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Best Nimble Alternatives in 2026: 8 Tools Compared

Bruce Magness, Chief of Staff, String · Published September 11, 2026 · Updated November 11, 2026

Last updated: November 11, 2026. Benchmark figures come from the October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark. Pricing was checked against each vendor's published pages on October 28, 2026.

What is the best Nimble alternative?

The best Nimble alternatives in 2026 are String, Scrapfly, Context.dev, Firecrawl, Bright Data, Oxylabs and Decodo. For bot-protected pages, String is a web access API for developers and AI agents that returns any URL's page with proxies and anti-bot handling behind one call; it passed 98.6% of requests (as of October 2026) in the Web Data Frontier Benchmark against Nimble's 68.0%. Scrapfly suits several APIs on one key, Context.dev a flat per-page cost, Firecrawl crawl-to-content work and Bright Data proxies plus datasets. Nimble stays the pick for grocery lists and search-and-research agents.

Nimble's result in this run depends on who protects the site. Behind Akamai or Cloudflare it passed 58.3% of requests, thirteenth of 17 providers. Everywhere else it passed 73.2%, eleventh of 17. The split is real, but in this run Nimble trailed most of the field on both sides of it.

TL;DR

  • Nimble passed 68.0% of benchmark requests, or 340 of 500, twelfth of seventeen providers. The run called Nimble's v1 Extract endpoint with render: "auto", which lets Nimble's own engine choose rendering and drivers.
  • String passed 98.6% (as of the October 2026 benchmark run), or 493 of 500, the highest of the 17 web scraping APIs tested. Blocked requests are free and the first 20,000 standard fetches need no card.
  • Nimble returned nothing across five attempts on 22 of 100 sites. Ten of the 22 sit behind Akamai or Cloudflare, which protect 35 of the 100.
  • On the 35 Akamai and Cloudflare sites Nimble passed 102 of 175 requests. On the other 65 it passed 238 of 325. That 14.9-point gap is the third widest in the run; the other sixteen providers averaged 68.0% and 73.1% on the same two groups.
  • Nimble bills only successful requests, at $1.00 per 1,000 URLs with no commitment, so its rate card is already the cost per usable page. There is no plan near $100 a month; managed plans start at $2,500 a month billed annually.
  • Nimble was slow even on the pages it returned. On the 52 sites where both providers passed every attempt, its median latency was 12.10 seconds against String's 1.50, and every alternative on this page except Decodo was faster on the sites each shared with it.
  • Every benchmark number comes from a public harness that anyone can rerun with their own API keys.

Nimble and seven alternatives at a glance

Provider Best for Benchmark success Latency score What $100 a month buys (per 1,000) The catch
String Protected targets that must return content 98.6% 4.24s Growth, $99: $0.16 for a plain fetch; $0.80 to $0.90 with a browser or a premium proxy; $3.25 with both. Blocked requests are free and credits roll over No crawl-to-content endpoint, no self-hosting, and no SOC 2 report yet
Nimble Agent search and extraction on sites outside Akamai and Cloudflare 68.0% 22.65s No plan near $100. Pay as you go: $1.00 per 1,000 successful Extract URLs, so $100 buys 100,000 pages 58.3% behind Akamai and Cloudflare, thirteenth of 17
Scrapfly Several APIs on one key, when latency is not the binding constraint 86.8% 19.62s Pro, $100: $0.10 datacenter; $0.50 with rendering or Unblocker; $2.50 on residential The Unblocker can upgrade the proxy pool, some target fees are unpublished, and credits do not roll over
Context.dev A flat, predictable per-page cost with protection included 93.0% 10.96s Pro, $90: 100,000 credits, or $0.90 per 1,000 pages Returned nothing on 6 sites, and a target's 404 is billed
Firecrawl Crawl-to-content with fast responses 81.2% 8.87s Standard, $99 billed monthly: 100,000 credits, or $0.99 per 1,000 pages A blocked page that returns a 403 document still costs a credit, and credits do not roll over below Scale
Bright Data Proxies, datasets, SERP APIs and unblocking under one contract 75.4% 27.88s No plan near $100. Pay as you go: $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests Premium domains bill higher at a rate the pricing page does not list
Oxylabs News and finance lists, and enterprise procurement 67.4% 16.62s No per-page rate. Basic, $100: Web Unblocker at $6.00 per GB, up to 16 GB Bandwidth billing, and 26 sites returned nothing
Decodo A premium proxy pool billed below Nimble's rate 71.2% 28.29s $99 plan: $0.30 standard; $0.60 with rendering; $0.70 premium; $1.10 premium with rendering Sixteenth of 17 on latency, and nothing returned on 19 of 100 sites

Benchmark figures come from the October 30, 2026 run, with 500 requests per provider across 100 sites. The latency score is failure-aware: per target, the p75 of a provider's successful attempts; a provider with no successful attempt on a target inherits the p75 of the providers that succeeded, and a target nobody returned counts at the 90-second timeout. Pricing comes from each vendor's published pages, checked October 28, 2026, at the plan closest to $100 a month billed monthly.

