Best ScraperAPI Alternatives in 2026: 6 Tools Compared

String vs ScraperAPI: 98.6% vs 76.4%, with automatic routing and no bill for a block

Source: October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark; String prices from usestring.ai/pricing, as of October 2026.

Pricing. String bills usage, and each plan's fee is usage credit. The first 20,000 standard fetches are free. Starter costs $19 a month (as of October 2026) and includes $19 of usage; Growth costs $99 (as of October 2026) and includes $99.

Rates are based on the path String automatically selects for the request: $0.16 per 1,000 plain fetches and $0.90 per 1,000 premium fetches on Growth, or $0.80 and $3.25 for browser paths. Unused credit rolls over. Blocked requests are never billed.

There is no premium flag to remember and no need to know which anti-bot system protects the target. You send the URL. String handles the path.

Benchmark success. String returned content on 98.6% of requests: 493 of 500, first among all 17 providers. It cleared 95 of 100 targets on all five attempts, returned partial results on five and was shut out on none.

Latency. String scored 4.24 seconds, first among all 17 providers, against ScraperAPI's 15.19 seconds, sixth.

Strengths. Protected pages. String returned every attempt on all 9 of ScraperAPI's shutouts. Across the eight social platforms tested, String passed 40 of 40 requests. ScraperAPI passed 24 of 40, returning nothing on Instagram, Facebook or X while clearing Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest on every attempt and TikTok on four of five.

String also has one four-row rate card with no domain multipliers. A LinkedIn page and a blog post use the same pricing logic. ScraperAPI charges 30 credits for LinkedIn.

Weaknesses. No crawl endpoint that walks a domain and returns every page, no change monitoring, no document parsing, no self-hosted build. ScraperAPI returned Yellow Pages, MarketWatch and Barron's on all five attempts where String returned four, and Kroger on all five where String returned two. String has an MCP server in the official registry as ai.usestring/web-access, with fetch, search and sitemap tools.

Try it against your own list before you believe any of this:

curl https://request.usestring.ai/v1/fetch \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $STRING_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://www.example.com/the-page-that-blocks-you", "format": "markdown"}'

Leave out format and the page comes back in a JSON envelope. The first 20,000 standard fetches are free, and a block costs nothing.

Scrapfly vs ScraperAPI: 86.8% and a $100 plan that includes anti-bot

Source: October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark; Scrapfly prices from its pricing page, checked November 11, 2026.

Pricing. Scrapfly Pro is $100 a month for 1,000,000 credits, which is $0.10 per 1,000 credits. An HTTP scrape on a datacenter IP is 1 credit. Turning on JS rendering or Unblocker, their anti-bot mode formerly called ASP, makes it 5. Residential proxies make it 25. So an Unblocker page on a datacenter IP costs about $0.50 per 1,000 on Pro, and the residential pool our run used costs $2.50. Discovery is $30 a month for 200,000 credits. Failed requests are never charged.

Benchmark success. 86.8%, 434 of 500, fourth of 17.

Latency. 19.62 seconds, tenth of 17, which is the weak spot: slower than ScraperAPI and more than four times String's.

Strengths. The most consistent rival across the large anti-bot groups: 92.6% on DataDome, 93.3% on Cloudflare, 96.7% on AWS WAF. Its adapter ran with ASP on and the residential pool pinned, so this is Scrapfly's strong mode and the number is comparable on those terms.

Weaknesses. Latency, and 5 sites returned nothing.

Firecrawl vs ScraperAPI: flat credits and a fast response

Source: October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark; Firecrawl prices from its pricing page, checked November 11, 2026.

Pricing. Firecrawl Standard is $99 a month for 100,000 credits, the closest thing in this list to a true $100 anchor. A scrape is 1 credit per page and an enhanced-proxy request costs the same 1 credit, so a protected page costs what an easy page costs. That is the sharpest contrast with ScraperAPI on this page. Two catches: credits are charged even when the target returns a 403 or 404, and plan credits roll over only on annual Scale (one month) and annual Enterprise (two months).

