The best ScraperAPI alternatives are String, Scrapfly, Firecrawl, Bright Data and Zyte.
On the open Web Data Frontier Benchmark (99 real sites, five attempts each, run August 11, 2026), ScraperAPI returned content on 64.2% of requests. String returned 97.0%, Scrapfly 82.0%, Firecrawl 78.6%, Bright Data 78.0% and Zyte 72.7%.
Pick String when protected pages need to come back every time. Pick Scrapfly for the closest all-around rival. Pick Firecrawl for crawling whole domains. Pick Bright Data for proxy scale. Pick Zyte when you want the vendor to price each site by difficulty.
This page compares all six web scraping APIs on benchmark success, latency, pricing at roughly $100 a month and MCP support.
ScraperAPI ran on its default path: URL plus API key, at one credit per request. That is not a caveat. That is the product customers get unless they manually select, and pay for, a stronger mode. Every result below reflects what happens when you run ScraperAPI by default.
TL;DR
| Provider | Best for | Benchmark success | Latency score | What $100 a month buys | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | Protected pages that must return every time | 97.0% (480/495) | 9.98s | Growth: $100/mo, then $0.20 per 1,000 plain fetches or $2.00 premium; blocked requests free | No crawl endpoint, no self-hosting |
| ScraperAPI | Cheap bulk fetches on cooperative sites | 64.2% (318/495) | 13.65s | No $100 plan. Hobby $49 buys 100,000 credits; a protected page costs 11 of them | 29 sites returned nothing; credits do not roll over |
| Scrapfly | The closest all-round rival | 82.0% (406/495) | 18.35s | Pro: $100/mo, 1,000,000 credits; ASP mode costs 5 credits, so $0.50 per 1,000 protected pages | Slowest of the top three on latency |
| Firecrawl | Crawling a whole domain to markdown | 78.6% (389/495) | 9.21s | Standard: $99/mo, 100,000 pages at 1 credit each whether easy or protected | Charged on a target 403 or 404; blocks some sites by policy |
| Bright Data | Proxy scale and enterprise compliance | 78.0% (386/495) | 26.14s | Billed on bandwidth, not requests, so no per-page figure at $100 | Slowest latency of all 15 providers |
| Zyte | Letting the vendor price each site by difficulty | 72.7% (360/495) | 14.85s | $100 commitment: $0.10 to $0.95 per 1,000 HTTP, $0.75 to $12.00 browser | Zyte assigns your tier, so your rate is not yours to pick |
The latency score is a per-target p75 of successful attempts. A provider that returns nothing on a target inherits the p75 of the providers that did succeed there, and a target nobody clears scores the 90-second timeout. It refuses to reward fast failures.
ScraperAPI returned nothing on any of 5 attempts against 29 of the 99 targets. That is the second-worst shutout count in the run, level with Nimble. The list is not exotic: Etsy, Instagram, Facebook, X, Stack Overflow, Best Buy, Booking.com, Tripadvisor, Zara, Ralph Lauren, StockX, Foot Locker, G2, Crunchbase, Trustpilot, Realtor.com, Idealista, Safeway, AutoZone, Hyatt, Carter's, Canada Goose, Neiman Marcus, cars.com, Yellow Pages, leboncoin, Allegro, AXS and Temu.
Seven of those 29 are sites the rest of the field found easy. On Etsy, Instagram, Foot Locker, Facebook, X, Tripadvisor and leboncoin, the other fourteen providers averaged 70% or better while ScraperAPI averaged zero. Foot Locker and leboncoin sat at 84.3% across the rest of the field.
String returned content on 28 of those 29. It cleared 25 on all five attempts and three more on four of five: Neiman Marcus, Allegro and Booking.com. The only site that shut out both products is Temu, which shut out every provider in the run.
