Best Scrape.do Alternatives in 2026: 8 Tools Compared

Bruce Magness, Chief of Staff, String · Updated October 27, 2026

Last updated: October 27, 2026. Benchmark figures come from the September 16, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark. Pricing was checked against each vendor's published pages on October 27, 2026.

What is the best Scrape.do alternative?

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 100-site benchmark, the highest of 16 providers. Scrapfly suits teams who want several APIs on one key. 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 news, finance and grocery. 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 September 16 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 485 of 500, the highest of the 16 web scraping APIs tested. It returned all five attempts on 93 of 100 sites. Blocked requests are free and the first 20,000 standard fetches need no card.
The surcharge list: Scrape.do's own per-domain price table names 8 of our 100 benchmark sites, at 10 to 30 credits a request. The 16 tested APIs averaged 53.4% on those 8 against 67.7% on the other 92. No tested API returned every attempt on all 8; String did 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. All 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%	7.06s	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	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	86.2%	19.79s	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	72.0%	16.32s	Pro, $90: 100,000 credits, or $0.90 per 1,000 pages	22 sites returned nothing in the September run
Firecrawl	Crawl-to-content work and fast responses	80.2%	9.11s	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	74.6%	15.62s	No plan near $100. Pay as you go: $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests; Scale is $499	Premium domains bill at a rate the pricing page does not list
Oxylabs	News, finance and grocery lists	69.0%	15.86s	Basic, $100: Web Unblocker at $6.00 per GB, up to 16 GB, or the /scrape endpoint at $0.90 per 1,000 results without JavaScript	The benchmarked product bills by bandwidth, so the cost per page depends on page size
Zyte	Short responses on a vendor-set price tier	68.0%	17.46s	$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 September 16, 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. 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 16 providers in our September run. Its pricing page shows "99.98% Success rate" and gives no method, no site list and no date. On our 100 sites the 16 tested APIs ranged from 97.0% to 36.4%, 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, and the tested APIs did worse on them than on the rest, 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. All seven alternatives on this page publish their own.

How we tested these web scraping APIs

We ran 100 live sites, five attempts each, against 16 providers, for 500 requests per provider and 8,000 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.

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

Before the September run, the harness moved five adapters to the settings their vendors document for bot-protected pages. On this page that covers Scrapfly, whose adapter now pins its residential pool. The String, Context.dev, Firecrawl, Bright Data, Oxylabs and Zyte adapters are unchanged from the August run. We do not claim that every provider ran in its strongest anti-bot mode.

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 September run keeps that corrected configuration.

Overall success rate across all 500 requests per provider. Web Data Frontier Benchmark · 100 targets · 500 requests per provider · September 16, 2026. Current 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 $99 a month 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. The first 20,000 standard fetches 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 $0.16 for a plain page, and $1.98 for a residential page with a browser against $3.25 for a premium-proxy page with a browser.

Benchmark success. 97.0%, or 485 of 500, first of sixteen. String returned all five attempts on 93 sites, partial content on 5, and nothing on 2 (temu.com and idealista.com). Scrape.do: not tested.

Latency. String's latency score is 7.06 seconds, first of sixteen. On the 17 sites all seven alternatives on this page returned in full, String's median was 1.50 seconds, second to Zyte's 1.30.

Strengths. Coverage, measured in public. String returned all five attempts on 7 of the 8 sites on Scrape.do's surcharge list. It passed 100% on the Cloudflare, PerimeterX, AWS WAF and Fastly sites and 92.6% on DataDome. Every vertical but real estate came in at 92% 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 returned nothing on idealista.com, one of the surcharge-list sites. 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, 404 among them. Credits do not roll over. Scrape.do's card is lower: $0.79 against $2.50 for a residential page.

Benchmark success. 86.2%, or 431 of 500, second of sixteen. It returned nothing on 5 sites, the fewest after String.

Latency. 19.79 seconds, eleventh of sixteen. On the 17 sites all seven alternatives returned in full, Scrapfly's median was 6.20 seconds, the slowest of the seven.

