8 best ScrapingBee alternatives in 2026 (pricing compared)

ScrapingBee is a good first scraping API. One endpoint, a $19 plan, SDKs that install in a minute and a docs page that explains everything. The trouble starts when a site fights back and the request that cost 1 credit yesterday costs 25 or 75 today. That is the moment most people type “scrapingbee alternative” into a search box.

This guide covers eight of them with pricing read from each vendor’s page on September 2, 2026. We build Spider Cloud, so Spider is on the list and comes first. We have held it to the same format as the rest, including a section on where it falls short, and every figure we cite for our own product is flagged as ours.

Key takeaways

ScrapingBee’s pricing is honest and its multipliers are the problem: 5 credits for JavaScript rendering, 10 for a premium proxy, 25 for both and 75 for a stealth proxy, so the 250,000-credit Freelance plan holds 3,333 stealth requests. The four features that make hard sites work are marked as not included on the $19 and $49 plans, which means the real entry price for protected targets is $99. Spider Cloud has no multipliers; rendering rolls into compute time and the bill is bandwidth plus CPU minutes, which we estimate at $8 to $15 per 100,000 pages in smart mode, our own number. ScraperAPI and ZenRows are the closest like-for-like swaps, with the same credit model, bigger free tiers and their own multipliers to read carefully. Scrapfly, Zyte and Bright Data cost more per hard page and hold up better on the sites where ScrapingBee starts burning 75 credits. Scrapeway’s August 2026 run listed ScrapingBee at 40% success on its test set; that is Scrapeway’s number, and it is the reason a lot of these searches happen.

What ScrapingBee is and why teams look elsewhere

ScrapingBee is a hosted scraping API. You send a URL with query parameters for rendering, proxy class, country, wait conditions and output, and you get HTML, markdown, plain text, a JSON extraction or a screenshot back. It has a Google Search endpoint, MIT-licensed Python and Node SDKs, a CLI and a hosted MCP server. The core is closed and there is no self-hosted version. Requests are synchronous.

The reasons people leave come straight from ScrapingBee’s own pricing and documentation pages.

The multipliers. The credit table prices a plain request at 1 credit, JavaScript rendering at 5, a premium proxy without JavaScript at 10, premium plus JavaScript at 25 and a stealth proxy at 75, with JavaScript required for stealth. Auto-mode bills 1, 5, 10, 25 or 75 credits depending on which configuration worked, so a page that needed stealth after two failed attempts still costs 75. AI extraction adds 5 credits on top.

The plan gating. The pricing page marks JavaScript rendering, premium proxies, geotargeting and screenshots as not included on Hobby ($19) and Freelance ($49). Those unlock at Startup ($99). So the 75,000 and 250,000 credit counts on the two cheapest plans apply to plain HTTP fetches only.

No overage and no rollover we could confirm. The FAQ says you upgrade or renew early when you run out. There is no yearly discount printed on the page on either of our two fetches, and the trial is a one-time 1,000 credits rather than a monthly allowance.

Success rate on hard sites. Scrapeway’s August 14 to 28, 2026 test listed ScrapingBee at 40% success with a 2.8 second average response, against a 56.8% average across the nine APIs it tested. That is Scrapeway’s measurement on its own URL set. It is not ours and we have not reproduced it, but it matches the pattern behind the multipliers: the cheap request path fails on protected pages, and the path that works is the expensive one.

To be fair to ScrapingBee, it only charges for 200, 404 and 410 responses, the docs are clear, the SDKs are MIT and Capterra shows 4.9 out of 5 across 137 reviews on a page whose plan data is stale. Small projects on ordinary sites are well served.

Comparison table

Prices are month-to-month list prices read on September 2, 2026 unless noted. “Cost at 100K pages” is the cheapest plan whose included units cover 100,000 plain page fetches in a month, with no JavaScript or premium proxy multipliers; the second figure in some rows is the same volume with JavaScript rendering on. The Spider figure is our own estimate from our pricing guide.

ScraperAPI’s plan prices come from a third-party review cross-checked against Capterra, because the vendor’s pricing page returned only its page header on both of our fetches; the Professional and Advanced tiers are confirmed in ScraperAPI’s own release notes. The Zyte figures assume every target lands in Tier 1. The Apify figures assume you write your own actor.

