The 7 Best Web Scraping APIs for AI in 2026

Every AI team building a RAG pipeline, fine-tuning dataset, or autonomous agent hits the same problem: you need web data, and you need it clean. The scraping API you pick determines how fast you get that data, how much it costs, and how many engineering hours you burn keeping the pipeline running.

This guide covers the seven tools that keep coming up in every AI engineering discussion. I built Spider, so I’m biased — I’ll be upfront about that. But I’ve also benchmarked all of these against real workloads, and I’ll share the numbers so you can draw your own conclusions.

The quick comparison

Before the deep dives, here’s the overview. Every number comes from published pricing pages, our 1,000-URL benchmark, or production monitoring data.

A few notes on these numbers. ScrapingBee’s $14.70 figure is what you actually pay per 1K pages when using stealth proxies with JS rendering (75 credits per request). Crawl4AI’s TCO includes compute and proxy costs for a production deployment, not just the software license. Bright Data’s minimum is per product — use two products, pay two minimums.

1. Spider

Best for: Teams that want one API for everything — crawling, scraping, search, screenshots, AI extraction — without a subscription.

Spider is what we build. The core is a Rust crawling engine, which is why it’s fast: compiled binary, async I/O, zero-copy HTML parsing. The API handles proxy rotation, anti-bot bypass, and browser rendering behind the scenes. You don’t manage any of that infrastructure.

What makes it different:

• No subscription. You buy credits when you need them. Average cost is about $0.65 per 1K pages. Credits don’t expire.
• Speed. Sub-second responses for most pages. Our benchmark measured 182 pages/s on static HTML, 48 pages/s on JS-heavy SPAs.
• Smart rendering. Auto-detects whether a page needs a browser. Static pages never touch Chromium, which saves time and cost.
• AI extraction. Describe what you want in plain English, get structured JSON back. No CSS selectors, no parsing code.
• MCP server. Works with Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, and other AI coding tools out of the box.

Where it falls short:

• Newer product. Smaller community than Scrapy or Apify.
• No marketplace of pre-built scrapers. You use the API directly.

Pricing: Bandwidth ($1/GB) + compute ($0.001/min). No subscription, no credit expiration. Production average: ~$0.65/1K pages. Details

2. Firecrawl

Best for: Teams already in the Mendable/LangChain ecosystem who want markdown output with minimal setup.

Firecrawl is a TypeScript-based scraping API that focuses on turning pages into LLM-ready markdown. It has good integrations with LangChain and LlamaIndex, a clean SDK, and an MCP server. The managed cloud handles proxies and rendering.

What makes it different:

• LLM-focused output. Markdown conversion is solid, with reasonable defaults for stripping navigation and ads.
• Map endpoint. Discovers all URLs on a site before you crawl, so you can filter what to fetch.
• Strong community. Active Discord, frequent updates, well-documented.

Where it falls short:

• Credits expire monthly. Unused pages vanish at the end of each billing cycle.
• TypeScript/Node.js architecture means roughly 7x slower than compiled alternatives on static HTML.
• AGPL license for self-hosting. If you modify and deploy it, you’re required to open-source your changes.

Pricing: Subscription tiers from $16/mo (3K pages) to $599/mo (1M pages), annual billing. Credits expire monthly. Details

3. Crawl4AI

Best for: Python-heavy teams with existing infrastructure who want full control and don’t mind self-hosting.

Crawl4AI is a free Python framework with 60K+ GitHub stars. It runs Playwright for browser rendering, converts to markdown, and includes chunking helpers for RAG pipelines. No cloud service (beta API is in progress).

What makes it different:

• Free software. Apache 2.0 license (with attribution clause). Zero API costs.
• Python-native. If your ML pipeline is already Python, Crawl4AI fits right in.
• LLM extraction. Built-in support for passing pages to an LLM for structured extraction.

Where it falls short:

• You run everything yourself. Browser instances, proxies, retries, scaling, monitoring — all yours.
• 89.7% success rate out of the box (no residential proxies configured). Those missing pages are missing chunks in your vector store.
• Total cost of ownership at 100K pages/month is roughly $485+ once you factor in compute, proxies, and engineering time.
• No managed proxy infrastructure. You bring your own.

Pricing: Free (self-hosted). Real cost = infrastructure + proxies + engineering hours. At 100K pages/month with protected sites, expect $385–585/month TCO. GitHub

4. ScrapingBee

Best for: Simple, one-off scraping jobs on unprotected sites where you don’t need AI extraction or browser automation.

ScrapingBee is a straightforward HTTP scraping API. Send a URL, get HTML back. It handles proxies and rendering, and the API is easy to use.

What makes it different:

• Simple API. Minimal configuration, works quickly for basic use cases.
• Google Search endpoint. Dedicated SERP scraping with structured results.
• Established product. Been around since 2019, stable infrastructure.

Where it falls short:

• Credit multipliers change your real cost. JS rendering (on by default) costs 5 credits per request. Stealth proxies cost 75 credits per request. That $49 plan with 250K credits gives you 3,333 actual requests when scraping protected sites.
• No AI extraction. No natural language queries. You get HTML and parse it yourself.
• No browser automation. Can’t click buttons, fill forms, or interact with the page.
• No crawling. Single-page scraping only — no link following or site discovery.

