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Best Scrape.do Alternatives in 2026: 8 Tools Compared

Bruce Magness, Chief of Staff, String · Updated September 18, 2026

Last updated: September 18, 2026. Benchmark figures come from the August 11, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark. Pricing was checked against each vendor's published pages between September 14 and September 18, 2026.

The best Scrape.do alternatives in 2026 are String, Scrapfly, Context.dev, Firecrawl, Bright Data, Oxylabs and Zyte. String is the strongest option when a web scraping API has to return protected pages: it passed 97.0% of requests on our 99-site benchmark, the highest of 15 providers. Scrapfly suits teams who want several APIs on one key and returned every attempt on all eight sites Scrape.do charges extra for. Context.dev suits teams who want one flat credit per page with protection included. Firecrawl suits crawl-to-content work and fast responses. Bright Data suits pay-as-you-go unblocking at scale. Oxylabs suits lists heavy on PerimeterX. Zyte suits short responses when you accept a price tier the vendor sets. Scrape.do was not in our benchmark, so it gets no success rate and no rank. This page compares all eight tools on benchmark success, response times, pricing near $100 a month, and MCP support.

Scrape.do is a cheap, simple web scraping API: $99 buys 1,250,000 credits, and it bills only responses it counts as successful. The reasons to look elsewhere are specific: its 99.98% success claim comes with no stated method, the credit cost of a page moves with the target and the mode, and it publishes no MCP server of its own.

TL;DR

  • Scrape.do was not tested in the August 11 run. It is marked "Not tested" in every table on this page, and no number here is invented for it. Its pricing page claims a 99.98% success rate and does not say how that was measured.
  • String passed 97.0%, or 480 of 495, the highest of the 15 web scraping APIs tested. It returned all five attempts on 92 of 99 sites. Blocked requests are free and the first 5,000 requests need no card.
  • The surcharge list: Scrape.do's own per-domain price table names 8 of our 99 benchmark sites, at 10 to 30 credits a request. The 15 tested APIs averaged 52.5% on those 8 against 64.8% on the other 91. Scrapfly returned every attempt on all 8, and String on 7.
  • Scrape.do bills 1 credit for a datacenter request and 25 for a residential request with a browser, per its request cost docs. A target's 400, 404 or 410 response counts as a success and is billed.
  • On Pro, $99 a month, that is about $0.08 per 1,000 plain pages and $1.98 per 1,000 residential pages with rendering. LinkedIn costs 30 credits, about $2.38 per 1,000.
  • Scrape.do's documentation lists n8n and Zapier integrations and no MCP server. Six of the seven alternatives here publish one.
  • Every benchmark number comes from a public harness that anyone can rerun with their own API keys.

Scrape.do and seven alternatives at a glance

Provider Best for Benchmark success Latency score What about $100 a month buys (per 1,000) The catch
String Protected targets that must return content 97.0% 9.98s Growth, $100: $0.20 for a plain fetch; $1.00 to $2.00 with a browser or a premium proxy; $4.00 with both. Blocked requests are free and credits roll over More expensive than Scrape.do's rate card at every request type; no SOC 2 report yet
Scrape.do A low credit price and a simple GET endpoint Not tested Not tested Pro, $99: about $0.08 datacenter; $0.40 with rendering; $0.79 residential; $1.98 residential with rendering; more on listed domains No independent success number; a target's 404 is billed
Scrapfly Several APIs on one key 82.0% 18.35s Pro, $100: $0.10 datacenter; $0.50 with rendering or Unblocker; $2.50 on residential Unblocker fees vary by target, and credits do not roll over
Context.dev One flat credit per page, protection included 79.2% 12.68s No plan near $100. Pro, $149: $0.745 per page. Developer, $25, plus overage: about $1.67 at $100 16 sites returned nothing in the August run
Firecrawl Crawl-to-content work and fast responses 78.6% 9.21s Standard, $99 billed monthly: 100,000 credits, or $0.99 per 1,000 pages A page that returns a 403 or 404 document still costs a credit
Bright Data Pay-as-you-go unblocking at scale 78.0% 26.14s No plan near $100. Pay as you go: $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests; Scale is $499 Premium domains bill at a rate shown only in the dashboard
Oxylabs PerimeterX-heavy lists 76.8% 14.67s Web Unblocker Micro, $75: 8 GB at $9.40 per GB. Web Scraper API Starter, $99: $1.10 per 1,000 results The benchmarked product bills by bandwidth, so the cost per page depends on page size
Zyte Short responses on a vendor-set price tier 72.7% 14.85s $100 commitment: $0.10 to $0.95 per 1,000 HTTP responses; $0.75 to $12.00 with a browser Zyte assigns the tier, and you cannot pick it

