Best Scrapfly Alternatives in 2026: 7 Tools Compared
Last updated October 27, 2026. Benchmark figures come from the September 16, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark: 100 sites, 16 providers, 5 attempts per site. The per-attempt data is the public run file. Pricing was checked against each vendor's own pricing pages and docs on October 27, 2026.
What is the best Scrapfly alternative?
The best Scrapfly alternatives in 2026 are String, ScraperAPI, Firecrawl, Bright Data and Context.dev for hosted scraping, and Crawl4AI if you want free software you run yourself. Scrapfly is a strong web scraping API: it placed second of 16 providers in the September 2026 run, at 86.2% of 500 requests. String placed first at 97.0%. ScraperAPI placed third at 84.0%, Firecrawl fourth at 80.2%, Bright Data sixth at 74.6% and Context.dev eighth at 72.0%.
Scrapfly returned all five attempts on 71 of the 100 sites. It missed at least one attempt on the other 29. On those 29 sites, String returned every attempt on 26, and at least one of the five hosted alternatives returned every attempt on 28. Only Temu defeated all of them.
The right alternative depends on the job:
- String is best when protected pages have to come back on every attempt.
- ScraperAPI is best for cheap volume on easy pages, with a per-site credit price you can look up.
- Firecrawl is best for crawling cooperative sites into markdown.
- Bright Data is best for proxies, datasets and unblocking under one contract.
- Context.dev is best for one flat credit per page with protection included.
- Crawl4AI is best when the budget is zero and you can run your own proxies and browsers.
This page compares all seven tools on benchmark success, latency, anti-bot coverage, pricing at about $100 a month, and MCP support.
TL;DR
- Scrapfly passed 86.2% of benchmark requests, 431 of 500, second of 16. It returned nothing on 5 sites and part of the attempts on 24.
- String passed 97.0%, 485 of 500, first of 16, with the fastest latency score at 7.06 seconds. Scrapfly's latency score was 19.79 seconds, eleventh of 16.
- On the 29 sites where Scrapfly missed at least one attempt, String returned all five on 26, Firecrawl on 22, Context.dev on 17, ScraperAPI on 16 and Bright Data on 12.
- 33 of Scrapfly's 69 failed attempts came back with a success status but without the page's content. That is 47.8%, the highest share of the 16 providers.
- Scrapfly does not bill failed scrapes, and its billing docs list the exceptions. Its monthly credits do not roll over.
- At $100 a month, Scrapfly Pro costs $0.10 per 1,000 plain datacenter requests and $2.50 to $3.00 per 1,000 in the residential configuration we tested. String Growth, $99, costs $0.16 per 1,000 standard fetches and $0.90 per 1,000 premium fetches.
- Every number comes from a public harness that you can rerun with your own API keys.
Scrapfly and six alternatives at a glance
| Provider | Best for | Benchmark success | Latency score | What about $100 a month buys (per 1,000) | Free tier | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | Protected pages that must come back on every attempt | 97.0% | 7.06s | Growth, $99: $0.16 standard fetch; $0.80 to $0.90 with a browser or a premium proxy; $3.25 with both. Blocked requests are free | 20,000 standard fetches, no card | No crawl jobs, no self-hosting, no language SDKs |
| Scrapfly | Five APIs on one key, and SOC 2 Type II | 86.2% | 19.79s | Pro, $100: $0.10 datacenter; $0.50 with the Unblocker or a browser; $2.50 residential; $3.00 residential with a browser | 1,000 credits, no time limit | The Unblocker can raise the credit cost per target, and some shield fees are not published |
| ScraperAPI | Cheap volume on easy pages | 84.0% | 12.97s | No $100 plan. Hobby, $49: $0.49 standard; Startup, $149: $0.15. A Cloudflare page is 11 credits | 1,000 credits, plus a 7-day trial with 5,000 | Per-site multipliers reach 30 credits; 200 and 404 responses bill |
| Firecrawl | Crawling cooperative sites into markdown | 80.2% | 9.11s | Standard, $99: 100,000 credits, $0.99 per page at full use | 1,000 credits a month | A returned 403 or 404 costs a credit; nothing on 17 sites |
| Bright Data | Proxies, datasets and unblocking on one contract | 74.6% | 15.62s | No plan near $100. Pay as you go: $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests | 5,000 requests a month | Premium-domain rate is shown only in the dashboard |
| Context.dev | One flat credit per page, protection included | 72.0% | 16.32s | Pro, $90: 100,000 credits, $0.90 per page | 1,000 credits a month | Nothing on 22 sites; 43.2% on DataDome |
| Crawl4AI | Free, self-hosted crawling | Not tested; it is a library, not a hosted API | Not tested | $0 for the software; you pay for proxies, servers and captcha solving | Free software | You own the anti-bot work |
The latency score is failure-aware. Per site, it takes the p75 of a provider's successful attempts. A provider with no successful attempt on a site inherits the p75 of the providers that succeeded, so a fast failure does not improve the score. Prices are the plan nearest $100 a month billed monthly, checked October 27, 2026.
