Context.dev is the strongest low-cost challenger in this comparison. It placed third for coverage in the open Web Data Frontier Benchmark, passed 79.2% of requests, and includes JavaScript rendering, anti-bot bypass, and premium proxies in one credit per standard page. String passed 97.0%, finished 2.70 seconds ahead on the failure-aware latency score, and turned 14 of Context.dev's 16 complete misses into usable pages. Pick Context.dev when a broad agent-data API and predictable prepaid credits matter most. Pick String when protected-page coverage matters most.
TL;DR
| String | Context.dev | |
|---|---|---|
| Product type | Fetch, search, sitemap, and remote browser | Web scraping, crawling, extraction, monitors, and brand intelligence |
| Benchmark success rate | 97.0% (480/495) | 79.2% (392/495) |
| Latency score | 9.98s, second of 15 | 12.68s, fourth of 15 |
| Per-target outcome | 92 perfect, 5 partial, 2 zero | 73 perfect, 10 partial, 16 zero |
| Anti-bot highlights | 100% Cloudflare, Kasada, and Fastly | 90.7% Cloudflare, 83.0% Akamai, 100% Fastly |
| Billing | Per successful request, with credits that roll over | Prepaid monthly credits; standard page scrape is one credit, blocked requests are free |
| Entry paid plan | $20/month plus usage | $25/month for 10,000 credits |
| Agent tooling | Hosted MCP, HTTP API | Hosted OAuth MCP, CLI, SDKs, API |
| Where it wins | Protected-page coverage, latency score, pay-as-you-go standard fetch | Flat protected-page rate, broader enrichment surface, Booking.com in this run |
We built the Web Data Frontier Benchmark and sell the product that ranks first. The answer to that conflict is reproducibility: the 99 targets and pass criteria, every provider adapter, and the August results JSON are public. The harness uses real API keys and a request passes only when the response contains an expected marker from the real page. A captcha page with HTTP 200 fails.
The Context.dev adapter calls its Scrape HTML endpoint with the target URL and maxAgeMs: 0, which forces a live scrape. Context.dev automatically escalates proxies and bypass handling on that endpoint. The adapter did not set a country, selectors, wait time, or browser actions. That tests Context.dev's automatic standard path, not every manual control its current endpoint supports.
If Context.dev believes another configuration is fairer, the adapter is one file and a pull request changes the next run. That process has precedent: a Firecrawl engineer corrected its adapter in benchmark pull request 6, and the following run raised Firecrawl's result by 7.7 points.
Pricing and product claims were checked against live first-party pages on August 31, 2026. Benchmark figures are from the August 11 run.
Context.dev has grown beyond a page scraper. Its web surface includes raw HTML, clean Markdown, image extraction, screenshots, sitemap discovery, site crawling, web search, structured extraction, document parsing, and batch processing. The same account also exposes brand, product, people, news, NAICS, and SIC data.
Its hosted MCP server exposes those operations to Claude, Codex, ChatGPT, Cursor, and other clients through OAuth. It can also create and run website monitors, so Context.dev is a broader context and enrichment platform than String.
String is narrower. Send one URL to the fetch endpoint and get Markdown, HTML, or JSON back. Proxy rotation, rendering, retries, and captcha handling escalate behind that endpoint. String also has live search, asynchronous sitemap crawling, a remote browser over CDP, and MCP. The product is built around one promise: get the requested page back, and bill only when content returns.
The benchmark sent 15 providers the same 99 URLs five times each. Most targets are protected retail, travel, news, real-estate, and social pages.
| Provider | Successful requests | Success rate | Latency score |
|---|---|---|---|
| String | 480/495 | 97.0% | 9.98s |
| Scrapfly | 406/495 | 82.0% | 18.35s |
| Context.dev | 392/495 | 79.2% | 12.68s |
| Firecrawl | 389/495 | 78.6% | 9.21s |
| Bright Data | 386/495 | 78.0% | 26.14s |
Context.dev placed third for success, 17.8 points behind String and 1.2 points behind Scrapfly. Its 12.68-second latency score placed fourth of 15, behind Firecrawl at 9.21, String at 9.98, and Scrapingdog at 12.51.
The latency score does not reward fast failures. For each target it uses the p75 of successful attempts. A complete miss inherits that target's p75 from providers that returned content, or the 90-second timeout when nobody succeeded. That is why coverage and speed can be read together.
Context.dev's clearest result deserves the same space as its misses. It passed Booking.com on all five attempts. String passed four. That made Booking.com the only target where Context.dev beat String outright.
Context.dev also went 5/5 across all jobs and careers, home and DIY, social media, and ticketing targets. Its automatic path posted 90.7% against Cloudflare, 83.0% against Akamai, 74.7% against DataDome, and 100% against the single Fastly target. Those are strong results for a standard one-credit scrape with no premium-mode switch.