How we compared

We fetched every vendor’s pricing page and billing docs on September 2, 2026 and used what was printed. Where a page would not render, as ScraperAPI’s did, we say where the numbers came from instead. Where we derived a figure by arithmetic on vendor rates, such as 100,000 rendered pages on ScrapingBee being 500,000 credits and therefore the $99 Startup plan, we call it derived.

For performance we have two of our own tests. The 1,000-URL crawl benchmark from February 2026 ran Spider, Firecrawl and Crawl4AI over one list from one machine and is written up in our Crawl4AI vs Firecrawl vs Spider benchmark. The Spider Browser dataset, 999 URLs across 254 domains, is at github.com/spider-rs/spider-browser-dataset. Both are ours and neither has been reproduced by anyone outside Spider. We do not have a benchmark of our own that includes ScrapingBee, ScraperAPI or ZenRows, so for those we quote Scrapeway’s August 2026 runs and attribute them each time.

We could not verify ScrapingBee’s annual pricing or rollover policy, ScraperAPI’s overage rate or rollover statement, ZenRows’ top-up price per credit, Scrapfly’s rollover, Bright Data’s rollover or Node SDK, or Firecrawl’s month-to-month prices from its own page. Unverified figures are not stated as facts anywhere in this guide.

1. Spider Cloud

Spider Cloud is a research lab for web data quality. The product is a crawl and scrape API that returns markdown, text, HTML or JSON, with request modes for plain HTTP, a smart mode that renders only when the page needs it, and a full browser. There is a scrape endpoint for single pages, a crawl endpoint that returns a whole site in one call or as a JSONL stream, an unblocker endpoint for hard targets, a search endpoint, and an MCP server at mcp.spider.cloud. SDKs cover Python, Node and Rust. The engine is the open-source spider crate under MIT.

Pricing as of September 2026

Usage billing: $1 per GB of content transferred, measured before transformation, plus $0.001 per minute of server-side compute. Failed requests cost nothing. Credits start at $1 and never expire. From our pricing guide, a mixed 100,000-page workload in smart mode runs about $8 to $15, 10,000 pages in HTTP mode about $0.80 to $1.00, and 1,000,000 pages in chrome mode with markdown and metadata about $80 to $160. These are our own estimates and not independently verified.

There are no multipliers. JavaScript rendering is compute time. Standard proxy rotation is included. Residential and ISP pools and AI extraction are priced separately. Unlimited is the alternative: concurrency from 2 units at $40 a month, dropping from $20 to $13 a unit as you add more, with over-limit requests getting a 429 and Retry-After rather than a charge.

Where it shines

The reason to pick it is the data that comes back, and the evidence we can offer is ours. In the February 2026 crawl benchmark Spider finished 1,000 URLs at 99.9% success and 74 pages a second averaged over static, JavaScript-heavy and protected slices. Spider Browser passed 100% of the 999-URL dataset across 254 domains. Both are our own benchmarks, not independently verified.

For a ScrapingBee user the practical difference is that a request costs what it weighs and takes, whether or not it needed a browser. A month where half your pages needed rendering does not cost five times a month where none did. And the crawl endpoint means a site is one call, not a loop over a sitemap.

Where it falls short

No free monthly allowance; the floor is $1 of credits. Geo-targeting is not available on Unlimited yet, and Unlimited uses a smaller flat-rate proxy pool than pay as you go. AI Studio is in alpha. The community is smaller than ScrapingBee’s or Firecrawl’s, with fewer third-party tutorials. Usage billing is harder to forecast than a credit count, and a team that wants a fixed monthly number needs to size an Unlimited plan instead. ScrapingBee’s Google Search endpoint and screenshot flag are simpler to call than the equivalent Spider endpoints if all you want is one parameter.

Who it is for

Teams whose ScrapingBee bill is dominated by the 25 and 75 credit requests, anyone crawling whole sites into an LLM pipeline, and agents that need a fast synchronous fetch. Read Spider as a ScrapingBee alternative for the direct comparison.