Why people leave Scrapfly
Scrapfly sells five products on one key: a Web Scraping API, a Cloud Browser API, a Crawler API, an Extraction API and a Screenshot API. Its anti-bot mode, now called the Unblocker, is one flag. It ships SDKs for Python, TypeScript, Go and Rust, and its pricing page lists SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and HIPAA. String has no SOC 2 report.
So the case against Scrapfly is narrow. People look for an alternative for two reasons: the sites it misses, and a bill that is hard to forecast on protected pages.
Hard sites
Scrapfly returned nothing on 5 of the 100 sites: Temu, Best Buy, Ralph Lauren, Zara and Google Search. String returned all five attempts on four of them. Temu defeated every provider in the run.
The bigger number is the 24 sites where Scrapfly returned some attempts and not others. Twelve of them sat at four of five. A site that passes four times in five looks healthy in a dashboard. The missing row shows up later, when someone reconciles the data.
Some of those misses are hard to see. 33 of Scrapfly's 69 failed attempts came back with a success status and a body that did not contain the page's content. A pipeline that trusts the status code stores those as data. The guide to validating scraped data covers how to catch them.
By industry, Scrapfly averaged 71.8% on retail sites against String's 92.9%, and 10% on the two search engines against String's 100%. It led String on real estate, 100% against 85.7%, and on marketplaces, 98% against 96%.
Pricing
Scrapfly's pricing page prints a short credit table. A plain HTTP request on a datacenter IP is 1 credit. JavaScript rendering or the Unblocker is 5. Residential proxies are 25. A screenshot is 60. Pro is $100 a month for 1,000,000 credits.
The Unblocker docs add the part the table leaves out. The Unblocker can change the proxy pool and turn on a browser for a target, and the docs say "The API Credit cost may fluctuate" as sites change their protection. They also say some targets carry shield fees that "are not publicly documented". The fee shows up in your request log after the call.
Failed scrapes are free. The billing docs list three limits on that. A 404 is excluded from the protection and bills. If 30% or more of your scrapes in 24 hours are blocked without the Unblocker, failed scrapes start to bill. And monthly credits do not roll over. Pay-as-you-go overflow on Pro is $3.50 per 10,000 credits, capped at half the monthly quota.
How we tested these web scraping APIs
The September 16, 2026 run sent 16 web scraping APIs to the same 100 live sites, five attempts each, 500 requests per provider, with a 90-second timeout. A request passed only when the response body contained a marker string from the real page. A captcha page or an empty 200 counted as a failure.
Each provider ran through an adapter in the public repository, at the strongest anti-bot setting its API offers. The Scrapfly adapter sends asp: true with the residential pool pinned and render_js: false. That is the Unblocker on Scrapfly's best general proxy pool, without a browser. The Unblocker can still turn a browser on by itself where a target needs one. A run with render_js: true on every request is a different and more expensive configuration, and this run does not measure it.
