned nothing. Its Akamai column reads 60.0%. Off that group it passed 81.9%, barely above Nimble's 80.6%, at nearly three times Nimble's shared-page latency.

Oxylabs vs Nimble: bandwidth billing and the best PerimeterX record

Pricing. Web Unblocker is billed by bandwidth, so there is no per-page rate to set beside Nimble's. Micro is 8GB for $75 a month at $9.40 per GB, Starter is 38GB for $325 at $8.60, and Advanced is 88GB for $660 at $7.50. A 40% promotion is running under the code WU40. The free trial is 1GB, which Oxylabs describes as up to 10,000 results; at that conversion Micro's 8GB is roughly $0.94 per 1,000 results at list, an estimate built on Oxylabs' own figure rather than a published rate.

Benchmark success. 76.8%, or 380 of 495, sixth of fifteen.

Latency. 14.67 seconds against Nimble's 18.41. On the 45 sites both passed every attempt, Oxylabs' median was 4.40 seconds against Nimble's 3.60.

Strengths. The best PerimeterX record in the run at 97.8%, against Nimble's 82.2%, plus ISO 27001 and an MCP server. It passed 71.4% on the Akamai and Cloudflare group and returned all five attempts on 10 of the 18 sites there where Nimble returned nothing.

Weaknesses. Bandwidth billing punishes heavy pages and makes forecasting harder than Nimble's flat rate. It is weak on AWS WAF at 50.0%, where Nimble reads 83.3%, and it returned nothing on the one Fastly site, which Nimble returned. Nimble returned all five attempts on 9 sites where Oxylabs returned nothing. Our Oxylabs alternatives page compares the two from the other side.

Decodo vs Nimble: two residential networks, cheaper plain pages

Pricing. The $99 plan bills $0.14 per 1,000 standard requests, $0.60 with rendering, $0.85 on premium proxies, and $1.20 on premium proxies with rendering. Prices exclude VAT and are billed monthly. Only successful scrapes are charged. Decodo's documentation says protected targets want premium proxies with rendering, which is the $1.20 rate, so on hard sites Decodo costs a little more than Nimble's flat $1.00.

Benchmark success. 70.7%, or 350 of 495, eighth of fifteen and 4.4 points above Nimble.

Latency. 22.63 seconds against Nimble's 18.41. On the 40 sites both passed every attempt, Decodo's median was 14.55 seconds against Nimble's 3.80, the widest gap on this page in Nimble's favour.

Strengths. The cheapest plain-page rate here at $0.14 per 1,000, an MCP server, 100+ prebuilt templates, and a better Akamai and Cloudflare result than Nimble at 74.9% against 40.0%. It passed 81.0% on Akamai alone.

Weaknesses. The two tools trade sites almost evenly. Decodo returned all five attempts on 11 of Nimble's zero-content sites, and Nimble returned all five on 12 of Decodo's. Off the Akamai and Cloudflare group Decodo passed 68.4% against Nimble's 80.6%, and it is weak on DataDome at 61.1%.

The anti-bot cut

Success rates by protection vendor, from the August 11 run. Site counts are in the column headers.

Nimble's row runs from 86.9% on the in-house column to 34.7% on Cloudflare. The in-house figure, across 26 sites that include Google, LinkedIn, Ticketmaster and Reddit, is the second best of all fifteen providers, behind only String. Its Cloudflare and Akamai columns are both eleventh of fifteen.

Nimble's edge split: 40.0% behind Akamai and Cloudflare, 80.6% everywhere else

Every page in this series carries one statistic computed from the run's per-target cells rather than from the leaderboard. For Nimble it is this.

Split the 99 sites by protection vendor. Thirty-five sit behind Akamai (20) or Cloudflare (15). On those 35, Nimble passed 70 of 175 requests, or 40.0%, eleventh of fifteen providers. On the other 64 sites, it passed 258 of 320, or 80.6%, fourth of fifteen, behind String at 95.9%, Scrapfly at 83.1% and Bright Data at 81.9%, and ahead of Oxylabs, Firecrawl, Context.dev and Decodo.

The gap is 40.6 points, the widest of any provider in the run. The field does not share it. The other fourteen providers averaged 59.6% on the Akamai and Cloudflare sites and 65.8% on the rest, a 6.2-point difference. Four providers on this page do better on those two vendors than off them: Context.dev at 86.3% against 75.3%, Firecrawl at 84.0% against 75.6%, Decodo at 74.9% against 68.4%, and String at 98.9% against 95.9%.

The zero-content sites follow the same split. Nimble returned nothing on 29 sites, and 18 of them are Akamai or Cloudflare sites, from a group that holds 35 of the 99. Off that group, Nimble returned all five attempts on 48 of 64 sites.

Sort your target list by protection vendor before you choose. A list with few Akamai or Cloudflare sites is where Nimble's non-rendered path finished fourth. In this suite that describes social networks, news and ticketing, where Nimble averaged 95.0%, 100% and 85.0%. US retail, jobs boards and review sites are the opposite case: half or more of the suite's sites in each sit behind Akamai or Cloudflare, and Nimble averaged 52.5%, 40.0% and 0% across them.