2. ScraperAPI

ScraperAPI is the most direct substitute on this list. Same credit model, same query-parameter API, plus structured data endpoints for Amazon, Google and other targets, an async batch API and a DataPipeline scheduler.

Pricing as of September 2026

ScraperAPI’s pricing page returned only its page header on both of our fetches, so the plan prices here come from Thunderbit’s review updated April 21, 2026 and cross-checked against Capterra: Free at 1,000 credits a month, Hobby $49 for 100,000, Startup $149 for 1,000,000, Business $299 for 3,000,000, Scaling $475 for 5,000,000, Professional $975 for 10,500,000 and Advanced $1,975 for 21,500,000, with yearly billing about 10% lower on the four smaller plans. Professional and Advanced are confirmed in ScraperAPI’s May 2026 release notes. The vendor’s billing FAQ confirms the free plan, a 5,000-request trial for the first seven days, pay-as-you-go overage on Scaling and above at a rate it does not print, and a seven-day refund.

The credit table is where it separates from ScrapingBee. A normal domain is 1 credit, an e-commerce domain 5, a search engine 25, a social network 30. Rendering is 10, not 5. Premium is 10, ultra premium 30, premium plus render 25, ultra premium plus render 75. Bot-protection bypass flags are 10 each. Country code, session, device type, output format and autoparse are free. Only 200 and 404 responses are charged. So 100,000 plain pages is $49 on Hobby, and 100,000 rendered pages is a million credits on Startup at $149.

Where it shines

Structured endpoints. If the job is Amazon product pages or Google results, the parsed JSON output saves the extraction step. The async API takes up to 50,000 URLs a batch with polling or a webhook, keeps results for 72 hours and supports a max_cost cap per job. Output formats include text and markdown for LLM use. The MCP server is MIT and hosted at mcp.scraperapi.com. SDKs cover Python, Node, PHP, Ruby and Java. The free plan is monthly rather than one-time.

Where it falls short

The Hobby floor is $49 against ScrapingBee’s $19. Rendering costs 10 credits rather than 5, so a rendered workload is twice ScrapingBee’s credit burn before proxies. A social network page is 30 credits and a SERP is 25 by domain, before any rendering. Scrapeway’s August 2026 run listed ScraperAPI at 58% success with a 6.3 second average, fifth of nine; that is Scrapeway’s number. Closed source, no self-hosting, and the fact that we could not read the pricing page ourselves is worth noting.

Who it is for

Teams that want ScrapingBee’s model with structured e-commerce and SERP output and a larger async batch. Read Spider as a ScraperAPI alternative.

3. ZenRows

ZenRows repackaged its plans in 2026 into Free, Build, Launch, Growth and Scale, each in three sizes, and it now has the cheapest paid entry and the largest free tier among the credit-based APIs here.

Pricing as of September 2026

From the ZenRows pricing docs: Free at 5,000 credits a month with no card and a monthly refresh. Build at $19, $29 and $39 for 45,000, 80,000 and 120,000 credits. Launch at $69, $99 and $129 for 250,000, 500,000 and 700,000. Growth at $199, $279 and $399 for 1.2, 2 and 3 million. Scale at $549, $749 and $999 for 5, 8 and 12.5 million. The pricing page shows Build from $16, Launch from $57, Growth from $165 and Scale from $456 with a “Save 17%” label, which we read as the yearly-billed rate. Paid plans roll unused credits over for one month. Top-ups are limited to four a period and roll into the next one.

Credits: standard 1, JavaScript rendering 5, premium proxies 10, both 25. Adaptive stealth mode bills for the configuration that succeeded. Residential proxies are 25,000 credits a GB on every plan, which works out to $10.56 a GB on the smallest Build plan and $2 a GB on the largest Scale plan. Browser Sessions are 5 credits a minute plus the same per-GB rate. So 100,000 plain pages is $39 on the largest Build plan, and 100,000 rendered pages is 500,000 credits on the middle Launch plan at $99. Only successful requests, including 404 and 410, spend credits.

Where it shines

The free tier and the rollover. 5,000 credits a month with no card is five times ScrapingBee’s one-time trial, and a slow month on a paid plan carries into the next. Markdown, plain text and screenshots are included without a separate multiplier. There is a hosted MCP server, MIT SDKs for Python, Node and Go, and a Batch API in beta that accepts 100,000 URLs a job with a webhook.