Disclosure: String built the benchmark and sells the product that ranks first. The answer to that conflict is a harness you can run yourself. Providers can contest a result. Firecrawl did: its engineer opened a pull request with a better configuration, and every run since uses it.
String vs Scrapfly: 97.0% vs 86.2%, and the fastest latency score
String's Web Access API is a web scraping API that takes one URL per call. Proxy choice, anti-bot handling, captchas and JavaScript rendering happen behind the endpoint, and String picks the fetch path per request.
Pricing. Growth is $99 a month, and the fee comes back as usage credit. It bills $0.16 per 1,000 successful fetches on a standard proxy, $0.90 on a premium proxy, $0.80 for a browser on a standard proxy and $3.25 for a browser on a premium proxy. Starter is $19 a month at $0.25, $2.40, $1.20 and $4.80. A request moves to the premium rate only when the site blocks the standard proxy. The first 20,000 standard fetches are free with no card. Blocked requests are free, except a request with custom headers that the site blocks, and credit rolls over.
Benchmark success. 97.0%, or 485 of 500, first of 16. All five attempts on 93 sites, some on 5, none on 2.
Latency. 7.06 seconds, first of 16, against Scrapfly's 19.79. Counting every attempt, failures included, String's mean was 5.31 seconds and Scrapfly's 16.96.
Strengths.
- 100% on Cloudflare, PerimeterX, AWS WAF and Fastly sites, and 98.0% on Akamai, where Scrapfly reached 81.0%.
- All five attempts on 26 of the 29 sites Scrapfly missed, including Best Buy, Ralph Lauren, Zara and Google.
- Search, asynchronous sitemap discovery and remote Chrome over CDP on the same key.
Weaknesses.
- Idealista: Scrapfly returned 5 of 5 and String none. String also dropped one attempt on Yelp, Autotrader and Allegro, where Scrapfly returned all five.
- No crawl jobs, no dedicated extraction or screenshot API, no self-hosting.
- No SOC 2 report and no language SDKs. Scrapfly has both.
- A plain datacenter page costs more on String: $0.16 per 1,000 against Scrapfly's $0.10.
String's MCP server
String's MCP server is listed in the official registry as ai.usestring/web-access. It is hosted at https://mcp.usestring.ai/v1/mcp and exposes web_access_fetch, web_access_search and web_access_sitemap. MCP calls use the same pricing as API calls.
Try String on your own list
curl https://request.usestring.ai/v1/fetch \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $STRING_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"url": "https://www.bestbuy.com/", "format": "markdown"}'
Leave out format and the page comes back in a JSON envelope, which is the default per the API reference. The head-to-head String vs Scrapfly page goes further on the two products.
ScraperAPI vs Scrapfly: 84.0% vs 86.2%, and a credit price per site
ScraperAPI placed third, 2.2 points behind Scrapfly, and it was faster. The ScraperAPI alternatives page ranks it against the field.
Pricing. No plan near $100. Hobby is $49 for 100,000 credits, $0.49 per 1,000 standard pages, and Startup is $149 for 1,000,000, $0.15 per 1,000. Startup is nearer $100 by dollar distance. The credit docs price a standard page at 1 credit, Amazon at 5, Google and Bing at 25 and LinkedIn at 30. A Cloudflare, DataDome, PerimeterX or Akamai bypass adds 10. So a Cloudflare page is 11 credits: $5.39 per 1,000 on Hobby and $1.64 on Startup. ScraperAPI bills 200 and 404 responses. Credits reset at renewal.
Benchmark success. 84.0%, or 420 of 500, third of 16. All five attempts on 71 sites, the same count as Scrapfly. Nothing on 9 sites against Scrapfly's 5.
Latency. 12.97 seconds, third of 16, against Scrapfly's 19.79.
Strengths.
- 92% on Akamai against Scrapfly's 81%, and 100% on news and finance against 91.1%.
- All five attempts on 16 of the 29 sites Scrapfly missed, including Ralph Lauren, Zara and Google.
- The credit cost of any URL is visible in advance through its cost endpoint, and ScraperAPI ships an MCP server.
Weaknesses.