ScraperAPI's headline is one credit per page. Its docs then price Amazon at 5 credits, Google and Bing at 25, LinkedIn at 30, and add 10 credits for any site behind Cloudflare, Cloudflare Turnstile, DataDome or PerimeterX. The parameters that raise the success rate carry their own charges: premium=true is 10 credits, render=true is 10, premium plus render is 25, ultra_premium is 30, and ultra_premium plus render is 75.
That is a 75x spread on a product advertised at one credit per page. ScraperAPI publishes a Domain Cost Estimator and a max_cost parameter so you can check a URL before you spend, which is more transparency than most vendors offer. The problem is not disclosure. It is that the cheap number is the one on the pricing page and the expensive number is the one your targets trigger.
Credits do not roll over. ScraperAPI's pricing FAQ says the balance "resets when your subscription renews". There is no plan near $100 a month, so the honest anchor is Hobby at $49 for 100,000 credits or Startup at $149 for 1,000,000.
The benchmark sends the same 99 URLs to 15 providers, five times each: 7,425 live, billable requests.
A request passes only when the response contains a marker from the real page: a product title, article headline or another known piece of content. A captcha page returning HTTP 200 fails. A blank response fails. A fast 403 fails. The benchmark measures whether the requested content actually came back.
Most targets are protected retail, travel, news and social sites. That is intentional. Easy pages tell you whether an HTTP client works. Hard pages tell you whether a web-access product works.
We built the public harness, and String ranks first in it. Do not take our word for it. The targets, pass criteria, provider adapters and raw results are public, and the repo runs with your own API keys.
A Firecrawl engineer submitted a configuration change in pull request #6. We merged it, reran the benchmark and Firecrawl's score rose 7.7 points. This page uses the improved result.
Every provider ran through its default or standard production path.
ScraperAPI's default request sends the URL and API key. No premium flag. No ultra-premium flag. No rendering flag. That is not a testing concession. It is how ScraperAPI runs unless the customer manually chooses and pays for another mode.
The distinction matters because different products handle hard pages differently.
String accepts the URL and automatically chooses the proxy and fetch path required for that request. Firecrawl's default auto mode retries through an enhanced proxy when needed without increasing the one-credit price. ScraperAPI asks the customer to choose the stronger path manually, and changes the price when they do.
On ScraperAPI, premium mode costs 10 credits. Rendering costs 10. Premium plus rendering costs 25. Ultra-premium costs 30. Ultra-premium plus rendering costs 75.
So the benchmark answers the question buyers actually face: what happens when I make the default request?
For ScraperAPI, the answer was 64.2% success at one credit per request. Its stronger configurations cost 10 to 75 times more. Those are different configurations with different economics, not the default product tested here.
Pricing. String combines a subscription with usage pricing. The first 5,000 requests are free. Starter costs $20 a month and Growth costs $100.
Rates are based on the path String automatically selects for the request: $0.20 per 1,000 plain fetches and $2.00 per 1,000 premium fetches on Growth, or $1.00 and $4.00 for browser paths. Credits roll 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 97.0% of requests: 480 of 495, first among all 15 providers. It cleared 92 of 99 targets on all five attempts, returned partial results on five and was shut out on two.
Latency. String scored 9.98 seconds, second among all 15 providers, against ScraperAPI's 13.65 seconds.
Strengths. Protected pages. String returned content on 28 of ScraperAPI's 29 shutouts, clearing 25 of them on all five attempts and three more on four of five: Neiman Marcus, Allegro and Booking.com. The only site that shut out both is Temu, which shut out every provider in the run. Across the eight social platforms tested, String passed 40 of 40 requests. ScraperAPI passed 25 of 40, returning nothing on Instagram, Facebook or X while clearing Reddit, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube and Pinterest on every attempt.
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. 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:
POST https://request.usestring.ai/v1/fetch
{"url": "https://www.example.com/the-page-that-blocks-you"}
Markdown comes back by default. The first 5,000 requests are free, and a block costs nothing.