Why people leave Nimble

Nimble sells web data to AI agents. Details in this section come from Nimble's own docs and site, checked October 28, 2026. Its API covers Search, Extract, Crawl, Map, prebuilt extraction templates and Web Search Agents that run research tasks at a chosen effort level. The Extract endpoint offers browser rendering, page actions, geo-targeting and a choice of drivers, including an auto mode that picks one for you. It ships a hosted MCP server, lists SOC 2 Type II and zero data retention, and announced a $47M Series B alongside its agent platform.

For page retrieval, the case for moving off Nimble rests on one finding from the run: a block of sites it does not return. Pricing is a smaller issue.

Hard sites

In the October 30, 2026 benchmark run, Nimble returned nothing at all, across five attempts, on 22 of the 100 sites. Ten of them sit behind Akamai or Cloudflare: mouser.com, apartments.com, lowes.com, homedepot.com, us.louisvuitton.com, zara.com and aa.com on Akamai; crunchbase.com, stockx.com and axs.com on Cloudflare. The other twelve are spread across DataDome, AWS WAF, PerimeterX and in-house systems. String returned content on all five attempts for 21 of the 22, and four of five on skyscanner.net.

Two of those names show why the list matters. The other sixteen providers averaged 78.8% on crunchbase.com and 70.0% on homedepot.com. They are easy sites for the field, and Nimble returned neither.

One category came close to zero. Nimble returned nothing on three of the four ticketing sites in the suite, stubhub.com, ticketmaster.com and axs.com, and averaged 25.0% across all four, its weakest category. On the six review and local-business sites it returned nothing on trustpilot.com and crunchbase.com and one of five on yelp.com, for 50.0%. String returned all four ticketing sites and five of the six review sites on every attempt, and yellowpages.com on four of five. A ticketing, brand-monitoring or lead-enrichment workload would lose much of those categories.

Nimble is also strong where much of the field is weak. It returned all five attempts on kroger.com, seatgeek.com and booking.com, where the other sixteen providers averaged 38.8%, 57.5% and 58.8%, and it passed 100% on grocery and food, the only one of 17 providers to do so. It beat String outright on four sites: yellowpages.com, marketwatch.com and barrons.com, where it passed five of five and String passed four, and kroger.com, where String passed two.

Pricing

Nimble's pay-as-you-go pricing is simple, as checked October 28, 2026. Extract, Crawl and Map cost $1.00 per 1,000 URLs with no commitment, and "Only successful requests are charged," according to its billing docs. Search costs $1.10 per 1,000 at lite depth and $5.00 at standard, plus $1.00 per 1,000 if you ask for full page content.

The difficulty sits above pay-as-you-go. The managed Data Services plans start at $2,500 a month, billed annually, for 350,000 page credits, and their credits "expire at the end of each month." The published ladder has nothing between $1.00 per 1,000 on your own card and a $30,000 annual commitment. Anything in between is a custom quote from sales.

Two of Nimble's own pages also disagree. The pricing page offers "5,000 free requests per month." The billing docs describe a free trial of "5,000 free web pages," with no monthly refresh. The pricing page also describes a manual driver override "for cost control," while the billing docs list a single Extract rate and publish no per-driver price. Ask Nimble which applies before you forecast.

How we tested these web scraping APIs

We ran 100 live sites, five attempts each, against 17 providers, for 500 requests per provider and 8,500 in all. Each provider ran through one adapter published in the repository. The timeout was 90 seconds. A request passed only when the response contained a marker from the real page, so a captcha interstitial returning HTTP 200 counted as a failure.