- Nothing on Instagram, Facebook and X, all of which Scrapfly returned in full. Social media averaged 62.5% against Scrapfly's 100%.
- A protected page costs 11 times a standard one, and LinkedIn 30 times.
Firecrawl vs Scrapfly: a crawler against a scraping platform
Firecrawl turns a URL or a whole domain into markdown. It is the second-fastest provider in the run. The Firecrawl alternatives page covers it in depth.
Pricing. Standard is $99 a month billed monthly, or $83 billed annually, for 100,000 credits. A scrape is 1 credit whatever the protection, so the list rate is $0.99 per 1,000 pages at full use. JSON output adds 4 credits. Firecrawl's billing docs charge 1 credit for a page that comes back with a 403 or 404 status. A scrape that returns no document is free. At its 80.2% rate, the upper bound is about $1.23 per 1,000 usable pages. Credits do not roll over below Scale.
Benchmark success. 80.2%, or 401 of 500, fourth of 16. Nothing on 17 sites.
Latency. 9.11 seconds, second of 16.
Strengths.
- All five attempts on 22 of the 29 sites Scrapfly missed, including Ralph Lauren, Zara, AutoZone and Bing.
- Crawl, map, search and change monitoring, an AGPL core, and a hosted MCP server.
- SOC 2 Type II on its pricing page.
Weaknesses.
- Social media averaged 25.0% against Scrapfly's 100%. Firecrawl returned nothing on LinkedIn, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, Facebook and Pinterest.
- A blocked page that returns a 403 still bills.
Bright Data vs Scrapfly: one contract for proxies and data
Bright Data is the enterprise platform. Web Unlocker is its product closest to Scrapfly's scrape endpoint. The Bright Data alternatives page covers it in depth.
Pricing. No plan near $100. The Web Unlocker pricing page lists a free tier of 5,000 requests a month, pay as you go at $1.50 per 1,000, and Scale at $499 for 383,000 requests. Bright Data bills successful requests only. Two exceptions sit in its features docs. Premium domains bill at a higher rate that appears only in the zone's estimated-cost panel. Custom headers or cookies switch the zone to billing every request, failed ones too.
Benchmark success. 74.6%, or 373 of 500, sixth of 16. Nothing on 16 sites.
Latency. 15.62 seconds, fourth of 16.
Strengths.
- 100% on PerimeterX against Scrapfly's 84.4%.
- 100% on social media, level with Scrapfly.
- Proxies, datasets, a SERP API and an MCP server on one account.
Weaknesses.
- 47.4% on DataDome against Scrapfly's 92.6%, and 25% on ticketing against 95%.
- Short of five attempts on 20 sites Scrapfly returned in full, including Ticketmaster, SeatGeek and Louis Vuitton.
- The premium-domain rate is not published, so it cannot rank as the cheapest option here.
Context.dev vs Scrapfly: one credit per page, protection included
Context.dev prices a scrape at one credit, with proxies, rendering and anti-bot bypass included. The String vs Context.dev page compares it head to head.
Pricing. Pro is $90 a month for 100,000 credits, $0.90 per 1,000 pages, protected or not. Browser actions raise a scrape to 2 credits, and JSON extraction adds 4. Context.dev says most failed requests are not billed, and a 404 bills at the base price. The free tier is 1,000 credits a month.
Benchmark success. 72.0%, or 360 of 500, eighth of 16. Nothing on 22 sites.
Latency. 16.32 seconds, sixth of 16.
Strengths.
- The simplest bill on this page: one rate for an easy page and a hard one.
- 96.0% on Cloudflare against Scrapfly's 90.7%.
- All five attempts on 17 of the 29 sites Scrapfly missed, Best Buy and Zara among them. Context.dev has an official MCP server.
Weaknesses.
- 43.2% on DataDome against Scrapfly's 92.6%.
- Short of five attempts on 21 sites Scrapfly returned in full, including Expedia, Hyatt and the Wall Street Journal.
Crawl4AI vs Scrapfly: free software against a managed service
Crawl4AI is an open-source Python crawler under Apache 2.0 that returns markdown for language models.