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 ASP, their anti-bot mode, makes it 5. Residential proxies make it 25. So a protected page on Scrapfly Pro costs about $0.50 per 1,000. Discovery is $30 a month for 200,000 credits. Failed requests are never charged.
Benchmark success. 82.0%, 406 of 495, second of 15.
Latency. 18.35 seconds, which is the weak spot: slower than ScraperAPI and nearly double String's.
Strengths. The most consistent rival across anti-bot categories, with no collapse anywhere: 92% on Cloudflare, 85.4% on the sites with no named vendor, 82.2% on PerimeterX. Its adapter ran with ASP on, so this is Scrapfly's strong mode and the number is comparable on those terms.
Weaknesses. Latency, and 8 sites returned nothing.
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 do not roll over below annual Scale.
Benchmark success. 78.6%, 389 of 495, fourth of 15.
Latency. 9.21 seconds, the fastest of all 15 providers.
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. 16 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.
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. 78.0%, 386 of 495, fifth of 15.
Latency. 26.14 seconds, the slowest of all 15.
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. Latency, and a wide flaky middle: 57 sites at 5/5 but 31 partial. Retries on partial targets are where a bandwidth bill grows quietly. More detail in the Bright Data alternatives page.
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. 72.7%, 360 of 495, seventh of 15.
Latency. 14.85 seconds.
Strengths. Success-only billing and one automated API rather than a menu of parameters you have to choose correctly.
Weaknesses. Zyte assigns the tier, so your effective rate is set by the vendor and can be reviewed. Cloudflare is the soft spot at 61.3%, and AWS WAF at 36.7% is the lowest of the six tools here. There is no Zyte-hosted MCP server; Zyte publishes a guide to building your own.
| Anti-bot system | Sites | String | Scrapfly | Firecrawl | Bright Data | Zyte | ScraperAPI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | 15 | 100% | 92.0% | 100% | 85.3% | 61.3% | 60.0% |
| DataDome | 19 | 97.9% | 81.1% | 89.5% | 82.1% | 81.1% | 54.7% |
| Akamai | 20 | 98.0% | 71.0% | 72.0% | 60.0% | 58.0% | 85.0% |
| PerimeterX | 9 | 88.9% | 82.2% | 84.4% | 68.9% | 86.7% | 57.8% |
| AWS WAF | 6 | 96.7% | 83.3% | 76.7% | 93.3% | 36.7% | 50.0% |
| Kasada | 3 | 100% | 80.0% | 93.3% | 93.3% | 100% | 0.0% |
| No named vendor | 26 | 96.2% | 85.4% | 59.2% | 81.5% | 83.8% | 69.2% |
ScraperAPI is not uniformly behind. On Akamai it returned 85.0%, the best of these six and well ahead of String's nearest rivals. Akamai is 20 of the 99 targets, so that is a real strength on a fifth of the suite. It also cleared LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok, YouTube and Pinterest on all five attempts, which several better-scoring providers did not. Against Kasada it returned nothing across all three targets, the only zero in the table.
This is the number to remember.
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.
Forty-three of the benchmark's 99 targets sit behind those three systems: 15 Cloudflare, 19 DataDome and nine PerimeterX.
On 43% of this benchmark, one credit becomes eleven.
| Page type | ScraperAPI credits | Cost per 1,000 at Hobby ($49 / 100,000 credits) |
|---|---|---|
| Standard page | 1 | $0.49 |
| Amazon | 5 | $2.45 |
| Behind Cloudflare, DataDome or PerimeterX | 11 | $5.39 |
| Google or Bing, including subdomains | 25 | $12.25 |
| 30 | $14.70 | |
ultra_premium with rendering |
75 | $36.75 |
Set that against the same page elsewhere. On Scrapfly Pro a protected page in ASP 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 $2.00 per 1,000 and a blocked one is free.
ScraperAPI has the lowest headline rate on this page. On the protected pages this benchmark is built around, 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.