Two limits on the statistic. It measures the adapter the August run used, the v1 endpoint with rendering off. We have not tested whether Nimble's current render: "auto" mode closes the gap; the harness now asks for that mode, and the next run will show it. And the protection label records where Nimble failed. It does not explain why.

Why pricing is hard to compare across these providers

Seven reasons, all of them visible on this page.

1. The unit is not the same. Nimble, Decodo, Firecrawl, Context.dev and Scrapfly price per request or per credit. Oxylabs prices Web Unblocker per gigabyte. Bright Data prices per successful request but bills some domains at a rate it does not publish.
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. Nimble's Extract URL is one page at one rate.
3. Failure billing differs, and it moves. Nimble, Decodo, Context.dev, Scrapfly, Bright Data and String bill only successes. Firecrawl changed its rule on September 4, 2026: no document means no charge, but a 403 that returns a document is billed.
4. The rate depends on the target, and sometimes the vendor decides. Scrapfly's anti-bot mode may escalate the proxy pool. Decodo's protected-target path is its top rate. Nimble describes a manual driver override "for cost control" but publishes one Extract rate.
5. Annual prices pose as monthly. Firecrawl's page shows $83 by default; the monthly-billed price is $99. Nimble's managed plans are quoted per month and billed annually.
6. Promotions and free allowances move the headline. Oxylabs is running 40% off under WU40. Nimble's pricing page and billing docs describe its free allowance differently.
7. Rollover is worth real money and it is rarely on the pricing card. String's credits roll over. Scrapfly's do not. Firecrawl's do not below annual Scale. Nimble's plan credits expire at the end of each month.

What $100 a month buys

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

• Nimble: no plan near $100. Pay as you go at $1.00 per 1,000 successful Extract URLs, so $100 buys 100,000 pages with no commitment. Managed plans start at $2,500 a month billed annually.
• String, $100: $0.20 plain fetch, $2.00 premium fetch, $1.00 browser, $4.00 browser on premium. Success-billed, blocks free, credits roll over.
• Scrapfly, $100: $0.10 datacenter, $0.50 with rendering or Unblocker, $2.50 residential. Failures free, no rollover.
• Decodo, $99: $0.14 standard, $0.60 with rendering, $0.85 premium, $1.20 premium with rendering. Success-billed.
• Firecrawl, $99: $0.99 flat, with blocked pages that return a document billed.
• Context.dev: no $100 plan. $25 for 10,000 credits or $149 for 200,000, which is $0.745 per 1,000.
• Bright Data: no plan near $100. $1.50 per 1,000 on pay as you go, with premium domains higher at an unpublished rate.
• Oxylabs: no per-page rate. Micro is 8GB for $75 list, $45 with the current coupon.

Read both directions. String is cheaper than Nimble on a plain fetch, at $0.20 against $1.00, and level on a standard browser request. Nimble is cheaper once a page needs a premium proxy, at $1.00 against String's $2.00 or $4.00. Both bill only successes, so those are costs per usable page. String's argument is coverage: 97.0% of the suite against 66.3%, and 16 of the 18 Akamai and Cloudflare sites Nimble could not return.

Which Nimble alternative should you pick?

• Your list is protected and the pages have to come back. String. 97.0% against 66.3%, and it returns 25 of the 29 sites Nimble could not.
• Your list is heavy on Akamai or Cloudflare and you want a flat bill. Context.dev, at 86.3% on that group, with one credit per page.
• Your list is heavy on Cloudflare and you also crawl. Firecrawl, at 100% on Cloudflare and the best latency score in the run.
• You want several APIs on one key. Scrapfly, second in the run at 82.0%.
• Your blocks are PerimeterX, or procurement decides. Oxylabs, at 97.8% on PerimeterX.
• You want the cheapest bill on plain pages. Decodo at $0.14 per 1,000, if a slower response is acceptable.
• You need proxies, datasets and SERP under one contract. Bright Data, though it does little for the sites Nimble missed.
• Stay on Nimble if your work is agent search and research, your targets sit mostly outside Akamai and Cloudflare, or you need SOC 2 Type II and zero data retention today. Off those two vendors its non-rendered path finished fourth of fifteen, it is quick on the pages it returns, and its $1.00 flat rate is simple to budget.

FAQ

What is the best Nimble alternative?

String, on the measured evidence. It passed 97.0% of 495 requests on the August 11, 2026 benchmark against Nimble's 66.3%, and it returned all five attempts on 25 of the 29 sites where Nimble returned nothing. Nimble is cheaper on protected pages and has a far larger agent and search product, so the choice is coverage against breadth.

Which providers can scrape Cloudflare-protected sites reliably?

On the 15 Cloudflare sites in the August 11 run, String and Firecrawl passed 100% of requests, Scrapfly 92.0% and Context.dev 90.7%. Nimble passed 34.7%. That weakness is part of a wider pattern: across the 35 sites behind Akamai or Cloudflare, Nimble passed 40.0%, eleventh of fifteen, against 80.6% and fourth place on the other 64 sites. The run used Nimble's non-rendered v1 path, so its current auto mode may do better.