Pricing: $49/mo (250K credits) to $249/mo (3M credits). Effective cost with stealth+JS: ~$14.70/1K pages. Details

5. Apify

Best for: Non-technical teams who want a pre-built scraper for a specific site (Amazon, Google, LinkedIn) without writing code.

Apify is a marketplace of community-built scrapers called “Actors.” Browse the store, pick an Actor for your target, run it on Apify’s cloud. There are Actors for Amazon products, Google Maps, TikTok, LinkedIn, and hundreds more.

What makes it different:

• Actor marketplace. Someone probably already built a scraper for your target site.
• Visual dashboard. Configure runs, schedule jobs, and download results without code.
• Built-in storage. Key-value store, datasets, and request queues managed for you.

Where it falls short:

• Three-layer billing. You pay compute units (CU = memory × time), proxy bandwidth (~$8/GB residential), and sometimes per-result Actor fees. A 10K-page job can cost $306 on Apify vs ~$6.50 on Spider depending on the Actor’s memory allocation.
• Actor quality varies wildly. Some are well-maintained; others were published once and abandoned. When a target site changes its layout, you’re dependent on the Actor developer to fix it.
• You don’t control costs. Each Actor decides its own memory allocation. A 4GB Actor costs 4x as much as a 1GB Actor for the same result, and you often can’t tell which you’re getting until the bill arrives.
• Credits expire monthly.

Pricing: $39/mo (Starter) to $999/mo (Business). CU rates from $0.20–$0.30 plus proxy and Actor fees. Details

6. Bright Data

Best for: Large enterprises with dedicated procurement teams who need raw proxy infrastructure with global coverage.

Bright Data has the largest proxy network in the world — 150M+ residential IPs across 195 countries. They started as Luminati, and the proxy infrastructure is genuinely best-in-class. The scraping products built on top of that network are a different story.

What makes it different:

• Proxy network. Unmatched in scale and geographic coverage.
• Enterprise compliance. KYC verification, SOC 2, GDPR tooling. If your legal team needs checkboxes, Bright Data has them.
• Multiple products. Web Unlocker, Scraping Browser, Web Scraper API, SERP API, raw proxies, pre-collected datasets.

Where it falls short:

• Six products, six APIs, six billing models. Need HTTP fetching and browser rendering? That’s two separate integrations with two separate $499/month commitments.
• $499/month minimum per product. Using Web Unlocker and Scraping Browser together is $998/month before you scrape anything.
• Sign-up friction. Identity verification, potential video calls for residential proxy access. You can’t just grab an API key.
• No AI extraction. No natural language queries.
• Slowest average response time in this comparison (~5s).

Pricing: PAYG at $1.50/1K (Web Unlocker) or $8/GB (Scraping Browser). Volume discounts require $499/mo commitment per product. Details

7. Jina Reader

Best for: Quick, free markdown conversion when you need a handful of pages and don’t care about scale, speed, or anti-bot bypass.

Jina Reader turns any URL into markdown by prepending r.jina.ai/ to the URL. It’s remarkably simple and free for light usage. Good for prototyping a RAG pipeline before committing to a paid tool.

What makes it different:

• Dead simple. curl https://r.jina.ai/https://example.com and you get markdown. No API key needed for basic usage.
• Free tier. Generous rate limits for prototyping and personal projects.
• Search endpoint. s.jina.ai provides web search results as markdown.

Where it falls short:

• No crawling. Single pages only — no link following or site discovery.
• No anti-bot bypass. Protected sites return errors.
• No browser automation. No screenshots. No structured extraction.
• Rate limits on the free tier will cap production workloads quickly.
• No SDKs or framework integrations.

Pricing: Free with rate limits. Paid plans available for higher throughput. Details

How to pick

The decision usually comes down to three questions:

Do you need a managed API or do you want to self-host? If self-hosted: Crawl4AI (Python) or Spider’s open source engine (Rust). If managed: everything else on this list.

What’s your monthly page volume? Under 10K pages/month: Jina Reader or Spider’s free credits are enough to prototype. 10K–1M: Spider or Firecrawl give you the best cost-to-feature ratio. Over 1M with global proxy needs: Bright Data’s network is hard to beat if you can stomach the commitment tiers.

Do you need AI extraction? If you want to describe what data you need in English and get JSON back, your options narrow to Spider, Firecrawl, and Crawl4AI (with your own LLM). ScrapingBee, Bright Data, and Jina Reader don’t offer this.

The bottom line

There’s no single “best” tool — it depends on your constraints. But here’s how I’d frame the decision if you’re building an AI application in 2026:

• You want to ship fast with minimal cost: Spider. One API, no subscription, sub-second responses, AI extraction included.
• You’re deep in the LangChain ecosystem: Firecrawl. Tight integrations, good markdown, active community.
• You want full control and have Python infrastructure: Crawl4AI. Free software, but factor in the real TCO.
• You need a pre-built scraper for a specific site: Apify. Check the Actor quality and watch the billing.
• You’re an enterprise buying proxy infrastructure: Bright Data. Unmatched network, high commitment.
• You’re prototyping and need free markdown: Jina Reader. Great for getting started, limited for production.
• You just need HTML from unprotected sites: ScrapingBee. Simple and reliable for basic jobs.

If you want to test any of these claims, Spider gives you free credits on signup — no credit card, no commitment. Run the same URLs through multiple tools and compare the output yourself.