Best ScrapingBee 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 and billing rules were checked against each vendor's own pages on October 27, 2026.
What is the best ScrapingBee alternative?
The best ScrapingBee alternatives in 2026 are String, Scrapfly, ScraperAPI, Firecrawl and Zyte for a hosted web scraping API, and Crawl4AI if you want free software you run yourself. In the September 2026 Web Data Frontier Benchmark, String returned verified content on 97.0% of 500 requests across 100 bot-protected sites. ScrapingBee returned 73.0% and placed seventh of 16. Scrapfly placed second at 86.2%, ScraperAPI third at 84.0%, Firecrawl fourth at 80.2% and Zyte eleventh at 68.0%.
String is the pick when a fixed list of protected pages must come back on every run. Scrapfly is the closest match to ScrapingBee's credit model with a higher success rate. ScraperAPI has the same key-and-URL shape and the third-best score. Firecrawl is the fastest route from a URL to markdown for an LLM. Zyte prices each site by a difficulty tier it sets for you. Crawl4AI is free if you supply the proxies. This page compares all seven tools on benchmark success, latency, pricing at $100 a month, and MCP support.
TL;DR
- ScrapingBee returned 73.0% (365 of 500) on its Auto Mode configuration. It returned all five attempts on 60 sites, some on 21 and none on 19.
- String returned 97.0% (485 of 500), the highest of 16, with the fastest latency score at 7.06 seconds. ScrapingBee's latency score was 21.96 seconds, fourteenth.
- ScrapingBee missed attempts on 29 sites for a reason other than a redirect code. It returned 62 of the 145 attempts there. String returned 131 and Scrapfly 117. Every one of those sites except Temu came back in full from at least one alternative on this page.
- ScrapingBee bills 200, 404 and 410 responses, and its plan credits are valid for one month and do not roll over. Auto Mode bills only the tier that worked.
- At $99 a month, ScrapingBee Startup costs $0.10 per 1,000 pages on its cheapest tier and $7.43 on its stealth tier. String Growth costs $0.16 per 1,000 standard fetches and $3.25 for its most expensive path.
- Crawl4AI is the free option: Apache 2.0, self-hosted, and you pay for proxies and browsers.
- The benchmark harness is public and runs with your own API keys.
ScrapingBee alternatives at a glance
| Provider | Best for | Benchmark success | Latency score | What $100 a month buys (per 1,000) | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | A fixed list of protected pages that must return every run | 97.0% | 7.06s | Growth, $99: $0.16 standard fetch, $0.90 premium fetch, $0.80 to $3.25 with a browser | No crawl endpoint, no language SDKs, no SOC 2 report |
| ScrapingBee | Known sites that already work, at a low prepaid unit price | 73.0% | 21.96s | Startup, $99: $0.10 to $7.43 by tier | 19 sites returned nothing; credits expire monthly |
| Scrapfly | ScrapingBee's credit model with a higher success rate | 86.2% | 19.79s | Pro, $100: $0.10 to $2.50 by configuration | 24 partial sites, the most in the top three |
| ScraperAPI | The same key-and-URL shape, with the third-best score | 84.0% | 12.97s | No $100 plan. Startup, $149: $0.15 standard, $4.47 on the tier tested | Domain and bypass multipliers; credits reset |
| Firecrawl | Speed and markdown for LLM pipelines | 80.2% | 9.11s | Standard, $99: $0.99 per page, protected or not | A returned 403 or 404 page costs a credit |
| Zyte | One API that picks the proxy tier per site | 68.0% | 17.46s | $100 commitment: $0.10 to $0.95 HTTP, $0.75 to $12.00 browser | Zyte sets the tier, so the rate is a range |
| Crawl4AI | Teams that already run proxies | Not tested | Not tested | $0 for the software | You build and run the anti-bot layer |
The latency score is the per-site 75th percentile of successful attempts. A site a provider never returned takes the 75th percentile of the providers that did, so a fast failure earns nothing.
Why people leave ScrapingBee
Hard sites
ScrapingBee returned all five attempts on 60 of the 100 sites, some attempts on 21 and nothing on 19. String's figures on the same sites are 93, 5 and 2. Eight of ScrapingBee's 19 were recorded as a redirect on every attempt, and the method section explains why that matters.
The partial group is the one that costs money in production. A site that returns three times in five does not look like a failure in a log. It looks like a hole in the dataset, and the fix is retries.