Benchmark figures come from the August 11, 2026 run, with 495 requests per provider across 99 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. Scrape.do's per-1,000 prices are derived from its Pro plan, $99 for 1,250,000 credits, times its published credit cost per request type. Pricing comes from each vendor's published pages at the plan closest to $100 a month billed monthly.

Why people look at Scrape.do alternatives

Scrape.do sells a web scraping API: one GET call with a URL and a token, with proxy rotation, TLS fingerprinting, CAPTCHA handling and an optional headless browser behind it. It also runs a proxy mode, an async API for batch jobs, and ready-made scrapers for Amazon, Google, Walmart and a few other sites. The pricing page says every plan, including the free one, gets every feature, although it also lists premium residential proxies as a Business-plan item. For a small team that wants a cheap endpoint and little setup, that is a real reason to stay.

The case for moving rests on three things: evidence on hard sites, a bill that moves with the target, and agent support.

Hard sites

There is no independent number for Scrape.do. It was not one of the 15 providers in our August run. Its pricing page shows "99.98% Success rate" and gives no method, no site list and no date. On our 99 sites the 15 tested APIs ranged from 97.0% to 29.7%, so a rate means little without its site list.

What Scrape.do does publish is a list of the sites it treats as hard. Its request cost docs name 26 domains where it turns on residential proxies, a browser or a custom profile by default, and charges for it. Eight of those domains are in our benchmark. The tested APIs averaged 52.5% on those eight against 64.8% on the other 91, so Scrape.do's list and our data agree on direction. The section on the surcharge list below has the site-by-site results.

Pricing

Scrape.do's rate card is low. Pro costs $99 a month for 1,250,000 credits, about $0.08 per 1,000 credits, per its pricing page. A plain datacenter request costs 1 credit, a request with the headless browser 5, a residential or mobile request 10, and residential with the browser 25. On Pro that is about $0.08, $0.40, $0.79 and $1.98 per 1,000 pages.

The bill depends on the page. Protected sites need the residential and browser modes, which cost up to 25 times a plain request. On the listed domains Scrape.do applies its own profile "whether or not you also passed those parameters", from 10 credits for google.com to 30 for linkedin.com and 200 for sainsburys.co.uk. Four listed domains, including chewy.com and shopee, say "Contact support for access." The docs tell you to trust the Scrape.do-Request-Cost response header over the table.

Failure billing has one catch. The pricing FAQ says you "won't lose credits on timeouts, blocks, or errors." The request cost docs are more specific: "Status codes counted as successful: 2XX, 400, 404, 410." A target's 404 costs credits. When credits run out, requests stop until you upgrade or buy more, per the pricing FAQ. Annual billing takes two months off and is set up by hand through support.

Agent support

Scrape.do's documentation lists n8n and Zapier under integrations and no MCP server. A community package wraps its API, but Scrape.do does not publish or maintain one. Six of the seven alternatives on this page publish their own.

How we tested these web scraping APIs

We ran 99 live sites, five attempts each, against 15 providers, for 495 requests per provider. 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.

The harness has no Scrape.do adapter. Every Scrape.do figure here comes from its own pricing page and docs.

Some adapters changed after the run. On September 6, 2026 a harness commit moved several providers to a stronger anti-bot setting, and the August run predates it. On this page that covers Scrapfly, Firecrawl and Zyte, whose adapters changed after these figures were collected and have not been rerun for this page. We do not claim that every provider ran in its strongest anti-bot mode. The String, Context.dev, Bright Data and Oxylabs adapters have not changed since the run.

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. This article uses that corrected run.

Overall success rate across all 495 requests per provider. Web Data Frontier Benchmark · 99 targets · 495 requests per provider · August 11, 2026. Live leaderboard

String vs Scrape.do: 97.0% measured, against a price card that is lower

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. The first 5,000 requests are free with no card, blocked requests are not billed, and unused credits roll over. Scrape.do's rate card is lower at every request type: about $0.08 against $0.20 for a plain page, and $1.98 against $4.00 for a residential page with a browser.