Strengths. Scrapfly returned all five attempts on 6 of the 8 surcharge-list sites and four of five on mouser.com, the hardest of them. It passed 100% on real estate, social and developer sites and 93.3% 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 bestbuy.com, ralphlauren.com, zara.com and google.com, and passed 10.0% on the two search engines.

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

Pricing. Context.dev bills one credit per page, and per its pricing page JavaScript rendering, anti-bot bypass and proxies are included in the base scrape price. Developer costs $20 for 10,000 credits and Pro costs $90 for 100,000, or $0.90 per 1,000, with Pro overage at $2.00 per 1,000 credits. Per its credit docs, successful and partial results are charged, a request where every output fails is free, and a processed 404 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. 72.0%, or 360 of 500, eighth of sixteen. It returned all five attempts on 67 sites, some attempts on 11, and nothing on 22.

Latency. 16.32 seconds. On the 17 sites all seven alternatives returned in full, Context.dev's median was 4.70 seconds.

Strengths. A predictable bill: the price of a page does not change with the site's protection. It passed 100% on the five job boards, the five grocery sites and the two gaming sites, and 96.0% on Cloudflare, second of sixteen. It returned every attempt on linkedin.com, the most expensive surcharge-list site in our set. Context.dev runs a hosted MCP server, and its trust center lists SOC 2 Type II.

Weaknesses. Review sites and DataDome. It passed 40.0% on review and local sites, returned nothing on yelp.com, trustpilot.com, g2.com and idealista.com, and passed 43.2% against DataDome. 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. Credits roll over only on Scale and Enterprise.

Benchmark success. 80.2%, or 401 of 500, fourth of sixteen.

Latency. 9.11 seconds, second of sixteen behind String. On the 17 sites all seven alternatives returned in full, Firecrawl's median was 4.60 seconds, fifth of seven.

Strengths. Speed, with crawl and extract next to scrape. It passed 93.3% on Cloudflare, PerimeterX and Kasada. 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 passed 25.0% across the eight social sites. It returned all five attempts on 5 of the 8 surcharge-list sites. Our Firecrawl alternatives page covers its other weak spots.

Bright Data vs Scrape.do: pay-as-you-go, and quick on the pages it returns

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 that appears in the zone's estimated-cost panel and not on the pricing page, and a zone with custom headers or cookies enabled bills 100% of requests, successful and failed. The free tier is 5,000 requests a month. Scrape.do publishes its per-domain prices; Bright Data does not.

Benchmark success. 74.6%, or 373 of 500, sixth of sixteen. It returned partial content on 21 sites.

Latency. 15.62 seconds, fourth of sixteen. On the 17 sites all seven alternatives returned in full, Bright Data's median was 2.40 seconds, third of seven.

Strengths. No commitment: pay as you go with no plan to size. It passed 100% on PerimeterX and on the eight social networks, and 86.7% against AWS WAF. On the surcharge list it returned every attempt on linkedin.com and leboncoin.fr. Bright Data runs an MCP server.

Weaknesses. An unlisted rate on premium domains, and a higher base price than Scrape.do's. It returned nothing on 16 sites, including g2.com, idealista.com, ticketmaster.com and reuters.com, and passed 25.0% on ticketing and 47.4% against DataDome. Our Bright Data alternatives page covers it in detail.

Oxylabs vs Scrape.do: news and grocery, on a bandwidth bill

Pricing. The benchmark used Oxylabs Web Unblocker, which bills by bandwidth under one subscription that covers every Oxylabs product: Starter is $30 a month at $7.20 per GB, up to 4 GB, and Basic is $100 at $6.00 per GB, up to 16 GB. The cost per page depends on page size. Oxylabs also sells a Web API /scrape endpoint priced per result: on Basic, other sites cost $0.90 per 1,000 results without JavaScript and $1.40 with it. Its billing docs for the per-result scraper count every 2xx and 4xx response as billable, even when "the result doesn't contain expected information." The benchmark did not test the per-result API.

