Spider vs. Bright Data

Bright Data has been in the proxy business for over a decade. 150 million+ residential IPs, 195 countries, a publicly traded parent company (Cogint). They started as Luminati, rebranded, and expanded from a pure proxy provider into a full suite of scraping products. For enterprise procurement teams buying data infrastructure, Bright Data is a known name.

For a developer who wants to scrape a URL and move on with their day, the experience is different.

Six products, six decisions

Most scraping services give you one API. Bright Data gives you a menu, and you need to pick the right item before you write any code:

Source: brightdata.com/pricing. Bright Data runs frequent promotions, so check for current rates.

The decision tree goes something like this: Is it a simple page fetch? Web Unlocker. Does it need browser interaction? Scraping Browser (different API, different billing). Is it Amazon or Google specifically? Web Scraper API might have a pre-built parser. Need to run your own code? Residential Proxies. Each product has its own documentation, its own API patterns, and its own billing model.

If your project touches multiple categories (say you need to scrape product pages with Web Unlocker, interact with a checkout flow via Scraping Browser, and pull search rankings from SERP API), you’re managing three separate integrations with three separate bills.

Spider has one API endpoint. Static page, JavaScript SPA behind Cloudflare, CAPTCHA-protected checkout flow: same request, same billing. When you need browser interaction, Spider Browser adds that over WebSocket without switching to a different product or pricing model.

The $499 commitment tiers

Bright Data’s PAYG rates work without a commitment, but volume discounts require $499/month per product:

Source: brightdata.com/pricing

Those are per-product commitments. Using Web Unlocker and Scraping Browser together? Two separate $499/month tiers, $998/month minimum before you scrape a single page.

Spider’s production average is about $0.65 per 1,000 pages (pricing) with no tiers or commitments. At 50K pages per month, that’s about $32 on Spider versus $75 on Bright Data’s Web Unlocker PAYG. At 500K pages, Spider runs roughly $325 versus $650+ on Bright Data’s committed tier.

Getting started

Multiple independent reviews note that Bright Data requires identity verification during sign-up, including potential video calls for residential proxy access. This makes sense for a proxy provider whose network could be abused; KYC protects them legally. But it means you can’t grab an API key and start testing in 5 minutes.

Spider takes an email. You get free starter credits immediately. No verification, no sales call, no waiting for approval.

The product-hopping problem

Here’s a real scenario. You start scraping a competitor’s product catalog with Web Unlocker. Simple HTTP fetches, $1.50/1K, works fine. Then the target site adds aggressive bot protection and starts serving JavaScript challenges. Web Unlocker can’t handle them anymore.

Now you need to switch to Scraping Browser. That means:

• Learning a new API (Puppeteer/Playwright connection strings instead of HTTP requests)
• Changing your billing model (per-GB bandwidth instead of per-result)
• Rewriting your scraping code to use a browser-based approach
• Potentially committing to a second $499/month tier

With Spider, you change nothing. The same API call you used on day one handles the new protection level automatically. Spider internally escalates from HTTP to browser rendering when it detects bot protection, so you don’t manage that transition.

When you need real browser control (clicking through a checkout flow, filling a search form, driving an interactive app), Spider Browser gives you that without switching products:

import { SpiderBrowser } from "spider-browser";

const spider = new SpiderBrowser({
  apiKey: process.env.SPIDER_API_KEY,
  stealth: 0,
});

await spider.init();
await spider.page.goto("https://competitor.com/pricing");

// Use natural language instead of CSS selectors
await spider.page.act("Click on 'Enterprise' tab");
await spider.page.act("Expand all feature sections");

const pricing = await spider.page.extract(
  "Extract all plan names, prices, feature lists, and any usage limits"
);

console.log(pricing);
await spider.close();

act() drives the browser with English. extract() returns structured JSON. Bright Data’s Scraping Browser gives you Puppeteer/Playwright access, which is capable, but the selector logic, extraction parsing, and error handling are on you.

Where Bright Data wins

Proxy infrastructure. No one else has 150M+ residential IPs across 195 countries with ISP-level, mobile, and datacenter options. If you need raw proxies (specific geo-targeting down to the city level, mobile carrier IPs, static residential sessions), Bright Data’s network is unmatched.

Their Datasets product also fills a real niche: pre-collected, structured data for market research teams that don’t want to build scraping infrastructure at all. If you just need a weekly dump of Amazon product data or LinkedIn company profiles, that’s a straightforward purchase.

Where Spider wins

Every other dimension. One API instead of six. No KYC to start testing. No per-product commitment tiers. Cheaper at every volume we’ve tested. AI extraction built into the SDK instead of requiring you to write and maintain selectors. And open source: Spider’s core crawling engine is MIT-licensed, not proprietary.

Spider pricing. Free credits to start, no card required.