Benchmark success. 97.0%, or 480 of 495, first of fifteen. String returned all five attempts on 92 sites, partial content on 5, and nothing on 2 (temu.com and skyscanner.net). Scrape.do: not tested.

Latency. String's latency score is 9.98 seconds. On the 19 sites all seven alternatives on this page returned in full, String's median was 2.00 seconds, second to Zyte's 1.70.

Strengths. Coverage, measured in public. String returned all five attempts on 7 of the 8 sites on Scrape.do's surcharge list and four of five on the eighth, mouser.com. It passed 100% on the Cloudflare, Kasada and Fastly sites and 97.9% on DataDome. Every vertical but travel came in at 91% or higher.

Weaknesses. Price on the rate card. A team that already gets its pages from Scrape.do pays less there than on String at every request type. String is a narrower product than Scrape.do's ready-made Amazon and Google scrapers, and it has no SOC 2 report.

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.mouser.com/"}'

Scrapfly vs Scrape.do: two credit ladders, one of them measured

Pricing. Pro is $100 a month for 1,000,000 credits. A datacenter scrape is 1 credit and a residential proxy is 25, per its billing docs, so plain and residential pages cost $0.10 and $2.50 per 1,000. The pricing page lists rendering or the Unblocker at 5 credits, while the Unblocker page says some target fees "are not publicly documented." Failed requests are not charged, with exceptions for several 4xx codes. Credits do not roll over. Scrape.do's card is lower: $0.79 against $2.50 for a residential page.

Benchmark success. 82.0%, or 406 of 495, second of fifteen. It returned nothing on 8 sites, the fewest after String.

Latency. 18.35 seconds. On the 19 sites all seven alternatives returned in full, Scrapfly's median was 6.70 seconds, sixth of seven.

Strengths. Scrapfly is the only one of the 15 tested APIs that returned all five attempts on all eight surcharge-list sites, including mouser.com, where the field averaged 18.7%. It passed 100% on real estate and developer sites and 96.7% on review and local sites. Scrapfly runs an MCP server.

Weaknesses. Speed, and a pricing model with more parts than Scrape.do's. Scrapfly returned nothing on autotrader.com, zara.com, airbnb.com, booking.com and axs.com, and passed 55.0% on ticketing. The harness changed Scrapfly's adapter to pin the residential pool after the August run and has not rerun it for this page.

Context.dev vs Scrape.do: one flat credit, with protection included

Pricing. Context.dev bills one credit per page, and per its pricing page the best proxies, JavaScript rendering and anti-bot bypass "are all included in that credit." Developer costs $25 for 10,000 credits and Pro costs $149 for 200,000, or $0.745 per 1,000. No plan sits near $100: on Developer, $100 with overage buys 60,000 pages, about $1.67 per 1,000. Failed and blocked requests are free, but per its credit docs "a usable partial response is billable" and a processed 404 on a priced API also costs credits. Against Scrape.do's $1.98 for a residential page with a browser, Context.dev's Pro rate is lower on protected pages and higher on plain ones.

Benchmark success. 79.2%, or 392 of 495, third of fifteen. It returned all five attempts on 73 sites, some attempts on 10, and nothing on 16.

Latency. 12.68 seconds. On the 19 sites all seven alternatives returned in full, Context.dev's median was 4.30 seconds.

Strengths. A predictable bill: the price of a page does not change with the site's protection. It passed 100% on the eight social networks, the four ticketing sites and the five job boards, and 90.7% on Cloudflare. It returned every attempt on linkedin.com and g2.com, the two most expensive surcharge-list sites in our set. Context.dev runs a hosted MCP server, and its trust center lists SOC 2 Type II.

Weaknesses. Review and real estate sites. It passed 50.0% on review and local sites and returned nothing on yelp.com, trustpilot.com, idealista.com and google.com. It passed 33.3% on the three Kasada sites. Our best web scraping tools page ranks it against the other hosted APIs.

Firecrawl vs Scrape.do: crawl-to-content, and fast

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. Per its billing docs, a scrape that returns no document is free, while a page that comes back with an error status such as 403 or 404 costs a credit. Scrape.do also bills a target's 404, so the two share that rule. Enhanced proxies cost the same credit as a basic request. Credits roll over only on Scale and Enterprise.