Benchmark success. 69.0%, or 345 of 500, ninth of sixteen.

Latency. 15.86 seconds, fifth of sixteen. On the 17 sites all seven alternatives returned in full, Oxylabs' median was 4.10 seconds.

Strengths. 100% on grocery and 95.6% on news and finance, plus 86.7% against PerimeterX and Kasada. It returned all five attempts on 6 of the 8 surcharge-list sites. Oxylabs publishes an MCP server.

Weaknesses. Ticketing, where it returned nothing on all four sites, and a bandwidth bill that is hard to set in advance. It returned nothing on 24 sites, including mouser.com, g2.com, amazon.com and booking.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. 68.0%, or 340 of 500, eleventh of sixteen.

Latency. 17.46 seconds, seventh of sixteen. On the 17 sites all seven alternatives returned in full, Zyte's median was 1.30 seconds, the shortest of the seven.

Strengths. Short responses on the sites it returns. Zyte passed 100% against Kasada and 88.9% against PerimeterX, and 88.9% on news and finance. At its lowest HTTP tier, $0.10 per 1,000 is close to Scrape.do's $0.08. Zyte runs a remote MCP server.

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 5 of them: mouser.com, idealista.com, g2.com, lowes.com and linkedin.com. It passed 30.0% against AWS WAF. Our Zyte alternatives page compares it from the other side.

The anti-bot cut

Success rates by protection vendor, from the September 16 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 (27)
String	92.6	98.0	100	100	100	93.3	100	96.3
Scrapfly	92.6	81.0	90.7	84.4	96.7	93.3	20.0	83.0
Context.dev	43.2	70.0	96.0	66.7	66.7	66.7	100	83.0
Firecrawl	77.9	84.0	93.3	93.3	83.3	93.3	100	64.4
Bright Data	47.4	79.0	88.0	100	86.7	66.7	80.0	72.6
Oxylabs	65.3	67.0	57.3	86.7	33.3	86.7	0	82.2
Zyte	50.5	64.0	58.7	88.9	30.0	100	100	85.2

DataDome is the column that separates the alternatives most. String and Scrapfly passed 92.6% and Firecrawl 77.9%, while Oxylabs passed 65.3% and Zyte, Bright Data and Context.dev sat between 43.2% and 50.5%. 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 · 100 targets · 500 requests per provider · September 16, 2026. Current 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 100 benchmark sites.

The 16 tested APIs averaged 53.4% on the eight sites against 67.7% on the other 92. The list points in the right direction: these sites are harder than the average site. No tested API returned all five attempts on all eight. String returned seven at five of five and nothing on idealista.com; Scrapfly and Oxylabs returned six.

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	25.0%	5/5	4/5	0/5	5/5	2/5	0/5	0/5
idealista.com	10	$0.79	31.3%	0/5	5/5	0/5	4/5	0/5	5/5	0/5
g2.com	25	$1.98	37.5%	5/5	5/5	0/5	5/5	0/5	0/5	0/5
google.com	10	$0.79	51.3%	5/5	0/5	1/5	4/5	3/5	5/5	3/5
lowes.com	10	$0.79	61.3%	5/5	5/5	4/5	5/5	3/5	5/5	0/5
capterra.com	10	$0.79	70.0%	5/5	5/5	5/5	5/5	2/5	5/5	5/5
linkedin.com	30	$2.38	73.8%	5/5	5/5	5/5	0/5	5/5	5/5	0/5
leboncoin.fr	10	$0.79	77.5%	5/5	5/5	5/5	5/5	5/5	5/5	5/5
Sites at 5/5				7	6	3	5	2	6	2

Two things follow for a buyer.

First, the list is a price map, not a difficulty map. Only four of the eight (mouser.com, idealista.com, g2.com and google.com) are among the 25 hardest sites in our run. The other 21 of the 25 hardest, such as temu.com, allegro.pl, yelp.com and realtor.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 ties for 58th hardest of 100 in our run. mouser.com costs 10 and ties with allegro.pl for 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.

