Web scraping APIs: 6 providers, pricing and comparisons

Compare providers

6 providers, compared by integration fit rather than an untested score
Provider	Best fit	Billing model
Firecrawl	An agent or retrieval pipeline that wants main-content documents without building a separate HTML-to-Markdown stage.	Credit plans with feature-specific consumption
Bright Data	An authorized retrieval workload needing an explicit zone configuration and a clear boundary between page access and structured platform-specific extraction.	Product-specific usage and successful-request pricing
ScrapingBee	A team that wants to start with page retrieval and add explicit wait conditions or selector-based extraction.	Credit allowances with configuration-dependent costs
ScraperAPI	An existing HTTP collection pipeline that wants managed page retrieval while retaining its own parsing and validation.	Credit-based plans with feature multipliers
Zyte API	A collector that needs to choose between raw HTTP retrieval, rendered content and structured extraction while retaining request-level controls.	Usage pricing by request tier and selected capabilities
Apify	A recurring or site-specific collection job that benefits from an existing Actor or a custom hosted scraper.	Platform usage plus Actor-specific pricing

The order is not a performance ranking. The right shortlist depends on the output, coverage and license you need.

Which workload are you building?

Define acceptance criteria before evaluating a provider
Workload	What to specify
Documents for an agent	Clean main-content text, source URLs and stable metadata. A 200 response containing a challenge page is a failed extraction.
Structured records	A versioned schema, missing-field rules and validation against an authorized, known-answer page set.
Recurring collection	Job state, retries, incremental collection and a defined output dataset. Browser execution and data storage may have separate costs.

Every provider comparison

Choose a pair for a side-by-side feature table, endpoint differences, cost considerations and migration notes.

Bright Data vs Firecrawl Firecrawl vs ScrapingBee Firecrawl vs ScraperAPI Firecrawl vs Zyte API Apify vs Firecrawl Bright Data vs ScrapingBee Bright Data vs ScraperAPI Bright Data vs Zyte API Apify vs Bright Data ScraperAPI vs ScrapingBee ScrapingBee vs Zyte API Apify vs ScrapingBee ScraperAPI vs Zyte API Apify vs ScraperAPI Apify vs Zyte API

Compare cost on the same unit

For 1,000 accepted pages, record attempted URLs, render mode, retries and schema failures. A low HTML-request price can require separate parsing; an extraction credit can include work that another vendor bills separately. Do not rank cost until the output passes the same acceptance check.

What can change the bill
Provider	Price and allowance check
Firecrawl	The pricing page distinguishes scraped pages and search credits. Compare the exact scrape options and billing interval; do not use an annually billed monthly equivalent as a monthly commitment.
Bright Data	Price the selected Web Unlocker zone and output. Do not compare proxy bandwidth, a scraper dataset and an Unlocker request as if they were one billing unit.
ScrapingBee	Use the documented cost of the selected render/proxy/extraction mode. The number of HTTP requests alone does not determine credit consumption.
ScraperAPI	Measure credits for your target domain and configuration. Structured endpoints and rendered page retrieval should not share an assumed per-call price.
Zyte API	Keep HTTP, browser and automatic extraction costs separate. Use the target workload and current pricing rules rather than one headline cost per thousand requests.
Apify	Plans include platform spend; individual Actors can use compute, per-result or other pricing. Do not infer total job cost from the platform's compute-unit rate alone.

How to evaluate the shortlist

Build an authorized test set spanning static HTML, JavaScript-rendered pages, tables and long articles. Save expected fields and the permitted access conditions.
Use the same URLs, country, device settings and freshness window. Keep cache hits separate from fresh fetches.
Mark challenge pages, empty main content and invalid structured fields as failures even if the HTTP status is 200.
Measure time to a usable document or completed dataset, not only time to job creation. Include polling, retries and client-side parsing.
Report total billed credits, browser time, proxy charges and actor fees per accepted document. Respect site terms, privacy, robots guidance and access controls; do not test bypassing protected accounts.

Use a common endpoint contract

All Them APIs · Web scraping APIsPOST /api/v1/web-scraping/extract

Review the request contract and tell us the coverage you need. Access requires enablement; this endpoint does not execute or bill requests yet.

View endpoint and request access

Sources and review dates

Documentation reviewed October 28, 2026. These are integration and plan comparisons, not measured speed or accuracy rankings. Availability, licensing and prices should be confirmed for the chosen plan.

Corrections: email faizank@docsalot.dev with an official source.