Where it falls short

The multipliers match ScrapingBee’s up to 25, so the rendered-plus-premium workload that hurts on ScrapingBee hurts about the same here. Scrapeway’s August 2026 run listed ZenRows at 15% success with a 2.1 second average, eighth of nine; that is Scrapeway’s number, and its plan table is stale, so treat it as one data point. The residential rate on small plans is high. We could not verify the top-up price per credit, and the Scraper APIs product page returned a 404.

Who it is for

Small teams that want the lowest paid floor, a real free tier and rollover, on sites where a 1 or 5 credit request works. Read Spider as a ZenRows alternative and the best ZenRows alternatives hub.

4. Scrapfly

Scrapfly is the credit-based API that fares best on protected sites in the one third-party test we have, and it is priced to make you pay for that only when you need it.

Pricing as of September 2026

From scrapfly.io/pricing: Free with 1,000 signup credits, Discovery $30 a month for 200,000 credits, Pro $100 for 1,000,000, Startup $250 for 2,500,000, Enterprise $500 for 5,500,000, Custom from $1,200. Yearly billing is two months free. Discovery hard-caps at quota; Pro and above move to pay-as-you-go in 10,000-credit batches at the plan rate.

From the billing docs: a datacenter request is 1 credit, JavaScript rendering adds 5, a residential proxy is 25, country selection is free, and bandwidth beyond the first megabyte is charged per 100KB. The anti-scraping-protection mode is free on requests that were not blocked and may escalate proxy and browser on those that were; a cost_budget parameter caps what any one request may spend. Failed requests are not billed unless more than 30% of traffic fails. So 100,000 plain pages is $30 on Discovery and 100,000 rendered pages is 600,000 credits on Pro at $100.

Where it shines

Scrapeway’s August 2026 run listed Scrapfly at 98% success, first of nine; that is Scrapeway’s number. The spend cap is the feature ScrapingBee’s auto-mode lacks: you decide in advance that a request may spend at most, say, 10 credits, and it stops there instead of climbing to 75. The MCP server has nine tools and a hosted version. SDKs cover Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust and Scrapy. The crawler returns WARC and HAR alongside markdown.

Where it falls short

Residential plus JavaScript is 31 credits a page. The 15.3 second average response in Scrapeway’s test is the slowest in this guide. Closed source, no self-hosting, and the $30 plan cannot buy overage.

Who it is for

Teams that hit protection often and want to bound the cost per request. Read Spider vs Scrapfly.

5. Firecrawl

Firecrawl is a different shape of tool from ScrapingBee. It is built around markdown output, a crawl endpoint that walks a site, and integrations with agent frameworks, and it shows up in ScrapingBee searches because teams that started with a scraping API and ended up feeding an LLM find it easier to switch than to keep converting HTML.

Pricing as of September 2026

From firecrawl.dev/pricing, which rendered only the yearly-billed rates when we fetched it: Free with 1,000 credits a month and no card, Hobby $16 a month for 5,000 credits, Standard $83 for 100,000, Growth $333 for 500,000, Scale $599 for 1,000,000, Enterprise custom. Month-to-month runs higher; the docs confirm both billing options exist but the page did not print the monthly column. Credits do not roll over except on annual Scale and Enterprise. Overage is sold in $5 packs at a rate that falls from $0.005 a credit on Hobby to $0.001 on Scale.

A scrape or crawled page is 1 credit and stealth proxy requests were repriced to 1 credit as well. The JSON extraction format is 5 credits a page. PDF parsing, PII redaction and several other formats add 4 each.

Where it shines

Everything is designed around LLM consumption. Markdown by default, a crawl that returns a whole site, a map endpoint, search, extract and an agent product, plus an MIT MCP server and SDKs in nine languages. The AGPL core can be self-hosted, minus the hosted-only anti-bot engine, screenshots, actions and agent. On our own February 2026 benchmark Firecrawl finished 1,000 URLs at 95.3% success and 16 pages a second, second of the three tools tested; that is our measurement.