Speed is the other complaint. ScrapingBee's latency score was 21.96 seconds, fourteenth of 16. Thirty-two of its 135 failed attempts ran the full 90-second timeout, five each on Allegro, the Wall Street Journal and CarGurus.
On the anti-bot cut, ScrapingBee is strong on Cloudflare (92.0% of requests) and weakest on Akamai (63.0%), DataDome (64.2%) and AWS WAF (63.3%). Akamai and DataDome protect 39 of the 100 sites.
Pricing
ScrapingBee's list price is low. Startup is $99 a month for 1,000,000 API credits and 100 concurrent requests, excluding VAT.
The number to check is credits per page. ScrapingBee's credit table charges 1 credit for a classic proxy without JavaScript, 5 with JavaScript, 10 for a premium proxy, 25 for premium with JavaScript and 75 for stealth. JavaScript rendering is on by default, so a request with no options costs 5 credits. The stealth tier costs 75 times the cheapest.
Auto Mode picks the tier for you and bills only the configuration that works. ScrapingBee's post says: "If none of the available configurations work, the request costs 0 credits." Auto Mode is GET only, and max_cost caps the tiers it tries.
Two terms to read before you commit. The pricing page says "API credits are valid for one month and don't roll over." The FAQ says ScrapingBee charges for responses "returning with a 200, 404 or 410 status code," so a dead URL spends credits.
How we tested these web scraping APIs
The September 16, 2026 run sent 100 bot-protected URLs to 16 providers, five attempts each, 500 requests per provider, with a 90-second timeout. A request passes only on a 2xx status and a marker string from the real page, per the harness's pass rule. A challenge page that returns HTTP 200 fails. The full ranking of all 16 web scraping APIs uses the same run.
We built the benchmark and we sell the product that ranks first in it. The harness, the target list, the pass rule and every adapter are public, and the repository takes your own keys. One vendor has used that path: a Firecrawl engineer opened a pull request against our adapter, and their score went up on the rerun.
September is the first run with each provider at its strongest published setting. The ScrapingBee adapter sends mode=auto with max_cost=75, so Auto Mode could climb all the way to the stealth tier. In August the adapter sent the default 5-credit path, and ScrapingBee scored 29.7%. The 73.0% is the product at full strength, and the August number measured our adapter.
Two caveats belong to ScrapingBee's side of the argument, and we state them here.
The first is redirects. Of ScrapingBee's 135 failed attempts, 48 on 11 sites were recorded as a redirect status (301, 302 or 307). The adapter reads ScrapingBee's initial-status-code field. ScrapingBee's documentation calls it "the initial status code returned by the scraped page" and says it is useful "when the page redirects." The harness fails any status outside 2xx. We have not confirmed whether those responses carried the real page. If all of them did, ScrapingBee's rate would be 82.6%. This page leaves those 11 sites out of the gap analysis below.
The second is timeouts. ScrapingBee's default request timeout is 140 seconds and the harness stops at 90. Thirty-two attempts hit that limit.
The other adapters: String sends the URL and lets the service choose the path. Scrapfly pins its anti-bot mode and the residential pool. ScraperAPI sends ultra_premium=true, its 30-credit bypass tier. Firecrawl stays on its default auto proxy mode. Zyte requests the HTTP response body and picks the rest itself.
String vs ScrapingBee: 97.0% vs 73.0%, and no credit tier to choose
String's Web Access API is one HTTP call per URL. Proxy class, rendering, captcha handling and retries happen behind the endpoint.
Pricing. Growth is $99 a month, and the fee is added to your balance as usage. Per 1,000 successful requests it bills $0.16 for a standard fetch, $0.90 for a premium fetch, $0.80 for a browser on a standard proxy and $3.25 for a browser on a premium proxy. Unused credit rolls over. Blocked requests and errors on String's side are not billed. A 404 from the site is billed, and so is a request with custom headers that the site blocks. The free tier is $5 of credit, which covers 20,000 standard fetches, with no card.
Benchmark success. 97.0%, 485 of 500, first of 16. All five attempts on 93 sites, some on 5, none on 2 (Temu and Idealista). No provider in the run returned Temu.
Latency. 7.06 seconds, the fastest latency score of the 16.
Strengths. Consistency per site. There is no site in the run where ScrapingBee returned all five attempts and String returned none. String led or tied every anti-bot column in the table below. It also runs search, an asynchronous sitemap crawl and a remote browser over CDP, and its MCP server is listed in the official registry as ai.usestring/web-access.