Benchmark success. 81.2%, 406 of 500, sixth of 17, above ScraperAPI.

Latency. 8.87 seconds, third of 17 behind String and Scrape.do.

Strengths. Speed, flat per-page pricing regardless of protection, and a product surface ScraperAPI does not have: crawl, monitor and document parsing, plus an AGPL core you can self-host.

Weaknesses. 17 sites returned nothing. A Firecrawl engineer has said the company blocks 10 of the benchmark's targets by policy, and their issue tracker shows self-hosted builds enforcing the same list, so no plan tier brings those back. The self-hosted build does not include the anti-bot engine, which their own guide states plainly. The full head-to-head is in String vs Firecrawl.

Bright Data vs ScraperAPI: proxy scale and bandwidth billing

Source: October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark; Bright Data prices from its pricing page, checked November 11, 2026.

Pricing. Bright Data bills residential traffic on bandwidth rather than requests: $8 per GB pay-as-you-go, or $7, $6 and $5 per GB at $499, $999 and $1,999 monthly commitments. Bandwidth counts request headers, request data, response headers and response data. A monthly commitment does not roll over. There is no per-page figure to put against ScraperAPI's credits, which is the point: the two products do not share a unit.

Benchmark success. 75.4%, 377 of 500, tenth of 17.

Latency. 27.88 seconds, fifteenth of 17.

Strengths. 400 million rotating residential IPs, an enterprise compliance surface, and Web Unlocker does not require the KYC process that the residential and mobile networks do.

Weaknesses. A wide flaky middle: 49 sites at 5/5 but 40 partial. Retries on partial targets are where a bandwidth bill grows quietly. More detail in the Bright Data alternatives page.

Zyte vs ScraperAPI: difficulty tiers instead of domain multipliers

Source: October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark; Zyte prices from its pricing page, checked November 11, 2026.

Pricing. Zyte prices each website into one of five difficulty tiers with datacenter, residential and rendering included. Pay-as-you-go HTTP runs $0.13 to $1.27 per 1,000 and browser runs $1.01 to $16.08. At a $100 monthly commitment those become $0.10 to $0.95 and $0.75 to $12.00. Billing is success-only.

Benchmark success. 79.6%, 398 of 500, seventh of 17, above ScraperAPI.

Latency. 14.43 seconds, fifth of 17.

Strengths. Success-only billing and one automated API rather than a menu of parameters you have to choose correctly. Zyte also runs a remote MCP server for agents.

Weaknesses. Zyte assigns the tier, so your effective rate is set by the vendor and can be reviewed. It had the lowest score of the six tools here on DataDome (68.4%), Akamai (68.0%) and AWS WAF (70.0%). Zyte does run a remote MCP server.

Where each provider specialises: success by anti-bot vendor

Source: October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark, per-attempt data in the public run file.

ScraperAPI's best column is Akamai, at 81.0%, ahead of the four other alternatives and behind only String's 97.0%. Akamai is 20 of the 100 targets, so that is a real strength on a fifth of the suite. Its weakest is Kasada at 53.3%, the lowest in that row, and its 70.7% on Cloudflare is also the lowest in its row.

The multiplier gap: 1 credit becomes 11, or 30 at the tier we tested

This is the number to remember. Source: October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark; ScraperAPI prices from its pricing FAQ and credits docs, checked November 11, 2026; String as of October 2026.

ScraperAPI's pricing FAQ says a standard page costs one credit. The same FAQ says sites behind Cloudflare, DataDome or PerimeterX add ten credits when ScraperAPI bypasses them. Its credits documentation lists Akamai at the same 10.

Forty-three of the benchmark's 100 targets sit behind those first three systems: 15 Cloudflare, 19 DataDome and nine PerimeterX. Counting Akamai's 20, it is 63.