Per-target outcomes make the 17.8-point gap concrete.
| Outcome across 99 sites | String | Context.dev |
|---|---|---|
| Passed all 5 attempts | 92 | 73 |
| Passed 1 to 4 attempts | 5 | 10 |
| Passed none | 2 | 16 |
Context.dev returned nothing on Temu, Safeway, Trustpilot, Crunchbase, Realtor.com, Skyscanner, Louis Vuitton, Yelp, Hyatt, Neiman Marcus, Canada Goose, Coupang, Idealista, WSJ, Google Search, and arXiv. String passed 12 of those 16 on all five attempts and passed Neiman Marcus and Coupang four times each. Temu and Skyscanner stopped both providers.
The anti-bot split explains much of it. Context.dev reached 90.7% on Cloudflare and 83.0% on Akamai, but String reached 100% and 98.0%. Context.dev's weakest named wall was Kasada at 33.3%; String passed every Kasada request. DataDome was 74.7% against String's 97.9%, and PerimeterX was 73.3% against 88.9%.
Context.dev's pricing is unusually clean. Developer costs $25 per month for 10,000 credits. Pro costs $149 for 200,000. Scale costs $499 for 1 million. Standard HTML or Markdown scraping costs one credit per successful page, with JavaScript rendering, anti-bot bypass, and premium proxies included. Failed or blocked requests are not billed. Browser-action calls cost two credits.
Paid overage arrives in 10,000-credit blocks: $15 on Developer, $9 on Pro, and $7 on Scale. The free account includes 250 one-time credits for a personal email or 500 for a work email. It is a test allowance, not a monthly free tier.
String's pricing starts at $20 per month. Growth is $100 per month, then $0.20 per 1,000 successful standard fetches or $2.00 per 1,000 successful premium fetches. Browser paths cost more. Credits roll over and a blocked request is free.
At 100,000 calls against the benchmark target mix, the published terms produce this comparison:
| Assumption | Monthly cost | Cost per 1,000 usable pages | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Context.dev Developer | 79,200 successful pages use 10,000 included credits plus seven overage blocks | $130.00 | $1.64 |
| String Growth, standard fetch | 97,000 successful pages at $0.20/1k, plus plan | $119.40 | $1.23 |
| String Growth, premium fetch | 97,000 successful pages at $2.00/1k, plus plan | $294.00 | $3.03 |
This table is a model, not a bill. String chooses a request path based on what the target needs, so a real workload mixes standard and premium rates. Context.dev's major pricing advantage is that protected handling does not change the one-credit standard-page price. String is cheaper when most pages use its standard fetch path. Context.dev is cheaper when most String requests would need premium fetches, and its Pro allowance gets more efficient as usage approaches 200,000 successful pages.
For an agent that needs more than page content, Context.dev has the broader toolbox. Its Markdown endpoint can strip page chrome, its crawl endpoint follows same-domain links, and its AI query endpoint crawls a site to fill requested data points. The platform also offers brand profiles, styleguides, fonts, products, people enrichment, news, monitors, and document parsing.
The MCP server turns that breadth into agent tools for scraping, searching, extracting, parsing, enriching, and monitoring. Context.dev also documents zero-data-retention controls, and its changelog lists SOC 2 Type I compliance.
String is the better fit when page retrieval is the bottleneck and the surrounding enrichment belongs in your own pipeline. Context.dev is the better fit when one vendor should supply page content and a catalog of higher-level context operations.
Context.dev is better for a broad context platform and a flat protected-page credit. String is better for fetch reliability in this benchmark: 97.0% against 79.2%, with 2 complete misses against 16. Context.dev did win Booking.com 5/5 to 4/5.
It depends on String's request path. Context.dev Pro is $149 for 200,000 credits, and a standard page costs one credit with protected handling included. String Growth is $100 plus $0.20 per 1,000 standard fetches or $2.00 per 1,000 premium fetches. String is cheaper on mostly standard traffic; Context.dev is cheaper than mostly premium String traffic.
No. Its pricing page says failed or blocked requests are not billed. String also bills only successful requests.
Often. Context.dev passed 90.7% of requests across 15 Cloudflare-protected targets. String passed 100%. Against Akamai the result was 83.0% to 98.0%, and against Kasada it was 33.3% to 100%.
The public adapter called GET /v1/web/scrape/html with the target URL and maxAgeMs: 0. It used Context.dev's automatic proxy escalation and bypass path, without country selection, wait time, selectors, or browser actions.
Yes. Context.dev runs a hosted OAuth MCP server for Claude, Codex, ChatGPT, Cursor, VS Code, and other compatible clients. It exposes scraping, crawling, search, extraction, parsing, enrichment, and monitor tools.
Use Context.dev when you want predictable prepaid credits and one API for scraping, crawling, structured extraction, brand intelligence, documents, and monitoring. Use String when the core job is getting difficult public pages back at the highest measured coverage.
Run the open-source benchmark with your own keys. The results file, target markers, and both adapters are public. Start with your own target subset because a full run makes thousands of billable calls.