Weaknesses. No crawl-to-content endpoint, no language SDKs, and no SOC 2 report. String has no dedicated Google, Amazon or Walmart parsers like ScrapingBee's. Its browser-on-premium path costs more than ScrapingBee's 25-credit tier.
Try it 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.example.com/the-page-that-fails", "format": "markdown"}'
Leave out format and the page comes back in a JSON envelope, which is the default.
Crawl4AI vs ScrapingBee: a library you host against an API you call
Pricing. Free. Crawl4AI is Apache 2.0 with more than 86,000 GitHub stars. The running costs are yours: proxies, browser servers and captcha solving.
Benchmark success. Not tested. Crawl4AI is a library, not a hosted endpoint, so the harness cannot rank it. Its success rate is whatever your proxies deliver.
Latency. Not tested, for the same reason.
Strengths. No per-request bill and no credit table. It produces markdown for LLM pipelines and ships MCP integration. For a team with a residential proxy contract, it removes a vendor.
Weaknesses. Everything ScrapingBee sells as a service becomes your job: proxy rotation, fingerprints, retries, captcha solving, and the on-call work when a site changes its defenses. It suits a team with a scraping specialist, not a team that wants a URL in and a page out.
Scrapfly vs ScrapingBee: 86.2% vs 73.0% at the same $100 anchor
Pricing. Scrapfly Pro is $100 a month for 1,000,000 credits, $0.10 per 1,000 credits. A datacenter HTTP scrape is 1 credit, JavaScript or the Unblocker is 5, and residential proxies take it to 25. That is $0.10, $0.50 and $2.50 per 1,000 pages. The pricing page says failed requests are "never charged on error." Quotas reset at renewal, and overage on Pro is $3.50 per 10,000 credits.
Benchmark success. 86.2%, 431 of 500, second of 16. All five attempts on 71 sites, some on 24, none on 5.
Latency. 19.79 seconds, eleventh of 16, and the slowest of the top four.
Strengths. The second-best success rate, with credit arithmetic close to ScrapingBee's, so a migration changes little in your cost model. It returned 117 of the 145 attempts on the sites ScrapingBee missed, and it returned Allegro and Idealista in full where String did not. It runs a hosted MCP server and SDKs in four languages.
Weaknesses. 24 partial sites, the widest flaky band of the top three. The adapter ran on the residential pool, which is the 25-credit tier, so Scrapfly's score is not its 1-credit price. Best Buy is the one site where ScrapingBee returned every attempt and Scrapfly returned none.
ScraperAPI vs ScrapingBee: the same shape, with a 30-credit tier behind the score
Pricing. ScraperAPI has no plan near $100. Hobby is $49 for 100,000 credits and Startup is $149 for 1,000,000; Startup is the nearer of the two. A standard page is 1 credit. Amazon, Walmart and eBay are 5, Google and Bing 25, LinkedIn 30. The docs list a Cloudflare, DataDome, PerimeterX or Akamai bypass at 10 credits. ScraperAPI charges for 200 and 404 responses, and its credits reset at renewal.
Benchmark success. 84.0%, 420 of 500, third of 16. All five attempts on 71 sites, some on 20, none on 9.
Latency. 12.97 seconds, third of 16.
Strengths. The closest thing to ScrapingBee in shape: a key and a URL, a published credit table, a domain cost lookup, a max_cost cap and an MCP server. It led this group on Akamai after String, at 92.0%.
Weaknesses. The score came from ultra_premium=true, which the docs price at 30 credits a request. That is $4.47 per 1,000 on Startup and $14.70 on Hobby. ScrapingBee returned five sites in full where ScraperAPI returned none: G2, GoodRx, X, Instagram and Facebook. The full page is at ScraperAPI alternatives.
Firecrawl vs ScrapingBee: faster, and it bills a returned error page
Pricing. Firecrawl Standard is $99 a month billed monthly ($83 billed annually) for 100,000 credits. A scrape is 1 credit, so $0.99 per 1,000 pages. The enhanced proxy adds nothing, and the JSON format adds 4 credits a page. Plan credits do not roll over below Scale.
Benchmark success. 80.2%, 401 of 500, fourth of 16. All five attempts on 75 sites, some on 8, none on 17.
Latency. 9.11 seconds, second of 16.
Strengths. The fastest provider after String, and the shortest path from a URL to markdown an LLM can read. It also crawls whole sites, which ScrapingBee does through its CLI. Its MCP server is hosted and mature.