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

Latency. 9.21 seconds, the best latency score in the run. On the 19 sites all seven alternatives returned in full, Firecrawl's median was 3.00 seconds, third of seven.

Strengths. Speed, with crawl and extract next to scrape. It passed 100% on Cloudflare and 89.5% on DataDome. It has an open-source core and an MCP server.

Weaknesses. Social networks. Firecrawl returned nothing on reddit.com, linkedin.com, instagram.com, facebook.com, tiktok.com and pinterest.com, and it returned all five attempts on only 3 of the 8 surcharge-list sites. Its adapter changed after the August run. Our Firecrawl alternatives page covers its other weak spots.

Bright Data vs Scrape.do: pay-as-you-go, and the slowest responses

Pricing. No plan near $100. Web Unlocker pay as you go costs $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests, and Scale costs $499 a month for 383,000 requests. Bright Data bills successes only, with two caveats in its feature docs: premium domains bill at a higher rate shown only in the dashboard, and a zone with custom headers bills 100% of requests. The free tier is 5,000 requests a month. Scrape.do publishes its per-domain prices; Bright Data does not.

Benchmark success. 78.0%, or 386 of 495, fifth of fifteen. It returned partial content on 31 sites, the most of any provider.

Latency. 26.14 seconds, the slowest latency score in the run. On the 19 sites all seven alternatives returned in full, Bright Data's median was 11.30 seconds, the slowest of the seven.

Strengths. No commitment: pay as you go with no plan to size. It passed 93.3% against AWS WAF and Kasada and 94.3% on real estate. On the surcharge list it returned every attempt on idealista.com, google.com and linkedin.com. Bright Data runs an MCP server.

Weaknesses. Speed, an unpublished rate on premium domains, and a higher base price than Scrape.do's. It returned nothing on lowes.com, target.com, ticketmaster.com and reuters.com, and passed 45.0% on ticketing. Our Bright Data alternatives page covers it in detail.

Oxylabs vs Scrape.do: the best PerimeterX result, on a bandwidth bill

Pricing. The benchmark used Oxylabs Web Unblocker, which bills by bandwidth: Micro is $75 a month for 8 GB at $9.40 per GB, and Starter is $325 for 38 GB. The cost per page depends on page size. Oxylabs also sells a Web Scraper API priced per result, $99 a month for up to 220,000 results at $1.10 per 1,000 without JavaScript and $1.30 with it. Its billing docs count every 2xx and 4xx response as billable, even when "the result doesn't contain expected information." The benchmark did not test the Web Scraper API.

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

Latency. 14.67 seconds. On the 19 sites all seven alternatives returned in full, Oxylabs' median was 4.30 seconds.

Strengths. 97.8% against PerimeterX, the best result in the run. It passed 93.3% against Kasada, 96.0% on grocery and 95.6% on news and finance. Oxylabs publishes an MCP server.

Weaknesses. Ticketing, at 25.0%, and a bandwidth bill that is hard to set in advance. It returned nothing on 18 sites, including mouser.com, amazon.com, booking.com and ticketmaster.com. The harness runs one general adapter per provider, and Oxylabs sells a dedicated Amazon endpoint that the run did not test. Our Oxylabs alternatives page compares it from the other side.

Zyte vs Scrape.do: the shortest responses, on a tier Zyte sets

Pricing. Zyte prices each site in five tiers. At the $100 monthly commitment, an HTTP response costs $0.10 to $0.95 per 1,000 and a browser response $0.75 to $12.00. Zyte assigns the tier automatically and reviews it quarterly with two weeks' notice. Unused commitment is not refunded. Bans and rate limits are free, but a target's 404 counts as a successful, billed response, as on Scrape.do. New accounts get a $5 credit for a 30-day trial. Both vendors price by how hard the site is; Scrape.do lets you pick the mode, and Zyte picks the tier.

Benchmark success. 72.7%, or 360 of 495, seventh of fifteen.

Latency. 14.85 seconds. On the 19 sites all seven alternatives returned in full, Zyte's median was 1.70 seconds, the shortest of the seven.

