Bright Data alternative 2026: Spider Cloud vs Web Unlocker

Bright Data, the company formerly called Luminati, runs a residential proxy network it describes as 400M+ IPs across 195 countries, and sells a line of products on top of it: Web Unlocker for fetching pages through the network, Scraping Browser for pages that need a real browser, Web Scraper API for named platforms, and the proxies themselves. It is the vendor procurement teams already know, and if you need a residential pool sold by the GB for your own crawler, it is the right shop.

Spider Cloud is a research lab for web data quality. We care about whether the page that comes back is complete and usable, and the product is built around that question: one endpoint, http, smart or chrome mode as a parameter, markdown or HTML back with metadata, and a bill made of bandwidth plus compute rather than a per-product rate card. The verdict: buy Bright Data when the proxy network is the thing you need. Use Spider when what you need is the content of many pages, delivered clean, at a price you can work out from the page count.

Side by side

Bright Data prices are as of September 2026 from the product pricing pages linked below. The Spider band is our own estimate from the pricing guide, not independently verified. Every vendor we track is on /compare/.

Bright Data pricing

The overview page at brightdata.com/pricing is prose; the numbers live on a page per product. Each managed product has a free tier of 5,000 units a month with no card, and Bright Data matches a first deposit up to $500. No annual pricing is shown, and we found no rollover statement.

Web Unlocker, the product most readers of this post are comparing against:

You pay only for successful requests. Web Unlocker returns static content; when a page needs a browser, Bright Data points you at its Browser API, billed per GB. As of September 2026, from the Web Unlocker pricing page.

The other products, same date:

• Web Scraper API, for named platforms: free 5,000 records, $1.50 per 1,000 pay as you go, Scale $499 for 384,000 then $1.30 (pricing).
• Scraping Browser: free 5,000 credits plus 1 GB a month, $8 per GB pay as you go, Scale $499 for 71 GB, about $7.03 per GB (pricing).
• Residential proxies: $8 per GB pay as you go, $7 per GB on the $499 Proxy Starter plan (141 GB), $6 on the $999 Growth plan (332 GB), $5 on the $1,999 Business plan (798 GB) (pricing). A promo code on the page halves pay as you go for three months.

The $499 tiers are per product. Using Web Unlocker and Scraping Browser at volume means two Scale plans.

The MCP server follows the same rate card. It ships as an npm package with 69 tools, includes 5,000 free requests a month, and then bills $1.50 per 1,000 requests and $8 per GB when a tool needs the browser, so an agent that leans on it at volume pays Web Unlocker and Scraping Browser prices through a different door. Spider’s MCP server bills the same bandwidth and compute as the API, with no separate allowance to track.

Three worked volumes on Web Unlocker, one request per page, no promo:

• 10,000 pages: the first 5,000 are free, the rest cost $7.50. If the free tier does not stack with paid usage in your month, $15.
• 100,000 pages: $150 pay as you go.
• 1,000,000 pages: $1,500 pay as you go, or Scale at $499 plus 617,000 more at $1.30, about $1,301.

Scraping Browser is the expensive path. If a rendered page moves 2 MB, an assumption on our side rather than a Bright Data figure, a million pages is 2,000 GB, and at the Scale rate that is about $14,060.

Bright Data cut Web Unlocker pay as you go from $3 to $1.50 per 1,000 in January 2025, according to Proxyway’s report at the time, and raised the Web Scraper API from $1 to $1.50 in the same change.

What Spider costs for the same work

Spider bills $1 per GB of content transferred plus $0.001 per CPU minute. JavaScript rendering rolls into compute, standard proxy rotation is included, and a request that returns an error costs $0. A mixed workload comes to about $8 to $15 per 100,000 pages in smart mode by our own estimate, not independently verified. A 10,000 page month in http mode is about $0.80 to $1.00, and 1,000,000 pages in chrome mode with markdown and metadata is about $80 to $160. The pricing guide shows the per-endpoint arithmetic.

There is no per-product rate card because there is one product. A page that needs a browser costs the compute the browser used, on the same request, at the same rates. Credits never expire. Unlimited, from $40 a month, sells concurrency as a flat fee instead, with a smaller flat-rate proxy pool than pay as you go.