Weaknesses. Firecrawl's billing docs charge 1 credit for a page that comes back "with an error status such as 403 Forbidden or 404 Not Found." At its 80.2% rate, $0.99 per 1,000 attempts is up to $1.23 per 1,000 usable pages. Social media is its gap: ScrapingBee returned LinkedIn, Instagram, Reddit, Facebook and Pinterest in full, and Firecrawl returned none of them. The full page is at Firecrawl alternatives.
Zyte vs ScrapingBee: Zyte picks the tier, ScrapingBee lets Auto Mode climb
Pricing. Zyte prices each website in five tiers and assigns the tier itself. At a $100 monthly commitment the HTTP path runs $0.10 to $0.95 per 1,000 responses and the browser path $0.75 to $12.00. Zyte's pricing docs say "You are only charged for successful responses." They also say Zyte reviews tier assignments quarterly, with two weeks' notice of a change. New accounts get a $5 credit.
Benchmark success. 68.0%, 340 of 500, eleventh of 16. All five attempts on 57 sites, some on 17, none on 26.
Latency. 17.46 seconds, seventh of 16.
Strengths. You see a price for a URL before you run it, and you never choose a proxy class. Zyte led this group on Kasada, 100% on three sites, and tied ScraperAPI on PerimeterX at 88.9%. It now lists an MCP server for building and running crawls.
Weaknesses. It scored below ScrapingBee overall. ScrapingBee returned ten sites in full where Zyte returned none, including Lowe's, Best Buy, LinkedIn and Kroger. A rate set by tier cannot be budgeted to one number. The full page is at Zyte alternatives.
Which ScrapingBee alternative handles Cloudflare and DataDome best?
Success rate by the anti-bot system in front of each site, September 16, 2026 run.
| Provider | DataDome (19 sites) | 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% |
| ScrapingBee | 64.2% | 63.0% | 92.0% | 80.0% | 63.3% |
| Zyte | 50.5% | 64.0% | 58.7% | 88.9% | 30.0% |
ScrapingBee's Cloudflare number is respectable at 92.0%, ahead of Scrapfly and ScraperAPI. Akamai is the column to read: 20 sites, the largest group in the suite, and ScrapingBee returned 63.0% of requests there. On DataDome, Scrapfly tied String at 92.6%.
Which alternative returns the pages ScrapingBee misses?
This is the question a buyer actually has. You are not replacing ScrapingBee on the sites where it works. You want the sites where it does not.
We took every site where ScrapingBee missed at least one of its five attempts, and left out the 11 sites where its misses were recorded as redirect codes. That leaves 29 sites and 145 attempts. ScrapingBee returned 62 of them.
| Provider | Attempts returned (of 145) | Sites returned in full (of 29) |
|---|---|---|
| String | 131 | 23 |
| Scrapfly | 117 | 18 |
| ScraperAPI | 113 | 16 |
| Firecrawl | 101 | 16 |
| Zyte | 67 | 10 |
| ScrapingBee | 62 | 0 |
ScrapingBee returned nothing on 10 of the 29: Allegro, Zara, AutoTrader, Mouser, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, CarGurus, Google Search, Apartments.com and Temu. String returned 7 of those 10 in full and 4 of 5 attempts on Allegro and AutoTrader. Temu returned nothing for anyone.
No single alternative covers the whole list. Scrapfly returned Allegro and Idealista in full, which String did not. Firecrawl and Zyte returned Zara in full, which Scrapfly did not. But every one of the 29 sites except Temu came back in full from at least one tool on this page. A failing ScrapingBee URL has a home somewhere.
The practical reading is a routing plan, not a swap. Keep ScrapingBee where it returns every attempt, send its misses to the alternative that returns them, and measure on your own URLs.
Why pricing is hard to compare across these providers
- The unit differs. String bills per successful request at the rate of the path it used. ScrapingBee, Scrapfly, ScraperAPI and Firecrawl sell credits. Zyte bills per successful response at a tier it assigns.
- A credit is not a page. ScrapingBee charges 1 to 75 credits for the same URL, Scrapfly 1 to 25 for a scrape, and ScraperAPI 1 to 75 depending on domain and parameters.
- Browser work is priced differently. ScrapingBee adds 4 credits for JavaScript. String bills a browser request at its own rate per 1,000. Zyte's browser tier runs up to $12.00 per 1,000.
- Output formats carry surcharges. ScrapingBee's AI query adds 5 credits. Firecrawl's JSON format adds 4 per page.