Nimble's result needs a qualification. The August 11, 2026 run used the original Nimble adapter, which posted to the legacy /v1/extract endpoint with render: false, raw HTML over a residential Nimble IP with no headless browser. Before the September run, the harness moved five adapters to the settings their vendors document for bot-protected pages, and Nimble's now requests render: "auto", which hands the request to Nimble's own escalation engine. The September and October figures measure that mode, with the same adapter in both runs. Between the August and September runs Nimble's success rate went from 66.3% to 68.6% and its latency score from 18.41 to 21.54 seconds. In October it passed 68.0% with a latency score of 22.65 seconds. The adapter still calls the v1 endpoint; Nimble's documentation says the legacy v1 endpoints keep working "until they are deprecated, but new integrations should target v2."

Two of the alternatives on this page carry a caveat of their own. In the September run Decodo's API returned HTTP 429 on every attempt for the last 29 targets, 145 attempts in all; in the October run it returned HTTP 429 on 2 attempts. The Scrapfly adapter moved to its residential pool in September under the same harness change as Nimble's.

Nimble publishes two benchmarks of its own, and both answer different questions. Nimble reports that its Web Search Agents lead the DRACO research benchmark, which scores answers to research questions rather than page retrieval. Its Extract API page describes an extraction test of 5,856 URLs across 2,107 domains with every engine on default settings, graded by anchor recall and token overlap. The scores themselves did not appear in the page's HTML when we checked it, so we do not quote one.

Disclosure: String built this benchmark and sells the product that ranks first in it. The answer to that conflict is a harness you can run yourself. The targets, pass criteria, and every provider configuration are open on GitHub, and the repository accepts your own API keys. The original benchmark post explains the pass rule and why the latency score refuses to reward fast failures.

Providers do contest results, and we publish the corrections. Firecrawl's engineer said its configuration was wrong, opened a pull request, and raised Firecrawl's score by 7.7 points. The October run keeps that corrected configuration.

Chart data
ProviderSuccess ratePassedLatency score
String98.6%493/5004.24s
Scrape.do94.0%470/5005.08s
Context.dev93.0%465/50010.96s
Scrapfly86.8%434/50019.62s
ScrapingBee85.2%426/50020.30s
Firecrawl81.2%406/5008.87s
Zyte79.6%398/50014.43s
Apify79.4%397/50024.87s
ScraperAPI76.4%382/50015.19s
Bright75.4%377/50027.88s
Decodo71.2%356/50028.29s
Nimble68.0%340/50022.65s
Oxylabs67.4%337/50016.62s
Browserbase43.0%215/50018.01s
ZenRows41.8%209/50021.91s
ScrapingAnt40.0%200/50018.39s
Scrapingdog27.6%138/50031.52s
Overall success rate across all 500 requests per provider. Web Data Frontier Benchmark · 100 targets · 500 requests per provider · October 30, 2026. Current leaderboard

String vs Nimble: 98.6% against 68.0%, and 21 of Nimble's 22 empty 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 $99 a month (as of October 2026) and bills $0.16 per 1,000 fetch requests on a standard proxy, $0.90 on a premium proxy, $0.80 for a browser request on a standard proxy, and $3.25 with both. Starter costs $19 a month at $0.25, $2.40, $1.20 and $4.80. The first 20,000 standard fetches are free with no card, blocked requests are not billed, a site's 404 is billed, and unused credits roll over. Against Nimble's flat $1.00, String is cheaper on a plain fetch, a standard browser request and a premium-proxy fetch, and more expensive only when a page needs a browser on a premium proxy.

Benchmark success. 98.6%, or 493 of 500, first of seventeen. String returned content on all five attempts for 95 sites and partial content on the other 5. On the 35 Akamai and Cloudflare sites it passed 97.7%, and on the other 65 it passed 99.1%.

Latency. 4.24 seconds against Nimble's 22.65, first of seventeen. On the 52 sites where both providers passed every attempt, String's median per-target latency was 1.50 seconds against Nimble's 12.10, and Nimble was slower on all 52.

Strengths. Coverage. String returned all five attempts on all 10 Akamai and Cloudflare sites where Nimble returned nothing. It passed 98.7% against Cloudflare, 97.0% against Akamai and 97.9% against DataDome, where Nimble reads 68.0%, 51.0% and 64.2%.

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 yellowpages.com, marketwatch.com, barrons.com and kroger.com, and String costs more than Nimble when a page needs a browser on a premium proxy.

MCP. String ships a hosted MCP server for fetch, search and sitemap discovery, 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: 86.8%, and 13 of the 22 sites Nimble missed

Pricing. As checked November 11, 2026, 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 scrapes are not charged. Credits do not roll over: quotas reset at renewal.