Is String cheaper than Nimble?

It depends on the page. On a plain fetch String costs $0.20 per 1,000 at the Growth plan against Nimble's $1.00, and a standard browser request costs the same $1.00 on both. Once a page needs a premium proxy String costs $2.00 or $4.00 against Nimble's flat $1.00. Both vendors bill only successful requests, so these are like-for-like costs per usable page. String returned 30.7 points more of the benchmark suite.

What is the cheapest Nimble alternative?

On plain pages, Scrapfly at $0.10 per 1,000 for a datacenter fetch at its $100 Pro plan, and Decodo at $0.14 on its $99 plan. On protected pages the order changes: Decodo's protected path is $1.20 and Scrapfly's residential rate is $2.50, both above Nimble's flat $1.00. Context.dev's $0.745 covers protected pages too, but needs the $149 plan. Bright Data is excluded from this answer because it does not publish its premium-domain rate.

Is there a free Nimble alternative?

Several have free allowances. String gives the first 5,000 requests free with no card. Firecrawl gives 1,000 credits every month. Context.dev gives 1,000 credits every month. Scrapfly gives 1,000 credits on signup with no time limit. Bright Data gives 5,000 requests a month. Nimble's own pricing page offers 5,000 free requests per month, while its billing docs describe a 5,000-page free trial.

Which Nimble alternatives have MCP servers?

All seven on this page. String, Firecrawl, Context.dev, Bright Data, Decodo and Oxylabs ship MCP servers, and Scrapfly publishes one as well. Nimble's own hosted MCP exposes search, extract, map, crawl, templates and research agents.

When is Nimble still the better choice?

When the job is search and research for an agent rather than raw page retrieval, when your targets sit mostly outside Akamai and Cloudflare, or when procurement needs SOC 2 Type II and zero data retention now. Off Akamai and Cloudflare, Nimble's non-rendered path passed 80.6%, fourth of fifteen. It returned all five attempts on ticketmaster.com, stubhub.com and seatgeek.com, where the other fourteen providers averaged between 40% and 61%, and its median latency on shared pages beat five of the seven alternatives here.

Can I verify these numbers myself?

Yes. The harness, the 99 targets, the pass criteria and every provider adapter are open on GitHub, and it runs with your own API keys. The adapter the August run used for Nimble is in the repository history, so you can rerun the old path or the current render: "auto" one. The full results are published per provider and per target.

Sources

Checked September 11, 2026. Benchmark figures: August 11, 2026 run, official_results/benchmark-2026-08-11T22-44-25-322Z.json in the harness repository.

Benchmark data

1. https://usestring.ai/benchmark
2. https://usestring.ai/blog/web-data-frontier-benchmark-august-2026
3. https://usestring.ai/blog/web-scraping-benchmark-problem
4. https://github.com/usestring/web-data-frontier-benchmark
5. https://github.com/usestring/web-data-frontier-benchmark/blob/de5e8a9/src/providers/nimble.ts
6. https://github.com/usestring/web-data-frontier-benchmark/commit/edba7b7
7. https://github.com/usestring/web-data-frontier-benchmark/pull/6

Nimble

8. https://www.nimbleway.com/pricing
9. https://docs.nimbleway.com/nimble-sdk/admin/pricing
10. https://docs.nimbleway.com/api-reference/introduction
11. https://docs.nimbleway.com/api-reference/extract/extract
12. https://docs.nimbleway.com/integrations/mcp-server/mcp-server
13. https://docs.nimbleway.com/nimble-sdk/admin/compliance
14. https://www.nimbleway.com/extract-api
15. https://www.nimbleway.com/blog/nimble-benchmarks
16. https://www.nimbleway.com/blog/announcing-47m-series-b-web-search-agent-platform

String

17. https://usestring.ai/pricing
18. https://usestring.ai/web-access
19. https://portal.usestring.ai/docs/mcp/overview

Scrapfly

20. https://scrapfly.io/pricing
21. https://scrapfly.io/docs/scrape-api/anti-scraping-protection
22. https://scrapfly.io/compliance
23. https://scrapfly.io/docs/mcp/getting-started

Context.dev

24. https://www.context.dev/pricing
25. https://docs.context.dev/install-mcp

Firecrawl

26. https://www.firecrawl.dev/pricing
27. https://docs.firecrawl.dev/billing
28. https://github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl
29. https://docs.firecrawl.dev/mcp-server

Bright Data

30. https://brightdata.com/pricing/web-unlocker
31. https://docs.brightdata.com/scraping-automation/web-unlocker/features
32. https://docs.brightdata.com/mcp-server/overview

Oxylabs

33. https://oxylabs.io/products/web-unblocker/pricing
34. https://github.com/oxylabs/oxylabs-mcp

Decodo

35. https://decodo.com/scraping/web/pricing
36. https://help.decodo.com/docs/web-scraping-api-introduction
37. https://help.decodo.com/docs/mcp