Where it falls short

The plan steps. Nothing sits between 5,000 credits at $16 and 100,000 at $83, and credits expire. Rendering and proxies are not multiplied but structured output is, at five times a plain page. The crawl is asynchronous, so an agent polls a job ID. Scrapeway’s August 2026 run listed Firecrawl at 64% success with a 4.7 second average; that is Scrapeway’s number. Firecrawl sells no proxy product, so a blocked target has nowhere to escalate.

Who it is for

Teams leaving ScrapingBee because the output needs to be markdown and the input is a whole site. Read Spider vs Firecrawl and the best Firecrawl alternatives hub.

6. Zyte

Zyte’s API replaces the credit multiplier with a per-site difficulty tier. The price of a request depends on how hard the site is, which the vendor decides, rather than which flags you turned on.

Pricing as of September 2026

From zyte.com/pricing and the API pricing docs: pay per successful response with a $5 credit in the first month and a 30-day trial. Pay-as-you-go carries a 25% discount; commitments of $100, $200, $350 and $500 a month raise it to 40%, 48%, 48% and 52%. Commitments do not roll over and have no overage penalty.

Per 1,000 successful HTTP responses on pay-as-you-go, Tier 1 is $0.13 rising to $1.27 at Tier 5. Browser mode is $1.01 at Tier 1 and $16.08 at Tier 5. Screenshots are $0.002 a request. So 100,000 Tier 1 HTTP pages is $13, 100,000 Tier 1 browser pages is $100 on the smallest commitment, and 100,000 Tier 3 browser pages is $240.

Where it shines

Price at volume on easy sites and a table that tells you the exact cost once the tier is known. Automatic extraction returns typed schemas for a fraction of a cent per data type. Scrapy is BSD-3-Clause and Scrapy Cloud hosts spiders from $9 a unit a month. Tier changes come with two weeks’ notice.

Where it falls short

You learn the tier by scraping, so the estimate you commit against can be off by ten times between tiers. No official MCP server, no official Node client, and markdown output is not documented. Hosted only.

Who it is for

Scrapy users and steady-volume teams with a fixed set of targets. Read Spider as a Zyte alternative.

7. Apify

Apify is a platform rather than an endpoint: scrapers run as actors on a schedule with storage, proxies and a marketplace. It replaces ScrapingBee for teams that want the whole pipeline hosted rather than only the fetch.

Pricing as of September 2026

From apify.com/pricing: Free with $5 of monthly usage and no card, Starter $19 a month ($17 yearly), Scale $199 ($179 yearly), Business $999 ($899 yearly). Compute units are $0.20 on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale and $0.13 on Business. Residential proxy is $8 a GB on Starter. Unused prepaid usage does not roll over.

Apify’s help center puts a Cheerio actor at about 3,000 pages per compute unit and a browser actor at about 300. Derived from that, 100,000 pages is about $6.67 of compute on Cheerio, covered by Starter, or about $66.67 on a browser actor.

Where it shines

The Store, scheduling, dataset exports in JSON, CSV, XLSX and more, webhooks, and an MIT MCP server at mcp.apify.com. Crawlee is Apache-2.0 in TypeScript and Python. G2 lists Apify at 4.7 out of 5 across 534 reviews.

Where it falls short

Compute units are harder to reason about than credits. Browser actors cost ten times Cheerio ones per page. The platform is not self-hostable and Store actors carry their own prices. The learning curve is the steepest here.

Who it is for

Teams that want a scheduled scraper with storage and are willing to write or rent an actor. Read Spider as an Apify alternative and the best Apify alternatives hub.

8. Bright Data

Bright Data is where teams go when nothing cheaper reaches the target. It runs the largest proxy network in the industry, put at 400 million residential IPs across 195 countries, and sells Web Unlocker, a Web Scraper API and a Scraping Browser on top.

Pricing as of September 2026

From brightdata.com/pricing/web-unlocker: 5,000 free requests a month per product with no card, pay-as-you-go at $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests, Scale at $499 a month for about 383,000 requests with additional requests at $1.30 per 1,000. Scraping Browser is $8 a GB. Residential proxies are $8 a GB list with committed plans from $499 a month at $7 a GB. First deposits are matched up to $500. No annual pricing is shown. So 100,000 pages on Web Unlocker is $150 pay-as-you-go by our arithmetic, and a million is $1,301 on Scale.