Benchmark success. 86.8%, or 434 of 500, fourth of seventeen and 18.8 points above Nimble. It returned nothing on 5 sites against Nimble's 22.

Latency. 19.62 seconds against Nimble's 22.65. On the 44 sites both passed every attempt, Scrapfly's median was 5.55 seconds against Nimble's 12.45, so Scrapfly is the faster of the two on pages both return.

Strengths. Fourth in the run, behind String, Scrape.do and Context.dev, several APIs on one key, and SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 attestations, with HIPAA on Enterprise and Custom plans. It returned all five attempts on 13 of Nimble's 22 zero-content sites, and Nimble returned all five on two of Scrapfly's five, alibaba.com and kroger.com. It passed 84.6% on the Akamai and Cloudflare group.

Weaknesses. Its Unblocker can upgrade a request to a better proxy pool, and some target fees "are not publicly documented," so the bill can move between $0.10 and $2.50 per 1,000 and beyond. Nimble's one flat Extract rate is easier to forecast.

Context.dev vs Nimble: one flat credit, and third in the run

Pricing. As checked November 11, 2026, Developer is $20 a month for 5,000 credits and Pro is $90 for 100,000, or $0.90 per 1,000 pages, with Pro overage at $2.00 per 1,000 credits. A scrape starts at 1 credit with proxies, JavaScript rendering and anti-bot bypass included. Browser actions raise it to 2 credits and JSON extraction to 5. A request where every output fails is not billed, but a target's 404 is. The free tier is 1,000 credits every month.

Benchmark success. 93.0%, or 465 of 500, third of seventeen.

Latency. 10.96 seconds against Nimble's 22.65. On the 55 sites both passed every attempt, Context.dev's median was 3.90 seconds against Nimble's 12.20.

Strengths. It passed 96.0% on Cloudflare, where Nimble reads 68.0%, and 100% on DataDome, where Nimble reads 64.2%. On the whole Akamai and Cloudflare group it passed 86.3% and returned all five attempts on 8 of the 10 sites there where Nimble returned nothing. Like Nimble, it prices a protected page the same as any other, at $0.90 against Nimble's $1.00, and it ships an official MCP server.

Weaknesses. Akamai, at 79.0%, is its weakest major wall, though still above Nimble's 51.0%. Nimble returned all five attempts on one site where Context.dev returned nothing, kroger.com.

Firecrawl vs Nimble: crawl-to-content, and the third-best latency score

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 roll over only on Scale and Enterprise.

Benchmark success. 81.2%, or 406 of 500, sixth of seventeen.

Latency. 8.87 seconds, third of seventeen behind String and Scrape.do. On the 46 sites both passed every attempt, Firecrawl's median was 5.00 seconds against Nimble's 13.80.

Strengths. 88.0% across the Akamai and Cloudflare group, the best of the alternatives here after String, and 98.7% on Cloudflare, where Nimble reads 68.0%. It returned all five attempts on 18 of Nimble's 22 zero-content sites, 9 of them in that group. Good crawl-to-content ergonomics, an open-source core, SOC 2 Type II, and an MCP server.

Weaknesses. The two tools fail in opposite places. Firecrawl's weakest column is the in-house bucket at 60.0%, where Nimble reads 81.5%, and Nimble returned all five attempts on 8 sites where Firecrawl returned nothing, including reddit.com, linkedin.com, instagram.com and facebook.com. Firecrawl went to zero on 17 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. As checked November 11, 2026, 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 the pricing page does not list and the zone's estimated-cost panel shows, and zones with custom headers or cookies enabled are billed for 100% of requests, successful and failed. Because that premium rate is not on the pricing page, Bright Data is not ranked as the cheapest option anywhere on this page.

Benchmark success. 75.4%, or 377 of 500, tenth of seventeen.

Latency. 27.88 seconds against Nimble's 22.65. On the 34 sites both passed every attempt, Bright Data's median was 8.75 seconds against Nimble's 11.70, and Nimble was slower on 21 of the 34.

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 passed 86.7% on PerimeterX, against Nimble's 82.2%, and 73.1% on the Akamai and Cloudflare group.

Weaknesses. It recovers fewer of Nimble's misses than its group rate suggests. Bright Data returned all five attempts on only 2 of the 10 Akamai and Cloudflare sites where Nimble returned nothing, and 6 of the 22 overall. Off that group it passed 76.6% against Nimble's 73.2%, and Nimble returned all five attempts on 3 sites where Bright Data returned nothing. Our Bright Data alternatives comparison covers it in full.