What we could not verify

There is no published benchmark that runs Web Unlocker and Spider against the same URL list, so this post makes no success-rate claim for Bright Data. Its G2 rating is 4.7 out of 5 across 344 reviews. The “400M+ residential IPs in 195 countries” figure is Bright Data’s own; an older 150M figure survives only in review text and we have dropped it. We could not confirm a Node SDK, whether Web Unlocker returns markdown or screenshots, or how the free 5,000 requests interact with paid usage in the same month, which is why the 10,000 page line above shows two numbers. Earlier versions of this post described Bright Data’s sign-up verification; we could not source that from a Bright Data page, so it is gone.

Our own numbers carry the same caveat. The Spider cost band is our estimate, and the Spider Browser dataset, which shows a 100% pass rate on 999 URLs across 254 domains from February 2026, measures browser rendering rather than fetch pricing.

Where Bright Data wins

The proxy network. A residential pool sold by the GB, from $8 pay as you go down to $5 on the $1,999 plan, for teams that run their own crawler and only want exits. Spider does not sell a standalone proxy product on those terms.

Named-platform scrapers. Web Scraper API returns records rather than pages for the platforms Bright Data maintains parsers for. If your work is one of those and the schema fits, $1.50 per 1,000 records with no parsing on your side is a fair price.

Enterprise packaging. Per-product plans, a deposit match, a 69-tool MCP server, and a sales organization that will write a custom contract.

Free tier per product. 5,000 free requests a month on each of Web Unlocker, Web Scraper API and Scraping Browser, with no card, is generous for evaluation.

Where Spider wins

The page you get back. Web Unlocker returns raw HTML or a JSON envelope around it. Spider returns markdown, text or HTML with metadata, ready for an index or a prompt, from the same request that fetched it.

One request for both static and rendered pages. On Bright Data, a page that needs a browser is a different product with a per-GB bill and a different SDK. On Spider it is request: "chrome", or smart mode deciding for you, on the same endpoint at the same rates.

Cost at every volume we priced. About $8 to $15 against $150 at 100,000 pages, and about $80 to $160 against $1,301 at a million, by our own estimate, not independently verified. Rendered pages widen the gap because Scraping Browser bills bandwidth at $7 to $8 per GB.

Open source and self-hostable. The engine is MIT at spider-rs/spider. Bright Data’s SDK and MCP server are open; the service is not.

A crawler as well as a fetcher. The /crawl endpoint follows links from a start URL, and the /unblocker endpoint is the closest analogue to Web Unlocker for a single hard page.

Migration: the same task in both SDKs

Fetch a pricing page through the unblocking layer and get the content. Bright Data’s Python SDK wraps Web Unlocker; Spider’s client calls the scrape endpoint.

Bright Data:

from brightdata import bdclient

client = bdclient(api_token="BRIGHT_DATA_TOKEN")

html = client.scrape("https://example.com/pricing")
print(len(html))

Spider:

from spider import Spider

client = Spider(api_key="SPIDER_API_KEY")

pages = client.scrape_url(
    "https://example.com/pricing",
    params={"request": "smart", "return_format": "markdown"},
)

print(pages[0]["content"])

The Bright Data call returns HTML you still have to clean. The Spider call returns markdown with title and metadata in the same object. If the page turns out to need a browser, Bright Data’s answer is a second product; Spider’s is request: "chrome" on the same call, documented on the scrape endpoint reference.

When to pick which

Pick Bright Data when you need the proxy network itself, when a maintained Web Scraper API parser covers your platform, or when your buyer wants an enterprise contract with a named vendor.

Pick Spider when you need the content of pages across many sites, when static and rendered pages should cost the same kind of money, when you want the crawler engine in the open, or when a bill that follows the page count matters more than a rate card. The proxy-first vendors are covered in Spider vs Oxylabs and Spider vs Zyte.

The fastest test is to run one URL from your real list through the playground and through Web Unlocker’s free tier, and look at both results before you look at either bill.