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.
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.
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 on its per-result scraper. Context.dev also bills a partial result.
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-domain rate is missing from its pricing page.
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.
Plan gaps change the unit price. Oxylabs jumps from $30 to $100 to $500. Scrape.do jumps from $29 to $99 to $249, so a team that outgrows Pro pays for 3,500,000 credits.
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, $99: $0.16 plain fetch, $0.90 premium fetch, $0.80 browser, $3.25 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, $90: $0.90 flat for 100,000 pages. Protection included, failures free, partial results 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, $100: Web Unblocker at $6.00 per GB, up to 16 GB; the /scrape endpoint at $0.90 per 1,000 results without JavaScript and $1.40 with it.
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 $0.16 for a plain page, and $1.98 for a residential page with a browser against $3.25 for a premium-proxy 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 100 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 100 sites, 93 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 86.2% with the fewest empty sites after String, if latency is not the constraint.
You want one price per page, whatever the protection. Context.dev at $0.90 per 1,000 on Pro, strong on job boards, grocery and Cloudflare.
You need pages back fast. Firecrawl, with the second-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 an unlisted premium-domain rate works for you.
Your list is heavy on news, finance or grocery. Oxylabs, at 95.6% on news and finance, if bandwidth billing works for your budget.
You want the shortest responses and accept an assigned price. Zyte, with a 1.30-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.

Switching from Scrape.do to String

What carries over. A GET to api.scrape.do with token and url becomes a POST to String's /v1/fetch with the key in a header. Keep the URL list and the code that reads HTML. output=markdown maps to "format": "markdown", render=true to "executeJS": true when you want to force a browser, geoCode to countryCode, and playWithBrowser to String's browser actions. super=true has no String equivalent, because String picks the proxy class itself.

What you rebuild. The Amazon, Google, Walmart, and other structured scrapers that return parsed JSON. On String you parse the page or describe the fields in jsonSchema. The async API with webhooks, Proxy Mode, sticky sessions, and postal-code targeting also stay behind. String's /search endpoint covers live Google results.

Integrations to reconnect. Scrape.do lists n8n and Zapier integrations and a Scrapy wrapper, and its docs list no official MCP server, so String's adds one. 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 Scrape.do charges more for, listed above; String returned 7 of those 8 on every attempt. Then add your own URLs that fail or cost the most today. Compare pages returned and cost per usable page, and move only the targets that improve. Leave custom headers off for the test: String does not bill a blocked request unless that request sent custom headers. The first 20,000 String standard fetches are free with no card. The ranking of 16 web scraping APIs puts every tested API side by side.

FAQ

What are the best Scrape.do alternatives?

String, Scrapfly, Context.dev, Firecrawl, Bright Data, Oxylabs and Zyte. On the September 16, 2026 benchmark String passed 97.0% of 500 requests, the highest of 16 web scraping APIs, and Scrapfly passed 86.2%. The other five passed between 68.0% and 80.2%. 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 September 16 run, String passed 100% of requests, Context.dev 96.0%, Firecrawl 93.3% and Scrapfly 90.7%. Bright Data passed 88.0%, Zyte 58.7% and Oxylabs 57.3%. 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 100 benchmark sites, against 1 for a plain request, and those eight are harder than the rest of the suite for the APIs we tested. 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 leaves its premium-domain rate off its pricing page.

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 $0.16 plain and $3.25 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 20,000 standard fetches 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. Zyte gives a $5 credit for a 30-day trial, and Oxylabs a $5 welcome credit.

Which Scrape.do alternatives have MCP servers?

All seven. String, Scrapfly, Context.dev, Firecrawl, Bright Data and Oxylabs publish MCP servers, and Zyte runs a remote MCP server. 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 100 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

Pricing checked October 27, 2026 for every vendor on this page. Benchmark figures: September 16, 2026 run, official_results/benchmark-2026-09-16T01-03-47-074Z.json in the harness repository.

Benchmark data

Scrape.do

String

Scrapfly

Context.dev

Firecrawl

Bright Data

Oxylabs

Zyte

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