Strengths. Short responses on the sites it returns. Zyte passed 100% against Kasada and 86.7% against PerimeterX, and 93.3% on news and finance. At its lowest HTTP tier, $0.10 per 1,000 is close to Scrape.do's $0.08.

Weaknesses. You cannot choose your rate, and the browser tier reaches $12.00 per 1,000. Zyte returned all five attempts on only 2 of the 8 surcharge-list sites and nothing on 4 of them: mouser.com, lowes.com, google.com and linkedin.com. It passed 36.7% against AWS WAF. There is no Zyte-hosted MCP server; Zyte publishes a guide to building your own. Its adapter changed after the August run. Our Zyte alternatives page compares it from the other side.

The anti-bot cut

Success rates by protection vendor, from the August 11 run. Site counts are in the column headers. Scrape.do is not in the table because it was not tested.

Provider DataDome (19) Akamai (20) Cloudflare (15) PerimeterX (9) AWS WAF (6) Kasada (3) Fastly (1) No named vendor (26)
String 97.9 98.0 100 88.9 96.7 100 100 96.2
Scrapfly 81.1 71.0 92.0 82.2 83.3 80.0 80.0 85.4
Context.dev 74.7 83.0 90.7 73.3 66.7 33.3 100 82.3
Firecrawl 89.5 72.0 100 84.4 76.7 93.3 100 59.2
Bright Data 82.1 60.0 85.3 68.9 93.3 93.3 100 81.5
Oxylabs 76.8 67.0 77.3 97.8 50.0 93.3 0 83.8
Zyte 81.1 58.0 61.3 86.7 36.7 100 100 83.8

Akamai is the column that separates the alternatives most. String passed 98.0% and Context.dev 83.0%, while Zyte, Bright Data, Oxylabs, Scrapfly and Firecrawl sat between 58.0% and 72.0%. Scrape.do's docs name Cloudflare, PerimeterX, DataDome and Akamai as the systems it is built to get past. No public data shows its result on any of them.

Success rate by anti-bot vendor. Web Data Frontier Benchmark · 99 targets · 495 requests per provider · August 11, 2026. Live leaderboard

Which sites does Scrape.do charge more for?

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

Scrape.do's request cost table names the domains where it applies residential proxies, a browser or a custom profile by default, and bills at that rate. Eight of those domains are among our 99 benchmark sites.

The 15 averaged 52.5% on the eight sites against 64.8% on the other 91. The list points in the right direction: these sites are harder than the average site. Only Scrapfly returned all five attempts on all eight. String returned all eight at some rate and seven at five of five.

Site Scrape.do credits Scrape.do on Pro, per 1,000 Field average String Scrapfly Context.dev Firecrawl Bright Data Oxylabs Zyte
mouser.com 10 $0.79 18.7% 4/5 5/5 1/5 1/5 2/5 0/5 0/5
idealista.com 10 $0.79 37.3% 5/5 5/5 0/5 0/5 5/5 2/5 4/5
lowes.com 10 $0.79 49.3% 5/5 5/5 5/5 2/5 0/5 5/5 0/5
google.com 10 $0.79 53.3% 5/5 5/5 0/5 3/5 5/5 5/5 0/5
g2.com 25 $1.98 58.7% 5/5 5/5 5/5 5/5 5/5 4/5 3/5
capterra.com 10 $0.79 58.7% 5/5 5/5 5/5 5/5 4/5 5/5 5/5
linkedin.com 30 $2.38 65.3% 5/5 5/5 5/5 0/5 5/5 5/5 0/5
leboncoin.fr 10 $0.79 78.7% 5/5 5/5 5/5 5/5 5/5 5/5 5/5
Sites at 5/5 7 8 5 3 5 5 2

Two things follow for a buyer.

First, the list is a price map, not a difficulty map. Only three of the eight (mouser.com, idealista.com and lowes.com) are among the 25 hardest sites in our run. The other 22 of the 25 hardest, such as temu.com, safeway.com, trustpilot.com and bestbuy.com, are not on the list. On those sites Scrape.do bills whatever mode you request, and a protected page usually needs residential proxies with the browser, 25 credits. The list tells you where Scrape.do sets the price for you, not where your bill will be high.