Where it shines

Reach and compliance. The network is the product. The MCP server is MIT with 69 tools and 5,000 free requests a month. There is an MIT Python SDK. Enterprise procurement teams tend to have already approved it.

Where it falls short

The highest cost per page in this guide: three times ScrapingBee’s Freelance plan at 100,000 plain pages and ten to twenty times Spider’s estimate. Web Unlocker returns static content, so a rendered page means the browser product and per-GB billing. Markdown and screenshots are not in the Unlocker docs. We could not verify a rollover policy or a Node SDK. The catalog is large enough that choosing a product is its own task.

Who it is for

Enterprises with a compliance requirement and targets that block everything else. Read Spider as a Bright Data alternative.

Reasons to consider a ScrapingBee alternative

Most people who switch are not unhappy with the API. They are unhappy with what the second month cost. These are the triggers.

The credit multiplier on hard sites. A request that escalates to stealth costs 75 credits. If a fifth of your pages do that, the 250,000-credit Freelance plan holds about 13,000 pages a month rather than 250,000. Spider charges by weight and compute time regardless of mode. Zyte charges by site tier. Scrapfly lets you cap a request’s spend.

Locked features on the cheap plans. JavaScript rendering, premium proxies, geotargeting and screenshots are not included below Startup at $99, so the real entry price for a protected target is $99, not $19. ZenRows includes markdown and screenshots on every plan. ScraperAPI includes country code and autoparse for free.

No monthly free tier, no overage, no confirmed rollover. ScrapingBee’s trial is 1,000 credits once. ZenRows gives 5,000 a month and rolls paid credits for a month. ScraperAPI, Firecrawl and Bright Data all give a monthly free allowance. Spider credits never expire.

Whole-site jobs. ScrapingBee is a per-URL API. If the job is “ingest this site”, you write the crawler. Spider and Firecrawl have crawl endpoints; Apify and Zyte’s Scrapy Cloud host one.

Success rate. Scrapeway’s August 2026 test listed ScrapingBee at 40% success against a 56.8% average across the APIs it tested. That is one third party’s URL set and method, not ours, and success rates in this category are measured by the parties selling the products more often than not. Read it as a prompt to test on your own targets rather than as a verdict.

How to choose

Match the tool to the job. The credit count on the pricing page comes second.

For RAG ingestion, you want a crawl endpoint, markdown output and a bill that scales with pages. Spider and Firecrawl are the two built for that. Spider returns the crawl in one call with usage billing and no multipliers; Firecrawl has the bigger integration list and a plan model that fits volumes near 100,000 or 1,000,000 pages.

For agent tool calls, the fetch is small and frequent, so a synchronous endpoint, an MCP server and a fast round trip matter more than throughput. Spider, ScrapingBee, ScraperAPI, ZenRows, Scrapfly, Firecrawl, Apify and Bright Data all publish MCP servers. Zyte does not.

For e-commerce monitoring, pages are rendered, targets are protected and you fetch the same URLs daily, so the cost per rendered page on a hard site decides it. ScraperAPI’s structured Amazon endpoint, Zyte’s tiered pricing, Scrapfly’s spend cap and Bright Data’s Unlocker are the specialists. Spider’s chrome mode with the unblocker endpoint covers it on usage billing; Apify fits if you want the scheduler hosted too.

For search, ScrapingBee’s Google endpoint is 10 credits a query, ScraperAPI’s SERP domains are 25 credits by domain, Firecrawl’s search is 2 credits per 10 results, Spider has a search endpoint and Bright Data sells a SERP API.

When two tools look equal on paper, run the same 100 URLs through both and count how many came back usable. Every pricing page describes the easy case.

Test it on the pages that cost you 75 credits

Take the URLs that push ScrapingBee into stealth mode, paste one into the Spider playground and look at what comes back and what it cost. That single check tells you more than any table in this guide. The compare page has the head-to-head posts for every tool above, and the pricing guide shows the worked examples behind the Spider estimates.