Oxylabs vs Nimble: bandwidth billing, and the narrowest gap on this page

Pricing. As checked November 11, 2026, Web Unblocker is billed by bandwidth under one subscription that covers every Oxylabs product, so there is no per-page rate to set beside Nimble's. Starter is $15 a month at $7.20 per GB, up to 2 GB; Basic is $100 at $6.00 per GB, up to 16 GB; Flexible is $500 at $4.80 per GB, up to 104 GB. New accounts get a $5 welcome credit.

Benchmark success. 67.4%, or 337 of 500, thirteenth of seventeen and 0.6 points below Nimble.

Latency. 16.62 seconds against Nimble's 22.65. On the 42 sites both passed every attempt, Oxylabs' median was 3.30 seconds against Nimble's 12.45.

Strengths. 97.8% on news and finance, plus ISO 27001 and an MCP server. It passed 91.1% on PerimeterX, against Nimble's 82.2%.

Weaknesses. Bandwidth billing punishes heavy pages and makes forecasting harder than Nimble's flat rate. It does little for Nimble's weak spot: 59.4% on the Akamai and Cloudflare group, and all five attempts on only 3 of the 10 sites there where Nimble returned nothing. It is weak on AWS WAF at 16.7%, where Nimble reads 40.0%, 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, a cheaper premium rate

Pricing. As checked October 28, 2026, Decodo's scraping API is now its Web Data API. The $99 plan bills $0.30 per 1,000 requests on standard proxies, $0.60 with JavaScript rendering, $0.70 on premium proxies and $1.10 on premium proxies with rendering, per its billing docs. Only successful requests are charged, but its response-code table counts a 2xx or 4xx response as successful when a result comes back. Requests use the premium pool unless you ask for standard, which Decodo reserves for simple pages that do not need anti-bot handling, so a protected page costs $0.70 to $1.10 against Nimble's flat $1.00.

Benchmark success. 71.2%, or 356 of 500, eleventh of seventeen and 3.2 points above Nimble. In September, when its API returned HTTP 429 on every attempt for the run's last 29 targets, it had passed 50.6%.

Latency. 28.29 seconds against Nimble's 22.65, sixteenth of seventeen. On the 36 sites both passed every attempt, Decodo's median was 20.95 seconds against Nimble's 11.90, the only gap on this page in Nimble's favour.

Strengths. The lowest premium-proxy rate here at $0.70 per 1,000, an MCP server, 100+ prebuilt templates, and 81.8% on fashion and luxury against Nimble's 63.6%. It passed 68.0% on Akamai, against Nimble's 51.0%.

Weaknesses. Decodo returned all five attempts on only 8 of Nimble's 22 zero-content sites, and Nimble returned all five on 8 of Decodo's 19. It is weak on DataDome at 65.3%, close to Nimble's 64.2%, and slow.

The anti-bot cut

Success rates by protection vendor, from the October 30, 2026 benchmark run. Site counts are in the column headers.

Provider DataDome (19) Akamai (20) Cloudflare (15) PerimeterX (9) AWS WAF (6) Kasada (3) Fastly (1) Proprietary / other (27)
String 97.9 97.0 98.7 97.8 100 100 100 100
Scrapfly 92.6 78.0 93.3 93.3 96.7 86.7 40.0 83.0
Context.dev 100 79.0 96.0 97.8 100 100 100 92.6
Firecrawl 85.3 80.0 98.7 100 83.3 100 100 60.0
Bright Data 74.7 72.0 74.7 86.7 73.3 66.7 100 75.6
Oxylabs 67.4 53.0 68.0 91.1 16.7 100 0 80.0
Decodo 65.3 68.0 73.3 86.7 73.3 100 0 70.4
Nimble 64.2 51.0 68.0 82.2 40.0 86.7 100 81.5

Nimble's row runs from 100% on the one Fastly site, 86.7% on Kasada and 81.5% on the in-house column to 40.0% on AWS WAF and 51.0% on Akamai. The in-house figure, across 27 sites that include Google, LinkedIn, Ticketmaster and Reddit, is seventh of all 17 providers. Its Akamai column is fourteenth of 17 and its Cloudflare column twelfth.