Second, the price does not follow the difficulty. linkedin.com costs 30 credits on Scrape.do and ranks 48th hardest of 99 in our run. mouser.com costs 10 and ranks second hardest, after temu.com. If your list holds sites like mouser.com, test Scrape.do on them first. The eight sites above are a fair start, because each has seven measured results beside it.

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. Scrape.do, Scrapfly, Context.dev and Firecrawl sell credits. String and Bright Data price per 1,000 requests. Zyte prices per response by a tier it assigns. Oxylabs Web Unblocker bills by the gigabyte.
  2. A credit is not always a page. One Context.dev or Firecrawl credit is one page, with protection included. One Scrape.do credit is a datacenter request, and a residential page with a browser is 25. Scrapfly's residential page is also 25.
  3. Failure billing differs. String and Bright Data bill only successes. Scrape.do, Zyte and Context.dev bill a target's 404, Firecrawl bills a 403 or 404 that returns a document, Scrapfly bills several 4xx codes, and Oxylabs bills any 2xx or 4xx. Context.dev also bills a usable partial response.
  4. The rate depends on the target, and sometimes the vendor decides. Scrape.do applies a per-domain profile on 26 listed sites. Zyte sets the tier. Scrapfly's Unblocker has undocumented per-target fees. Bright Data's premium domains carry a dashboard-only rate.
  5. Annual prices pose as monthly. Firecrawl's page shows $83 by default against $99 billed monthly. Scrape.do and Context.dev take two months off for annual billing.
  6. Plan gaps change the unit price. Context.dev has no plan between $25 and $149. Scrape.do jumps from $29 to $99 to $249, so a team that outgrows Pro pays for 3,500,000 credits.
  7. Rollover is worth real money and it is rarely on the pricing card. String's credits roll over. Scrapfly's and Firecrawl's below Scale do not, and neither does Zyte's commitment. Scrape.do's pricing page says requests stop at the monthly limit and does not mention rollover.

What $100 a month buys

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

  • Scrape.do, $99: about $0.08 datacenter, $0.40 with rendering, $0.79 residential, $1.98 residential with rendering; listed domains from $0.79 to $15.84. Successes billed, including a target's 400, 404 or 410. Not tested.
  • 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 on the pricing page, $2.50 residential. Failures free with 4xx exceptions, no rollover.
  • Context.dev: no plan near $100. Developer, $25, plus overage: 60,000 pages for $100, about $1.67. Pro, $149: $0.745. Protection included, failures free, partial responses and processed 404s billed.
  • Firecrawl, $99: $0.99 flat, with error pages that return a document billed.
  • Bright Data: no plan near $100. Pay as you go at $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests, premium domains extra.
  • Oxylabs: Web Unblocker Micro, $75, at $9.40 per GB; Web Scraper API Starter, $99, at $1.10 per 1,000 results.
  • Zyte, $100 commitment: $0.10 to $0.95 HTTP, $0.75 to $12.00 browser, tier assigned by Zyte.

Read both directions. On the rate card, Scrape.do is cheaper than String at every request type: $0.08 against $0.20 for a plain page, and $1.98 against $4.00 for a residential page with a browser. Both bill only what they count as a success, so neither rate needs dividing by a failure rate. What the rate card cannot tell you is how many of your pages come back. String's 97.0% is measured on a public list of 99 sites. Scrape.do has no public measurement to compare it with.

Which Scrape.do alternative should you pick?

  • Your list is protected and the pages have to come back. String. 97.0% on 99 sites, 92 returned in full, and 7 of the 8 surcharge-list sites at five of five.
  • You want several APIs on one key and a credit model like Scrape.do's. Scrapfly, second in the run at 82.0% and the only tested API with all eight surcharge-list sites in full, if latency is not the constraint.
  • You want one price per page, whatever the protection. Context.dev at $0.745 per 1,000 on Pro, strong on social networks, job boards and ticketing.
  • You need pages back fast. Firecrawl, with the best latency score in the run, if error-page billing works for you.
  • You want pay-as-you-go with no plan to size. Bright Data at $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests, if speed is not the constraint.
  • Your list is heavy on PerimeterX. Oxylabs, at 97.8% on PerimeterX, if bandwidth billing works for your budget.
  • You want the shortest responses and accept an assigned price. Zyte, with a 1.70-second median on the sites all seven returned.
  • Stay on Scrape.do if your sites already come back reliably, if a low credit price decides, or if you use its ready-made Amazon, Google or Walmart scrapers. Its Amazon scraper returns structured JSON at 1 credit a request.