- What counts as billable differs. ScrapingBee bills 200, 404 and 410. ScraperAPI bills 200 and 404. Firecrawl bills a returned 403 or 404 page. Scrapfly says upstream 4xx and 5xx responses are free, and Zyte bills successful responses only. String bills a site's 404 and does not bill a blocked request.
- Prepaid balances behave differently. String's credit rolls over. ScrapingBee's plan credits last one month. Scrapfly and ScraperAPI quotas reset at renewal, and Firecrawl's do too below its Scale plan.
- The top of every price ladder is a sales call, so the rates on this page stop before the volumes large teams buy at.
What $100 a month buys
- String (Growth, $99): $99 of usage. $0.16 per 1,000 standard fetches, $0.90 premium fetch, $0.80 standard browser, $3.25 premium browser. Blocked requests are free, and credit rolls over.
- ScrapingBee (Startup, $99, 1,000,000 credits): $0.10 per 1,000 on a classic proxy without JavaScript, $0.50 with JavaScript, $0.99 premium, $2.48 premium with JavaScript, $7.43 stealth. Billed on 200, 404 and 410. Credits last one month.
- Scrapfly (Pro, $100, 1,000,000 credits): $0.10 plain HTTP, $0.50 with JavaScript or the Unblocker, $2.50 with residential proxies. Failures are free.
- ScraperAPI: no plan near $100. Startup, $149: $0.15 per 1,000 standard pages and $4.47 on the 30-credit tier the benchmark used. Hobby, $49: $0.49 and $14.70.
- Firecrawl (Standard, $99, 100,000 credits): $0.99 per 1,000 pages, protected or not, and up to $1.23 per usable page at its benchmark rate, because a returned 403 or 404 bills.
- Zyte ($100 commitment): $0.10 to $0.95 per 1,000 HTTP responses, $0.75 to $12.00 per 1,000 browser responses, by tier.
- Crawl4AI: $0 for the software, plus your proxies and servers.
String against ScrapingBee at this level runs both ways. On a page that works on a cheap path, ScrapingBee is cheaper: $0.10 against String's $0.16 without JavaScript, and $0.50 against String's $0.80 for a rendered page. On a premium proxy without a browser, String is cheaper at $0.90 against $0.99. With premium and JavaScript together, ScrapingBee is cheaper at $2.48 against $3.25. On a page that only ScrapingBee's stealth tier returns, String is cheaper at $3.25 against $7.43. The mix of your sites decides the bill, and a page that never returns has no unit price.
Which ScrapingBee alternative should you pick?
Pick String when a known list of protected pages has to come back the same way on every run, and you want to pay only for pages that return. It led the run by 10.8 points and returned 131 of the 145 attempts on the sites ScrapingBee missed.
Pick Scrapfly when you like ScrapingBee's credit arithmetic and want a higher success rate at the same $100. Accept slower responses and more partial sites than String.
Pick ScraperAPI when you want the same key-and-URL shape and a higher score, and you can price your targets on its 30-credit tier first.
Pick Firecrawl when speed and markdown matter more than the last points of coverage, and your list is not social media.
Pick Zyte when you would rather not choose a proxy class at all, you already run Scrapy, and a rate that is a range works for you.
Pick Crawl4AI when you already run proxies and have someone who can own a scraping stack.
Stay on ScrapingBee when your sites already return on its cheap tiers, prepaid unit price is what you optimize, or you use its dedicated Google, Amazon, Walmart and YouTube APIs. It returned 97.5% of requests on the eight social sites, ahead of ScraperAPI, Firecrawl and Zyte. Auto Mode with a max_cost cap is a good way to control spend. It also ships a CLI and a hosted MCP server.
Switching from ScrapingBee to String
What carries over. A GET to app.scrapingbee.com/api/v1 becomes a POST to https://request.usestring.ai/v1/fetch with a bearer key. Keep the URL list and the code that reads HTML. return_page_markdown=true maps to "format": "markdown", which you must set because String returns a JSON envelope by default. render_js maps to executeJS, and extract_rules or ai_extract_rules map to a jsonSchema. mode=auto, premium_proxy and stealth_proxy have no String equivalent, because String picks the path for every request.
What you rebuild. ScrapingBee's dedicated Google, Fast Search, Amazon, Walmart, YouTube and ChatGPT APIs, Proxy Mode, and CLI crawls. String's search endpoint returns live Google results, and its sitemap crawl lists a site's URLs for you to fetch one by one. It returns pages, not parsed retail records. If a dedicated ScrapingBee API is doing the job, keep ScrapingBee for it.