Chart data
ProviderDataDome (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)
String97.9%97.0%98.7%97.8%100.0%100.0%100.0%100.0%
Scrape.do97.9%87.0%93.3%100.0%100.0%100.0%100.0%92.6%
Context.dev100.0%79.0%96.0%97.8%100.0%100.0%100.0%92.6%
Scrapfly92.6%78.0%93.3%93.3%96.7%86.7%40.0%83.0%
ScrapingBee85.3%74.0%97.3%88.9%63.3%100.0%100.0%88.1%
Firecrawl85.3%80.0%98.7%100.0%83.3%100.0%100.0%60.0%
Zyte68.4%68.0%92.0%91.1%70.0%100.0%100.0%84.4%
Apify85.3%69.0%86.7%86.7%63.3%100.0%0.0%80.7%
ScraperAPI75.8%81.0%70.7%82.2%76.7%53.3%100.0%76.3%
Bright74.7%72.0%74.7%86.7%73.3%66.7%100.0%75.6%
Decodo65.3%68.0%73.3%86.7%73.3%100.0%0.0%70.4%
Nimble64.2%51.0%68.0%82.2%40.0%86.7%100.0%81.5%
Oxylabs67.4%53.0%68.0%91.1%16.7%100.0%0.0%80.0%
Browserbase31.6%28.0%6.7%73.3%16.7%33.3%0.0%80.7%
ZenRows52.6%57.0%33.3%73.3%36.7%60.0%0.0%17.8%
ScrapingAnt7.4%33.0%24.0%53.3%13.3%53.3%100.0%74.8%
Scrapingdog16.8%27.0%29.3%6.7%13.3%20.0%0.0%46.7%
Success rate by anti-bot vendor. Web Data Frontier Benchmark · 100 targets · 500 requests per provider · October 30, 2026. Current leaderboard

Nimble's edge split: 58.3% behind Akamai and Cloudflare, 73.2% 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 100 sites by protection vendor. Thirty-five sit behind Akamai (20) or Cloudflare (15). On those 35, Nimble passed 102 of 175 requests, or 58.3%, thirteenth of 17 providers. On the other 65 sites, it passed 238 of 325, or 73.2%, eleventh of 17. Among the alternatives on this page, String at 99.1% (as of the October 2026 benchmark run), Context.dev at 96.6%, Scrapfly at 88.0%, Firecrawl at 77.5% and Bright Data at 76.6% passed more there, and Decodo and Oxylabs, both at 71.7%, passed less.

The gap is 14.9 points, the third widest in the run after Browserbase and ScrapingAnt. It was 17.6 points in the September 16 run. In the August 11 run, with rendering off, Nimble's gap was 40.6 points, the widest of any provider: it passed 40.0% on the Akamai and Cloudflare sites and 80.6% on the rest. The field shares the direction this time, but not the size. The other sixteen providers averaged 68.0% on the Akamai and Cloudflare sites and 73.1% on the rest, a 5.1-point difference. One provider on this page does better on those two vendors than off them: Firecrawl at 88.0% against 77.5%.

The zero-content sites follow the same split. Nimble returned nothing on 22 sites, and 10 of them are Akamai or Cloudflare sites, from a group that holds 35 of the 100. Off that group, Nimble returned all five attempts on 41 of 65 sites.

Sort your target list by protection vendor before you choose. A list with few Akamai or Cloudflare sites is where Nimble does better, though it finished eleventh there. In this suite that describes news and finance and social networks, where no site sits behind either vendor and Nimble averaged 86.7% and 95.0%. Retail and review sites are the opposite case: about half the suite's sites in each sit behind Akamai or Cloudflare, and Nimble averaged 47.1% and 50.0% across them.

Two limits on the statistic. It measures the adapter the September and October runs used, render: "auto" on the v1 Extract endpoint, and not Nimble's v2 Extract. 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 premium domains at a rate its pricing page does not list.
  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 and Bright Data bill only successes, though Bright Data bills every request once custom headers or cookies are on. String does not bill a blocked request but bills a site's 404. Decodo bills a 2xx or 4xx response that returns a result. Context.dev bills a target's 404. Scrapfly does not bill upstream 4xx and 5xx responses. 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 Unblocker may upgrade the proxy pool. Decodo bills its premium rate unless you ask for standard proxies. 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. Bright Data matches a first deposit dollar for dollar up to $500. 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 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, $99 (as of October 2026): $0.16 plain fetch, $0.90 premium fetch, $0.80 browser, $3.25 browser on premium. Blocks free, a site's 404 billed, credits roll over.
  • Scrapfly, $100: $0.10 datacenter, $0.50 with rendering or Unblocker, $2.50 residential. Failed scrapes free, no rollover.
  • Decodo, $99: $0.30 standard, $0.60 with rendering, $0.70 premium, $1.10 premium with rendering. A 2xx or 4xx that returns a result is billed.
  • Firecrawl, $99: $0.99 flat, with blocked pages that return a document billed.
  • Context.dev, $90: $0.90 flat for 100,000 pages, with protection included and a target's 404 billed.
  • Bright Data: no plan near $100. $1.50 per 1,000 on pay as you go, with premium domains higher at a rate the pricing page does not list.
  • Oxylabs, $100: no per-page rate. Basic bills Web Unblocker at $6.00 per GB, up to 16 GB.