Pricing. The software is free. You pay for servers, residential proxy bandwidth, captcha solving and the engineering time to keep them working.
Benchmark success. Not tested. Crawl4AI is a library, not a hosted API, so the harness cannot rank it.
Latency. Not tested.
Strengths.
- No vendor bill and full control of the pipeline.
- Playwright under the hood, with CSS, XPath and LLM extraction. The documentation is thorough.
Weaknesses.
- You own the anti-bot work. Every protected site in this benchmark is one Crawl4AI reaches only with proxy and browser infrastructure you run.
Where providers specialize: success by anti-bot vendor
Success rate by the anti-bot system in front of each site, September 16, 2026 run.
| Provider | DataDome (19) | Akamai (20) | Cloudflare (15) | PerimeterX (9) | AWS WAF (6) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | 92.6% | 98.0% | 100% | 100% | 100% |
| Scrapfly | 92.6% | 81.0% | 90.7% | 84.4% | 96.7% |
| ScraperAPI | 82.1% | 92.0% | 89.3% | 88.9% | 83.3% |
| Firecrawl | 77.9% | 84.0% | 93.3% | 93.3% | 83.3% |
| Bright Data | 47.4% | 79.0% | 88.0% | 100% | 86.7% |
| Context.dev | 43.2% | 70.0% | 96.0% | 66.7% | 66.7% |
Scrapfly tied String on DataDome, its best column, and was second to String on AWS WAF. Akamai was its weakest large group, 17 points behind String. ScraperAPI and Firecrawl also beat it there.
Who returns the pages Scrapfly misses?
This is the number this page owns. It looks only at the 29 sites where Scrapfly missed at least one of its five attempts: 24 partial and 5 with nothing. The count below is the number of those sites where each alternative returned all five attempts.
| Provider | All five attempts on Scrapfly's 29 imperfect sites | Short of five on sites Scrapfly returned in full (of 71) |
|---|---|---|
| String | 26 | 4 |
| Firecrawl | 22 | 18 |
| Context.dev | 17 | 21 |
| ScraperAPI | 16 | 16 |
| Bright Data | 12 | 20 |
Read the two columns together. Every alternative fills some of Scrapfly's gaps. The four besides String each fall short on 16 to 21 sites that Scrapfly handled. Firecrawl, for example, fills 22 and drops 18, most of them social networks. String fills 26 and falls short on 4: Idealista at none, and Yelp, Autotrader and Allegro at four of five.
At least one of the five alternatives returned every attempt on 28 of the 29 sites. Temu was the exception. So a second provider behind Scrapfly can close almost all of its gaps, if the second provider does not open its own.
Why pricing is hard to compare across these providers
Seven differences make a single per-page number unreliable:
- The unit differs. Scrapfly, ScraperAPI, Firecrawl and Context.dev sell credits. String and Bright Data bill per successful request. Crawl4AI bills nothing and leaves the infrastructure bill to you.
- The credit is not constant. One Scrapfly request is 1 credit on a datacenter IP and 25 on residential. A ScraperAPI request is 1 to 30 credits by site, plus 10 for a bypass. Firecrawl and Context.dev charge one credit per page whatever the protection.
- Browsers are metered separately. Scrapfly adds 5 credits. String has its own browser rates. Context.dev charges 2 credits for browser actions.
- Output formats cost extra. JSON extraction adds 4 credits on Firecrawl and on Context.dev.
- What bills on failure differs. String, Bright Data and Scrapfly bill successes, with exceptions each vendor documents. Firecrawl bills a returned 403 or 404. ScraperAPI bills 200 and 404. Context.dev bills a 404.
- Prepaid balances behave differently. Scrapfly, ScraperAPI and Firecrawl credits reset each month. String credit rolls over.
- Some rates are not published. Scrapfly's shield fees and Bright Data's premium-domain rate appear only after you sign up.
What $100 a month buys
- String Growth, $99: $0.16 per 1,000 standard fetches, $0.90 premium, $0.80 browser, $3.25 browser on premium. Successful requests only. Credit rolls over.
