Spider vs. NetNut: Why a Proxy Network Alone Isn’t Enough in 2026

NetNut is a proxy network. Spider is a scraping and browser automation platform. These are fundamentally different products, but if you are paying for NetNut today, you are probably paying for only one layer of a stack that requires five.

What NetNut actually is

NetNut sells proxy bandwidth: residential, static residential, mobile, and datacenter IPs across 200+ countries. You point your scraping tools — Puppeteer, Playwright, Selenium, whatever — through their network to avoid IP-level blocks.

NetNut does not scrape websites. It does not render JavaScript. It does not solve CAPTCHAs. It does not extract data. It is a pipe. Your traffic goes through it and comes out the other side looking like it originates from a residential ISP.

Everything else — the browser, the anti-detection, the rendering, the parsing — is your problem.

The problem with proxies in 2026

A good proxy network used to be enough to scrape most sites. That stopped being true about two years ago. Anti-bot systems now operate at layers that a proxy cannot touch:

TLS fingerprinting. Cloudflare, Akamai, and DataDome fingerprint the TLS ClientHello. Your cipher suites, extensions, and elliptic curves have to match a real browser. Changing the source IP does nothing to your TLS fingerprint.

HTTP/2 fingerprinting. Anti-bot systems inspect HTTP/2 SETTINGS frames, WINDOW_UPDATE parameters, and header ordering. These are protocol-level signals that pass through any proxy unchanged.

Behavioral analysis. Mouse movement patterns, scroll velocity, click entropy, and navigation sequences are tracked in real time. No proxy can simulate human behavior on a page.

JavaScript challenges. Cloudflare Turnstile, hCaptcha, and custom JS challenges require an actual browser environment to execute. A proxy does not run JavaScript.

A residential IP gets you past the first check. The next three still catch you.

What Spider does instead

Spider handles the entire pipeline. The API takes a URL, handles proxy rotation, browser rendering, anti-detection, and data extraction, then returns clean output. Spider Browser gives you a remote session with stealth and AI extraction built in.

Spider Browser handles all of these detection layers automatically. When you call page.goto(url), the system works through whatever protection the site uses and returns the content. In our public benchmark, Spider Browser achieved a 100% pass rate across 999 URLs — including Amazon, Nike (Akamai), Walmart and Zillow (PerimeterX), Sephora and Booking.com (DataDome), and dozens of Cloudflare-protected sites. Proxy rotation is one component of a multi-layer approach — not the whole strategy.

What a scraping workflow looks like on each

With NetNut

import puppeteer from "puppeteer";

const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
  args: ["--proxy-server=http://gw.netnut.io:5959"],
});

const page = await browser.newPage();

// Authenticate with the proxy
await page.authenticate({
  username: "YOUR_NETNUT_USER",
  password: "YOUR_NETNUT_PASS",
});

// Anti-detection: your responsibility
await page.setUserAgent("Mozilla/5.0 ...");
await page.evaluateOnNewDocument(() => {
  // Patch navigator.webdriver, plugins, languages, WebGL, etc.
  // Hope this still works after Cloudflare's next update
});

await page.goto("https://example.com");
const html = await page.content();

// Data extraction: also your responsibility
// parse(html) with Cheerio? custom regex?

await browser.close();

With Spider

import { SpiderBrowser } from "spider-browser";

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

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

// Extraction is built in
const data = await spider.page.extract(
  "Extract the main product name, price, rating, and number of reviews as JSON"
);

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

No proxy config. No anti-detection patching. No parsing library. Spider handles the transport, the stealth, and the extraction in one call.

The cost of a proxy-based stack

NetNut’s rotating residential proxies range from roughly $1.50 to $7/GB depending on plan size and proxy type, with per-GB rates decreasing on higher-volume commitments.

But proxy bandwidth is only one line item. A working scraping operation on top of NetNut requires:

Proxy bandwidth: $150-$700/month for a moderate workload (~100GB)
Server infrastructure: $200+/month for cloud VMs running headless browsers
CAPTCHA solving service: $50-$100/month (2Captcha, Anti-Captcha, etc.)
Anti-detection maintenance: engineering hours every time Cloudflare or DataDome ships an update
Monitoring and retry logic: more engineering time to handle the failures that still get through

A realistic NetNut-based stack runs $400-$1,000/month in infrastructure costs before you account for the engineering time to keep it running. And that engineering time is not a one-time investment — anti-bot systems update constantly, and your patches break with them.

Spider bills based on bandwidth and compute time — proxies, rendering, stealth, and extraction are all included. No credit multipliers, no per-feature surcharges. A typical workload of 50,000 pages per month costs around $32.50. No infrastructure to run, no patches to maintain. See spider.cloud/credits for the full pricing breakdown.

When NetNut still makes sense

NetNut is the right choice if you already have a working scraping stack and just need better IPs, if you need raw proxy access for non-scraping use cases like ad verification or brand monitoring, or if compliance requirements dictate specific proxy types.

If you are building a scraping workflow from scratch — or tired of maintaining the stack of services that sits between a proxy and usable data — Spider replaces the whole thing.

Spider vs. NetNut: Why a Proxy Network Alone Isn't Enough in 2026