On the default path, one credit becomes eleven on at least 43% of this benchmark. The ultra_premium tier that produced ScraperAPI's 76.4% costs 30 on every request.

ScraperAPI's own pages disagree on the protected rate. Its pricing FAQ says a bypass adds 10 credits, which makes 11. Its credits documentation lists 10 as the cost per scrape, which makes $1.49 at Startup and $4.90 at Hobby.

Set that against the same page elsewhere. On Scrapfly Pro a protected page in Unblocker mode is 5 credits at $0.10 per 1,000 credits, about $0.50 per 1,000. On Firecrawl Standard a protected page is 1 credit, about $0.99 per 1,000. On String Growth a premium fetch is $0.90 per 1,000 (as of October 2026) and a blocked one is free.

ScraperAPI's headline rate is among the lowest on this page. On the protected pages this benchmark is built around, and at the tier that scored 76.4%, it has close to the highest real rate.

There is one useful billing distinction: ScraperAPI charges only for 200 and 404 responses, so a direct 403 block costs nothing. Firecrawl charges when its infrastructure processes the request, including target 403s and 404s.

But status code is not the same thing as usable data. A captcha page can return HTTP 200, cost credits and contain none of the requested content. That is why this benchmark validates the page body rather than treating any 200 as success.

Why pricing is hard to compare across these providers

Source: each vendor's pricing and billing pages, checked October 27, 2026; String as of October 2026.

Seven reasons, all present in the six tools above.

• The unit differs. ScraperAPI, Scrapfly and Firecrawl sell credits. String sells successful requests. Zyte sells results priced by site difficulty. Bright Data sells gigabytes.
• A credit is not a credit. One ScraperAPI credit is a standard page and 30 is a LinkedIn page. One Scrapfly credit is a datacenter HTTP fetch and 25 is a residential one.
• Browser work has its own meter. Firecrawl bills Interact at 2 credits per browser minute, or 7 when the session uses a prompt. String bills its WebSocket browser on bandwidth and duration.
• Output formats can surcharge. Firecrawl adds 4 credits per page for LLM-extracted JSON.
• What counts as billable varies. Scrapfly and String bill nothing on failure. Zyte bills successful responses. ScraperAPI bills 200 and 404. Firecrawl bills whenever its infrastructure processed the request.
• Prepaid behaves differently from usage. ScraperAPI and Scrapfly credits reset at renewal, and Firecrawl's do below Scale. String credits roll over.
• The published rate is often not the rate. Zyte assigns your difficulty tier. Bright Data's list price sits next to a standing discount banner. ScraperAPI's real rate depends on the domain and the tier you send.

What $100 a month buys

Source: each vendor's pricing page, checked October 27, 2026; String as of October 2026.

• String Growth, $99 (as of October 2026). All of it usage: 618,750 plain fetches at $0.16 per 1,000, or 110,000 premium at $0.90. Blocked requests free, unused credit rolls over.
• Scrapfly Pro, $100. 1,000,000 credits. About 200,000 Unblocker pages on datacenter IPs, 40,000 on the residential pool, or 1,000,000 plain HTTP fetches.
• Firecrawl Standard, $99. 100,000 pages, protected or not, at 1 credit each.
• Zyte, $100 commitment. $0.10 to $0.95 per 1,000 HTTP responses, depending on the tier Zyte assigns your sites.
• ScraperAPI. No plan at $100. Startup, the nearest, is $149 for 1,000,000 credits: $0.15 per 1,000 easy pages, $1.49 to $1.64 per 1,000 pages behind Cloudflare, DataDome or PerimeterX, and $4.47 on ultra_premium. Hobby is $49 for 100,000 credits, which is 100,000 easy pages, about 9,000 protected ones, or about 3,300 on ultra_premium.
• Bright Data. No per-page figure; $100 of pay-as-you-go residential is 12.5 GB.