FAQ

What are the best Scrape.do alternatives?

String, Scrapfly, Context.dev, Firecrawl, Bright Data, Oxylabs and Zyte. On the August 11, 2026 benchmark String passed 97.0% of 495 requests, the highest of 15 web scraping APIs, and Scrapfly passed 82.0%. The other five passed between 72.7% and 79.2%. Scrape.do was not in the run, so it has no measured rate to compare.

Which scraping service works on Cloudflare-protected websites?

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%. Bright Data passed 85.3%, Oxylabs 77.3% and Zyte 61.3%. Scrape.do says it handles Cloudflare, and no public benchmark measures it.

What hidden costs come with cheap scraping APIs?

Mostly per-site surcharges and billed errors. Scrape.do charges 10 to 30 credits on eight of our 99 benchmark sites, against 1 for a plain request, and the 15 tested APIs averaged 52.5% on those eight against 64.8% on the rest. It also bills a target's 400, 404 or 410. Zyte bills a target's 404, Firecrawl bills error pages that return a document, and Bright Data prices premium domains in the dashboard only.

What is the cheapest way to scrape at scale?

On the rate card, Scrape.do's Pro plan is among the cheapest: about $0.08 per 1,000 plain pages and $1.98 per 1,000 residential pages with rendering. Zyte's lowest HTTP tier is $0.10 and Scrapfly's datacenter rate $0.10. String costs $0.20 plain and $4.00 for a browser on a premium proxy, so String is not cheaper per request. The cheapest rate only matters on pages that return, so test your own list.

Best web scraping API for a startup on a budget?

String's first 5,000 requests are free with no card. Scrape.do's free plan gives 1,000 successful credits a month with every feature on. Bright Data gives 5,000 free requests a month, Firecrawl 1,000 credits a month, and Context.dev 1,000 credits a month to work emails. Zyte gives a $5 credit for a 30-day trial.

Which Scrape.do alternatives have MCP servers?

Six of the seven. String, Scrapfly, Context.dev, Firecrawl, Bright Data and Oxylabs publish MCP servers. Zyte has no hosted MCP server and publishes a guide to building one. Scrape.do's documentation lists n8n and Zapier integrations and no MCP server of its own.

When is Scrape.do still the better choice?

When its pages already come back and price decides. Its rate card is lower than String's at every request type, its pricing page says every plan gets every feature, and its ready-made scrapers return Amazon and Google data as structured JSON. Check the Scrape.do-Request-Cost header on your own targets, because listed domains cost up to 200 credits a request.

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 full results are published per provider and per target. The harness has no Scrape.do adapter; adding one is a pull request, and we publish corrections.

Sources

Checked September 18, 2026 (Scrape.do); September 17, 2026 (Context.dev); September 16, 2026 (Oxylabs); September 14, 2026 (String, Scrapfly, Firecrawl, Bright Data, Zyte). 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/commit/edba7b7
  6. https://github.com/usestring/web-data-frontier-benchmark/pull/6

Scrape.do

  1. https://scrape.do/pricing/
  2. https://scrape.do/documentation/
  3. https://scrape.do/documentation/request-costs/
  4. https://scrape.do/documentation/integrations/
  5. https://scrape.do/documentation/amazon-scraper-api/
  6. https://mcpservers.org/servers/dztabel-happy/scrape-do-mcp

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/billing
  3. https://scrapfly.io/docs/scrape-api/anti-scraping-protection
  4. https://scrapfly.io/docs/mcp/getting-started

Context.dev

  1. https://www.context.dev/pricing
  2. https://docs.context.dev/guides/free-credits
  3. https://docs.context.dev/install-mcp
  4. https://trust.context.dev

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://oxylabs.io/products/scraper-api/web/pricing
  3. https://developers.oxylabs.io/products/web-scraper-api/usage-and-billing/billing-information
  4. https://github.com/oxylabs/oxylabs-mcp

Zyte

  1. https://www.zyte.com/pricing/
  2. https://docs.zyte.com/zyte-api/pricing.html
  3. https://docs.zyte.com/zyte-api/usage/errors.html
  4. https://www.zyte.com/blog/build-your-own-mcp-server/
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