Read both directions. String is cheaper than Nimble on a plain fetch, at $0.16 against $1.00, and on a standard browser request or a premium-proxy fetch, at $0.80 and $0.90. Nimble is cheaper once a page needs both a browser and a premium proxy, at $1.00 against String's $3.25. Neither bills a blocked request, so those rates are close to the cost per usable page. String's argument is coverage: 98.6% of the suite against 68.0%, and all 10 of the Akamai and Cloudflare sites Nimble could not return.

Which Nimble alternative should you pick?

Figures here come from the October 30, 2026 benchmark run, with String's results as of October 2026, and vendor pricing pages checked October 28, 2026.

  • Your list is protected and the pages have to come back. String. 98.6% against 68.0%, and it returns 21 of the 22 sites Nimble could not.
  • Your list is heavy on Cloudflare and you want a flat bill. Context.dev, at 96.0% on Cloudflare, with one credit per page.
  • Your list is heavy on Akamai or Cloudflare and you also crawl. Firecrawl, at 88.0% on that group and the third-best latency score in the run.
  • You want several APIs on one key. Scrapfly, fourth in the run at 86.8%.
  • Your list is news and finance, or procurement decides. Oxylabs, at 97.8% on news and finance.
  • You want a premium proxy pool below Nimble's rate. Decodo at $0.70 per 1,000, if a slower response is acceptable.
  • You need proxies, datasets and SERP under one contract. Bright Data, though it returns fewer than half of the sites Nimble missed.
  • Stay on Nimble if your work is agent search and research, your list is mostly grocery, or you need SOC 2 Type II and zero data retention today. It passed 100% on the five grocery and food sites, the only provider of 17 to do so, and its $1.00 flat rate is simple to budget.

Switching from Nimble to String

What carries over. A POST to sdk.nimbleway.com/v2/extract, or to the legacy api.webit.live Web API, becomes a POST to String's /v1/fetch with a bearer key. formats: ["markdown"] maps to "format": "markdown", render: true to "executeJS": true, and browser actions to String's actions. The driver choice goes away, because String picks the fetch path.

What you rebuild. Extract Templates and scheduled Extract Jobs, async and batch extraction with callbacks, Search, Map, Crawl, agent research runs, file parsing, and the residential proxy gateway. String's /search endpoint and sitemap crawl cover search and URL discovery. Templates become jsonSchema extraction or your own parser.

Integrations to reconnect. Nimble publishes Python, Node, and Go SDKs, a CLI, a hosted MCP server, plugins for coding agents, and integrations for LangChain, LlamaIndex, the Vercel AI SDK, Databricks, and Snowflake. Its docs list no n8n, Zapier, or Make integration. 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. Start with the sites where Nimble returns nothing. In the October 30, 2026 benchmark run that was 22 of 100, and String returned 21 of them 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 Nimble page compares the two products in more depth.

FAQ

What is the best Nimble alternative?

String, on the measured evidence. It passed 98.6% of 500 requests on the October 30, 2026 benchmark against Nimble's 68.0%, and it returned all five attempts on 21 of the 22 sites where Nimble returned nothing. Nimble is cheaper on pages that need a browser on a premium proxy 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 October 30 run, String and Firecrawl each passed 98.7% (as of the October 2026 benchmark run) of requests, Context.dev 96.0% and Scrapfly 93.3%. Nimble passed 68.0%. That weakness is part of a wider pattern: across the 35 sites behind Akamai or Cloudflare, Nimble passed 58.3%, thirteenth of 17, against 73.2% and eleventh place on the other 65 sites.

Is String cheaper than Nimble?