Against ScraperAPI specifically, the answer depends on the plan and the tier. At Startup, the plan nearest $100, ScraperAPI is cheaper on plain pages, $0.15 against $0.16 per 1,000, and String is cheaper on protected ones, $0.90 against $1.49 to $1.64 on the default path and $4.47 on the tier behind ScraperAPI's 76.4%. At Hobby every one of ScraperAPI's rates is higher. The case for String here is coverage as much as the rate: ScraperAPI returned nothing on 9 of the 100 sites, String on none. If your targets are cooperative and high-volume, ScraperAPI Startup is cheap per easy page, and that is a real reason to stay.

Which ScraperAPI alternative should you pick?

Source: October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark; prices checked October 27, 2026; String as of October 2026.

Pick String when the job is defined by pages that must come back: protected retail, social platforms, travel, or any scheduled job where a silent miss corrupts a dataset. It returned every attempt on all 9 of ScraperAPI's shutouts and it does not bill a block.

Pick Scrapfly when you want one product that is good everywhere rather than excellent in one place, and a real $100 plan with anti-bot included in the credit weight. Accept the latency.

Pick Firecrawl when the work is crawling and converting rather than unblocking, when speed matters, or when you want a flat per-page price on protected sites. It also finished above ScraperAPI in the October run, 81.2% against 76.4%.

Pick Bright Data when you need proxy scale, geographic breadth or an enterprise compliance surface, and your pipeline can absorb a bandwidth bill.

Pick Zyte when you would rather the vendor decide how hard each site is and bill you accordingly, and you want success-only billing without choosing parameters.

Stay on ScraperAPI when your targets are easy, predictable and high-volume, or when its 76.4% coverage is enough and you will pay the ultra_premium rate for it.

At one credit per page, the rate is hard to beat, and Akamai, at 81.0%, was its best column.

But know what you are buying. The tier that returned 76.4% costs 30 credits a request. On the default path, protected domains can cost eleven credits, LinkedIn costs 30 and the strongest configuration costs 75.

If your target list looks anything like this benchmark, the cheap headline price stops being cheap very quickly.

Switching from ScraperAPI to String

Source: ScraperAPI docs and String docs, checked October 27, 2026; ScraperAPI's shutout count from the October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark.

What carries over. A GET to api.scraperapi.com with api_key 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_format=markdown maps to "format": "markdown", the country parameter to countryCode, and render=true to "executeJS": true when you want to force a browser. premium and ultra_premium have no String equivalent, because String picks the proxy class per request.

What you rebuild. ScraperAPI's structured data endpoints for Amazon, Google, Walmart, eBay, and Redfin, autoparse, the AI Parser, DataPipeline schedules, the Crawler, the async API with callbacks, and Proxy Port mode. For the fields you need, String's jsonSchema extraction replaces a parser. Schedules and crawls stay with ScraperAPI or move to a job runner you already operate.

Integrations to reconnect. ScraperAPI publishes SDKs for Python, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, and Java, a remote MCP server, and integrations for n8n, Zapier, LangChain, and LlamaIndex. 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 ScraperAPI's 9 shutouts listed above. Then add the URLs that only come back at 25, 30 or 75 credits, and set max_cost on the ScraperAPI side so the test cannot escalate. 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 String vs ScraperAPI page compares the two products in more depth.

FAQ

Source for the figures below: October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark; prices from each vendor's pricing page, checked October 27, 2026; String as of October 2026.

What is the best ScraperAPI alternative for Cloudflare-protected sites?

String, tied with Firecrawl. Across the 15 Cloudflare-defended targets in the October 2026 benchmark both returned content on 98.7% of requests, against ScraperAPI's 70.7%, the lowest of the six tools here. Scrapfly returned 93.3% on that group, Zyte 92.0% and Bright Data 74.7%. Cloudflare is also where ScraperAPI's pricing changes: its own FAQ adds 10 credits per request for a Cloudflare bypass, so those pages cost 11 credits rather than 1.