- Scrapfly Pro, $100: 1,000,000 credits. $0.10 per 1,000 datacenter requests, $0.50 with the Unblocker or a browser, $2.50 residential, $3.00 residential with a browser. The configuration we tested starts at $2.50, before any shield fee.
- ScraperAPI: no $100 plan. Hobby, $49, is $0.49 per 1,000 standard pages. Startup, $149, is $0.15. A Cloudflare page costs 11 credits on both.
- Firecrawl Standard, $99: 100,000 credits, $0.99 per 1,000 pages at full use. About $1.23 per 1,000 usable pages at its benchmark rate, because a returned 403 or 404 bills.
- Bright Data: no plan near $100. Pay as you go is $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests; premium domains bill higher at an unpublished rate.
- Context.dev Pro, $90: 100,000 credits, $0.90 per 1,000 pages, protection included.
- Crawl4AI: $0 for the software.
String against Scrapfly at this level runs both ways. On a page that clears on a datacenter IP, Scrapfly is cheaper: $0.10 against $0.16. On a protected page, Scrapfly's Unblocker on a datacenter IP costs $0.50 against String's $0.90 premium fetch, so Scrapfly is cheaper there too, when that path works. In the residential configuration that scored 86.2%, Scrapfly costs $2.50 to $3.00, and String's premium fetch is cheaper. With a browser on a premium proxy, String's $3.25 is above Scrapfly's $3.00. Which rate a Scrapfly request lands on depends on what the Unblocker decides for that target.
Which Scrapfly alternative should you pick?
Pick String when a missing page breaks the product: retail, travel, ticketing or search pages on a schedule. It returned every attempt on 26 of Scrapfly's 29 imperfect sites, and it bills nothing for a blocked request.
Pick ScraperAPI when your list is mostly easy pages and you want the cost of each URL before you send it. Startup's $0.15 per 1,000 standard pages is the lowest standard-page rate among the alternatives.
Pick Firecrawl when the job is crawling documentation, blogs or company sites into markdown, and social networks are not on the list.
Pick Bright Data when you want proxies, datasets and unblocking under one enterprise contract, or your list is heavy on PerimeterX.
Pick Context.dev when you want one rate per page and your list has few DataDome sites.
Pick Crawl4AI when the budget is zero and you can run the proxy and browser layer yourself.
Stay on Scrapfly when you need a crawler, an extraction API, screenshots and a cloud browser on one key, when SOC 2 Type II is a procurement gate, or when your list is real estate and marketplaces, where it led the run. Idealista is one site where Scrapfly returned every attempt and String returned none.
Switching from Scrapfly to String
What carries over. A GET to api.scrapfly.io/scrape becomes a POST to https://request.usestring.ai/v1/fetch, with the key in an Authorization header instead of the query string. Keep the URL list. The page moves from result.content to data in String's JSON envelope; add "format": "markdown" or "format": "raw" to get the page as the whole body. render_js=true maps to "executeJS": true, country to countryCode, and js_scenario to String's browser actions. unblocker and proxy_pool have no String equivalent, because String picks the path per request.
What you rebuild. Scrapfly's Crawler API, its Extraction API templates and models, its scheduled jobs and webhooks, and its Cloud Browser session tools have no direct String equivalent. String's jsonSchema extracts into fields you name, /v1/fetch takes screenshots, and its remote browser takes Playwright or Puppeteer over CDP. Crawl jobs stay on Scrapfly or move to a job runner you already operate. Running both is a reasonable end state.
Integrations to reconnect. Scrapfly ships SDKs for Python, TypeScript, Go and Rust, a Scrapy integration, a hosted MCP server, and connectors for Zapier, Make, n8n, LangChain, LlamaIndex and CrewAI. 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. Take the URLs that fail on Scrapfly today, and the ones that land on residential or shield-fee credits, and run them through String. In the September run, String returned every attempt on 26 of the 29 sites Scrapfly missed. Compare pages returned and cost per usable page, then move only the targets that improve. Keep Idealista on Scrapfly. Leave custom headers off for the test, because a blocked request with custom headers bills. The first 20,000 String standard fetches are free with no card. The String vs Scrapfly page compares the two products in more depth.