Seven reasons, all present in the six tools above.
Against ScraperAPI specifically, at this level: String is more expensive per page on a plain fetch ($0.20 per 1,000 against $0.49 per 1,000 credits, but ScraperAPI's easy pages are 1 credit, so the two are close) and cheaper on protected pages, where String charges $2.00 per 1,000 and ScraperAPI charges 11 credits, about $5.39. In the other direction, if your targets are cooperative and high-volume, ScraperAPI Startup at $149 for 1,000,000 credits is cheaper per easy page than anything else here, and that is a real reason to stay.
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 content on 28 of ScraperAPI's 29 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 a flat per-page price on protected sites is worth more than the last few points of coverage.
Pick Bright Data when you need proxy scale, geographic breadth or an enterprise compliance surface, and your pipeline is tolerant of slow responses.
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.
At one credit per page, the rate is hard to beat. Akamai was a real strength at 85.0%, and ScraperAPI cleared LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok, YouTube and Pinterest on all five attempts.
But know what you are buying. The one-credit default path returned content on 64.2% of benchmark requests. 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.
String. Across the 15 Cloudflare-defended targets in the August 2026 benchmark it returned content on 100% of requests, against ScraperAPI's 60.0%. Firecrawl also returned 100% on that group and Scrapfly 92.0%. Bright Data returned 85.3% and Zyte 61.3%. 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.
Because 64.2% is what ScraperAPI returned by default.
The benchmark adapter sends the URL and API key, the standard one-credit request. It does not add premium, ultra-premium or rendering parameters because ScraperAPI does not add those parameters by default.
Those stronger paths are separate, manually selected configurations. They also change the economics: premium and rendering cost 10 credits, premium plus rendering costs 25, ultra-premium costs 30 and ultra-premium plus rendering costs 75.
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.
The benchmark measures the default product experience and its default economics. For ScraperAPI, that was 318 successful requests out of 495: 64.2%.
Eleven credits, not one. ScraperAPI's pricing FAQ says sites behind Cloudflare, DataDome or PerimeterX add 10 credits per request. 43 of the 99 benchmark targets sit behind those three systems. At Hobby, $49 for 100,000 credits, that is $5.39 per 1,000 protected pages against $0.49 per 1,000 standard ones. Google and Bing cost 25 credits and LinkedIn 30.
Every tool here has a free entry point, and they are not the same size. ScraperAPI gives 1,000 credits a month with 5 concurrent connections. Firecrawl gives 1,000 credits a month. String gives the first 5,000 requests free, and because a block is never billed, testing your hardest URLs costs nothing. Zyte and Scrapfly run trials rather than a standing free tier.
It depends entirely on whether your pages are protected. On easy pages ScraperAPI Startup, $149 for 1,000,000 credits, is the cheapest per page in this group and nothing here beats it. On pages behind Cloudflare, DataDome or PerimeterX, Scrapfly Pro is the cheapest at roughly $0.50 per 1,000 in ASP mode, then Firecrawl Standard at about $0.99 per 1,000, then String Growth at $2.00 per 1,000, then ScraperAPI at about $5.39.
Four of the 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 does not host one; it publishes a guide to building your own.
On protected pages, yes: $2.00 per 1,000 premium fetches on Growth against about $5.39 per 1,000 for an 11-credit page at ScraperAPI Hobby, and String never bills a blocked request while ScraperAPI bills any 200, including a captcha page. On cooperative pages at volume, no: ScraperAPI Startup at $149 for 1,000,000 credits is cheaper per easy page than String's $0.20 per 1,000 plus the $100 subscription, once you are well past a million pages a month. String credits roll over; ScraperAPI credits reset at renewal.
Run the benchmark.
The harness, 99 target URLs, pass criteria, provider adapters and raw results are public. The repo takes your own API keys.
The live leaderboard, August 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.