It depends on the page. Per each vendor's pricing page, checked October 28, 2026, on a plain fetch String costs $0.16 per 1,000 (as of October 2026) at the Growth plan against Nimble's $1.00, a standard browser request $0.80 and a premium-proxy fetch $0.90. Once a page needs a browser on a premium proxy String costs $3.25 against Nimble's flat $1.00. Neither vendor bills a blocked request, so these rates are close to the cost per usable page. String returned 30.6 points more of the benchmark suite.

What is the cheapest Nimble alternative?

Per each vendor's pricing page, checked October 28, 2026: on plain pages, Scrapfly at $0.10 per 1,000 (as of October 2026) for a datacenter fetch at its $100 Pro plan, then String at $0.16 on its $99 Growth plan and Decodo at $0.30 on its $99 plan. On protected pages the order changes: Decodo's premium pool at $0.70, String's premium fetch at $0.90 and Context.dev at $0.90 on its $90 Pro plan all sit below Nimble's flat $1.00, while Decodo's premium rate with rendering, $1.10, and Scrapfly's residential rate, $2.50, sit above it. Bright Data is excluded from this answer because its pricing page does not list its premium-domain rate.

Is there a free Nimble alternative?

Several have free allowances. String gives the first 20,000 standard fetches 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. Oxylabs gives a $5 welcome credit (per each vendor's pricing page, checked October 28, 2026). 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 list is mostly grocery, or when procurement needs SOC 2 Type II and zero data retention now. In the October 30, 2026 benchmark run, Nimble passed 100% on grocery and food, the only one of 17 providers to do so, and 95.0% on social networks. Off Akamai and Cloudflare it passed 73.2%, eleventh of 17.

Can I verify these numbers myself?

Yes. The harness, the 100 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 non-rendered path or the current render: "auto" one. The full results are published per provider and per target.

Sources

Pricing checked October 28, 2026. Benchmark figures: October 30, 2026 run, official_results/benchmark-2026-10-30T18-48-18-489Z.json in the harness repository.

Benchmark data

  1. https://usestring.ai/benchmark
  2. https://usestring.ai/blog/web-data-frontier-benchmark-october-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/main/official_results/benchmark-2026-10-30T18-48-18-489Z.json
  6. https://github.com/usestring/web-data-frontier-benchmark/blob/de5e8a9/src/providers/nimble.ts
  7. https://github.com/usestring/web-data-frontier-benchmark/pull/16
  8. https://github.com/usestring/web-data-frontier-benchmark/pull/6

Nimble

  1. https://www.nimbleway.com/pricing
  2. https://docs.nimbleway.com/nimble-sdk/admin/pricing
  3. https://docs.nimbleway.com/api-reference/introduction
  4. https://docs.nimbleway.com/api-reference/extract/extract
  5. https://docs.nimbleway.com/integrations/mcp-server/mcp-server
  6. https://docs.nimbleway.com/nimble-sdk/admin/compliance
  7. https://www.nimbleway.com/extract-api
  8. https://www.nimbleway.com/blog/nimble-benchmarks
  9. https://www.nimbleway.com/blog/announcing-47m-series-b-web-search-agent-platform

String

  1. https://usestring.ai/pricing
  2. https://usestring.ai/web-access
  3. https://portal.usestring.ai/docs/mcp/overview

Scrapfly

  1. https://scrapfly.io/pricing
  2. https://scrapfly.io/docs/scrape-api/anti-scraping-protection
  3. https://scrapfly.io/compliance
  4. https://scrapfly.io/docs/mcp/getting-started

Context.dev

  1. https://www.context.dev/pricing
  2. https://docs.context.dev/install-mcp

Firecrawl

  1. https://www.firecrawl.dev/pricing
  2. https://docs.firecrawl.dev/billing
  3. https://github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl
  4. https://docs.firecrawl.dev/mcp-server

Bright Data

  1. https://brightdata.com/pricing/web-unlocker
  2. https://docs.brightdata.com/scraping-automation/web-unlocker/features
  3. https://docs.brightdata.com/mcp-server/overview

Oxylabs

  1. https://oxylabs.io/products/web-unblocker/pricing
  2. https://github.com/oxylabs/oxylabs-mcp

Decodo

  1. https://decodo.com/web-data-api/pricing
  2. https://help.decodo.com/docs/web-data-api-billing
  3. https://help.decodo.com/docs/web-data-api-response-codes
  4. https://help.decodo.com/docs/mcp
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