Why did ScraperAPI's score move from 64.2% to 84.0%, then 76.4%?

Because the benchmark changed what it sends, not because we can date a product change. Source: August, September and October 2026 runs of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark.

In the August run, the adapter sent the URL and API key, the standard one-credit request. Before the September run, a harness change moved it to ultra_premium, the advanced bypass tier ScraperAPI documents for protected pages.

That tier is a separate, manually selected configuration with its own economics: 30 credits a request, or 75 with rendering.

The October run sent ScraperAPI the same ultra_premium request, and it returned 76.4%, down from 84.0% and from third to ninth. Its adapter did not change between the two runs.

Other providers made different product decisions. String automatically selects the fetch path for each request. Firecrawl's default auto mode retries through an enhanced proxy without increasing the one-credit price.

How much does a protected page really cost on ScraperAPI?

On the default path, eleven credits, not one. ScraperAPI's pricing FAQ says sites behind Cloudflare, DataDome or PerimeterX add 10 credits per request, and 43 of the 100 benchmark targets sit behind those three systems. At Startup, $149 for 1,000,000 credits, that is $1.64 per 1,000 protected pages against $0.15 per 1,000 standard ones. At Hobby, $49 for 100,000, it is $5.39 against $0.49. On ultra_premium, the tier the benchmark used, it is 30 credits on every page.

Is there a free ScraperAPI alternative?

Every tool here has a free entry point, and they are not the same size. ScraperAPI gives 1,000 free credits a month with 5 concurrent connections, and a 7-day trial with 5,000. Firecrawl gives 1,000 credits a month. Scrapfly gives 1,000 credits on signup with no time limit. String gives the first 20,000 standard fetches free, and because a block is never billed, testing your hardest URLs costs nothing.

What is the cheapest ScraperAPI alternative?

It depends entirely on whether your pages are protected. On easy pages Scrapfly Pro's datacenter rate is $0.10 per 1,000 (as of October 2026), then ScraperAPI Startup, $149 for 1,000,000 credits, at $0.15, then String Growth at $0.16. On pages behind Cloudflare, DataDome or PerimeterX, Scrapfly Pro is the cheapest at roughly $0.50 per 1,000 in Unblocker mode on datacenter IPs, then String Growth at $0.90, then Firecrawl Standard at about $0.99 per 1,000, then ScraperAPI Startup at $1.49 to $1.64. ScraperAPI Hobby is $4.90 to $5.39.

Which ScraperAPI alternatives have an MCP server?

All five. String is in the official registry as ai.usestring/web-access. Firecrawl runs a hosted MCP server. ScraperAPI itself publishes one at mcp.scraperapi.com/mcp. Bright Data and Scrapfly both ship servers. Zyte runs a remote MCP server.

Is String cheaper than ScraperAPI?

It depends on the plan and the page. Source: ScraperAPI pricing, checked November 11, 2026, and String pricing, as of October 2026. At Startup, the ScraperAPI plan nearest $100, String is cheaper on protected pages and ScraperAPI is cheaper on easy ones, $0.15 against $0.16. At Hobby, String is cheaper on both: ScraperAPI costs $0.49 and $4.90 to $5.39 for the same two paths. String never bills a blocked request, while ScraperAPI bills any 200, including a captcha page. String credits roll over; ScraperAPI credits reset at renewal.

How can I verify these numbers?

Run the benchmark.

The harness, 100 target URLs, pass criteria, provider adapters and raw results are public. The repo takes your own API keys.

The live leaderboard, October 2026 results post and raw results JSON all use the same run.

A full benchmark makes thousands of billable calls, so start with the sites you actually care about.

If you think a provider should run differently, change the adapter and submit a pull request. Firecrawl did that in #6. We merged it, reran the benchmark and published its higher score.