FAQ
What is the best Scrapfly alternative for protected sites?
String. In the September 16, 2026 run it passed 97.0% of 500 requests against Scrapfly's 86.2%. It passed 100% on Cloudflare, PerimeterX and AWS WAF sites and 98.0% on Akamai, where Scrapfly reached 81.0%. The two tied on DataDome at 92.6%.
Who returns the pages Scrapfly misses?
Scrapfly missed at least one attempt on 29 of 100 sites. On those 29, String returned all five attempts on 26, Firecrawl on 22, Context.dev on 17, ScraperAPI on 16 and Bright Data on 12. Only Temu defeated all of them.
Is there a free Scrapfly alternative?
Crawl4AI is free and open source under Apache 2.0, but you supply the proxies, browsers and captcha handling. Among hosted APIs, String's first 20,000 standard fetches are free with no card. Bright Data gives 5,000 Web Unlocker requests a month, Firecrawl and Context.dev 1,000 credits a month, and ScraperAPI 1,000 credits plus a 7-day trial. Scrapfly's own free tier is 1,000 credits with no time limit.
What is the cheapest Scrapfly alternative?
It depends on how hard your pages are. On easy pages, ScraperAPI Startup is $0.15 per 1,000 and Scrapfly Pro is $0.10, both below String's $0.16. On protected pages, Context.dev is $0.90 flat and String's premium fetch is $0.90. A ScraperAPI Cloudflare page is $1.64 on Startup, and Scrapfly's residential configuration is $2.50 to $3.00. Bright Data is left out of any cheapest claim because its premium-domain rate is not published.
Which Scrapfly alternatives have an MCP server?
String, ScraperAPI, Firecrawl, Bright Data and Context.dev all publish one. Scrapfly runs a hosted MCP server too. String's is listed in the official MCP registry as ai.usestring/web-access, with fetch, search and sitemap tools. Crawl4AI is a library.
Is String cheaper than Scrapfly?
Sometimes. On a plain datacenter page, Scrapfly Pro is cheaper: $0.10 per 1,000 against String Growth's $0.16. On a protected page, Scrapfly's Unblocker on a datacenter IP is $0.50 against String's $0.90 premium fetch. In the residential configuration that scored 86.2%, Scrapfly is $2.50 to $3.00, and String is cheaper. String credit rolls over; Scrapfly credits reset each month.
When is Scrapfly still the better choice?
When you want a crawler, an extraction API, screenshots and a cloud browser on one key. When your compliance team needs SOC 2 Type II, which Scrapfly has and String does not. When your list is real estate or marketplaces, where Scrapfly led the run, or includes Idealista. And when most of your pages clear on a datacenter IP at $0.10 per 1,000.
Can I verify these numbers?
Yes. The harness, the 100 targets, the pass rule and every adapter are on GitHub, and the repository takes your own API keys. The September run file holds every attempt, and the live leaderboard shows the same numbers. A full run makes thousands of billable requests, so start with your own 20 sites.
Sources
Checked October 27, 2026.
- String, Web Data Frontier Benchmark: /benchmark and the September 2026 results post
- Benchmark harness repository
- September 16, 2026 run file
- Scrapfly adapter
- Firecrawl's adapter correction
- Scrapfly: pricing, Web Scraping API billing, account billing, Unblocker, scrape API getting started, MCP server, Python SDK
- String: pricing, fetch API reference, MCP docs, integrations, MCP registry entry
- ScraperAPI: pricing, credits and request costs, MCP server
- Firecrawl: pricing, billing docs, MCP server, repository
- Bright Data: Web Unlocker pricing, Web Unlocker features, MCP server
- Context.dev: pricing, MCP install
- Crawl4AI: repository, documentation
- Related String pages: best web scraping APIs, Firecrawl alternatives, ScraperAPI alternatives, Bright Data alternatives