Integrations to reconnect. ScrapingBee publishes SDKs, a CLI, a hosted MCP server and integrations for n8n, Make and LangChain. 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 guides in String's docs.
Test on your own failing URLs first. Take the URLs that fail on ScrapingBee today, and the ones that only return on the 75-credit stealth tier, and run them through String. Compare pages returned and cost per usable page, then move only the URLs that improve. Leave custom headers off for the test, because String bills a blocked request that sent custom headers. The free tier covers 20,000 standard fetches with no card. The String vs ScrapingBee page compares the two products in more depth.
FAQ
What is the best ScrapingBee alternative for Cloudflare-protected sites?
String. In the September 2026 benchmark it returned 100% of requests on the 15 Cloudflare-protected sites. Firecrawl returned 93.3%, ScrapingBee 92.0%, Scrapfly 90.7% and ScraperAPI 89.3%. On Akamai, the largest group with 20 sites, String returned 98.0% and ScrapingBee 63.0%.
Which alternative returns the sites ScrapingBee fails on?
String returned the most. On 29 sites where ScrapingBee missed attempts for a reason other than a redirect code, ScrapingBee returned 62 of 145 attempts. String returned 131, Scrapfly 117, ScraperAPI 113, Firecrawl 101 and Zyte 67. Every one of those sites except Temu came back in full from at least one of them.
Is there a free ScrapingBee alternative?
Crawl4AI is free and open source under Apache 2.0, and you supply the proxies. Among hosted APIs, String's free tier covers 20,000 standard fetches with no card. Firecrawl gives 1,000 credits a month, Scrapfly 1,000 credits, ScraperAPI 1,000 credits plus a 7-day trial with 5,000, and Zyte a $5 credit. ScrapingBee itself gives 1,000 free credits with no card.
What is the cheapest ScrapingBee alternative?
On a plain page, none of them beats ScrapingBee's $0.10 per 1,000. Scrapfly and Zyte's lowest tier match it at $0.10, and String's standard fetch is $0.16. On protected pages it depends on the tier each site needs: String's premium fetch is $0.90 and its top path $3.25, Scrapfly's residential tier $2.50, and ScrapingBee's stealth tier $7.43.
Which ScrapingBee alternatives have an MCP server?
String is listed in the MCP registry as ai.usestring/web-access, with fetch, search and sitemap tools. Scrapfly, ScraperAPI, Firecrawl and Zyte each list an MCP server, and Crawl4AI ships MCP integration. ScrapingBee hosts one too.
Is String cheaper than ScrapingBee?
Sometimes. On cheap paths ScrapingBee is cheaper: $0.10 against $0.16 for a plain page, $0.50 against $0.80 for a rendered one, and $2.48 against $3.25 for premium with JavaScript. String is cheaper for a premium fetch without a browser ($0.90 against $0.99) and for any page that needs ScrapingBee's stealth tier ($3.25 against $7.43). String's credit rolls over, and ScrapingBee's plan credits last one month.
When is ScrapingBee still the better choice?
When your sites already return on its 1-credit or 5-credit tiers, or when you need its dedicated Google, Amazon, Walmart or YouTube APIs. It returned 97.5% on the eight social sites in the run. Auto Mode bills only the tier that works, and max_cost puts a ceiling on each request.
Can I verify these benchmark numbers myself?
Yes. The harness, the target list, the pass rule and every adapter are public, and it runs with your own keys. The September 16 run file holds every attempt, and the leaderboard shows the same numbers. If you think an adapter is set up badly, open a pull request.
Sources
Checked October 27, 2026 unless noted.
- String, Web Data Frontier Benchmark: /benchmark and the September 2026 results post
- Benchmark harness repository and its pass rule
- September 16, 2026 run file
- Adapters: ScrapingBee, String, Scrapfly, ScraperAPI, Firecrawl, Zyte
- ScrapingBee pricing, FAQ, documentation, credit system, Auto Mode
- String pricing and fetch API reference
- Scrapfly pricing and billing docs
- ScraperAPI pricing and credit costs
- Firecrawl pricing, billing docs and adapter pull request
- Zyte pricing and pricing docs
- Crawl4AI repository
- Related String pages: String vs ScrapingBee, String vs Scrapfly, ScraperAPI alternatives, Firecrawl alternatives, best web scraping APIs