ScrapingBee alternative in 2026: credits, multipliers, cost

ScrapingBee is a single-URL scraping API for developers who want one GET request, one HTML response, and a monthly bill they can predict. It has been around long enough to have a Capterra rating of 4.9 from 137 reviews, and its documentation is some of the clearest in the category. Spider Cloud is a research lab for web data quality. It ships a crawler, a scraper, a hosted browser and a proxy mode under one key, returns markdown or JSON rather than HTML by default, and bills bandwidth and compute instead of credits.

The verdict depends on which pages you scrape. On plain pages at one credit each, ScrapingBee’s $19 Hobby plan is hard to argue with. The moment your targets sit behind bot protection, the credit table takes over: the stealth proxy costs 75 credits a request, so the 1,000,000 credit Startup plan buys 13,333 protected pages for $99. Spider has no per-feature multiplier, returns the data already converted, and can crawl a whole site in one call. For anything past a few thousand protected pages a month, Spider is the cheaper tool and the one with less code around it. Our hub post on the best ScrapingBee alternatives covers the rest of the field.

Side by side

ScrapingBee’s column comes from its pricing page and documentation as read on September 2, 2026. Spider’s comes from the pricing and plans guide.

Pricing

ScrapingBee’s plans

ScrapingBee sells five monthly plans. Prices exclude VAT, credits reset monthly, and there is no overage; when you run out you upgrade or renew early.

Prices as of September 2026, from scrapingbee.com/pricing. The trial is 1,000 credits with no card. ScrapingBee only charges for requests that return 200, 404 or 410, which is a fair rule and one we want to credit them for.

The credit table is the part the pricing page does not show. From the documentation:

Auto mode bills “1, 5, 10, 25 or 75 credits depending on the configuration that worked”, which is convenient when it works on the first try and expensive when it lands on stealth.

Two things follow from that table. First, the $19 and $49 plans do not include JS rendering or premium proxies at all, so the multipliers are a Startup-and-above concern; the cheap plans are for pages that render server side. Second, once you are on Startup or higher and the site needs stealth, the plan’s headline credit count divides by 75:

Add AI extraction and it is 80 credits a page. Those figures are arithmetic on ScrapingBee’s own numbers, not something a reviewer measured.

Spider’s worked example

Spider bills bandwidth at $1 per GB of content transferred, measured before transformation, and compute at $0.001 per minute of server-side processing. JavaScript rendering rolls into compute rather than carrying a multiplier, standard proxy rotation is included, and residential and ISP pools and AI extraction are priced separately. Failed requests cost $0. Credits never expire.

The pricing guide puts it at about $8 to $15 per 100,000 pages in smart mode, from $1/GB plus $0.001 per CPU minute; failed requests cost nothing. Smart mode starts with a plain HTTP fetch and escalates to a rendered fetch only where the page needs it, so most of a crawl is billed at the cheap end. At 10,000 pages the guide’s estimate is about $0.80 to $1.00, and at 1,000,000 pages in chrome mode with markdown and metadata it is about $80 to $160.

Set that beside ScrapingBee. 100,000 plain pages: $49 on Freelance versus roughly $8 to $15. 100,000 pages that need rendering: $99 on Startup versus the same $8 to $15, because rendering is compute rather than a fivefold multiplier. 100,000 pages that need stealth: 7.5 million credits, which is Business at $249 plus most of a second month or Business+ at $599, versus a Spider bill that depends on bytes and CPU minutes rather than on which proxy tier answered.

A team that wants a flat number instead can take the Unlimited plan from $40 per month for two units of concurrency. Unlimited routes through a smaller flat-rate proxy pool and does not offer geo-targeting yet, so it suits steady crawls of sites you already know work.

Benchmarks

ScrapingBee does not publish a success-rate methodology, so we cannot quote a vendor number. Scrapeway runs a weekly panel across scraping APIs against a fixed set of real targets and publishes the results. Its August 14 to 28, 2026 window puts ScrapingBee at a 40% success rate, a 2.8 second mean response, and $1.49 per 1,000 scrapes, with the note that 39.6% is “below-average” against a 56.8% panel average. Scrapeway’s page still lists the older $49 entry plan, so read its cost column with that in mind.

We have not run a head-to-head against ScrapingBee ourselves and will not invent one. Our published crawl benchmark covers Firecrawl and Crawl4AI on a different corpus and is linked from the Firecrawl comparison, and the Spider Browser dataset (100% pass rate on 999 URLs across 254 domains, February 2026, dataset at https://github.com/spider-rs/spider-browser-dataset) is our own benchmark, not independently verified. It measures the hosted browser rather than the scraping API, so it is evidence of what the infrastructure can reach, not a ScrapingBee comparison.

Where ScrapingBee wins

The first request. ScrapingBee’s API is one URL with query parameters, the docs cover every parameter on one page, and the Python and Node clients are thin wrappers you can read in an afternoon. A developer who has never scraped anything is fetching pages inside ten minutes.

Fixed bills. A 5 MB page is one credit on ScrapingBee and five megabytes of bandwidth on Spider. If your targets are heavy and your volume is small, the credit model is easier to budget and can be cheaper. The $19 Hobby plan with 75,000 plain fetches is a real product for a hobbyist or a side project, and there is no card on the trial.

The Google Search API. At 10 credits a search on Startup and above, ScrapingBee sells parsed search results as a first-class product. Spider has a search endpoint too, but ScrapingBee’s is longer established and its result schema is well documented.

The charge rule. Only 200, 404 and 410 are billed. That matches Spider’s failed-requests-cost-nothing rule and is better than several vendors in this category.

Where Spider wins

Data quality is the claim and the rest is evidence for it. Spider returns markdown, text or JSON from the request, converted on the way out, so the page that lands in your vector store or your table has already had navigation, scripts and boilerplate stripped. ScrapingBee added return_page_markdown, which helps, but the product still centers on HTML and the parsing stays with you.

Whole sites in one call. ScrapingBee scrapes one URL per request and has no crawl or async mode we could verify. Spider’s crawl endpoint takes a start URL and a limit, follows links, and returns every page in one response, with the same output formats. A documentation site, a product catalog or a blog archive is one request instead of a discovery script feeding a loop.

No multiplier table. Rendering is compute at $0.001 a minute. Stealth mode and the unblocker endpoint exist for sites behind common bot-protection services, and they cost what the bytes and the CPU time cost, not 75 times the base rate. Failed requests are $0 on both services, but on Spider a page that needed three attempts is billed for the bytes it moved, not for the tier that finally answered.

Concurrency and expiry. Every Spider account starts at 10,000 requests per minute. ScrapingBee caps concurrency by plan, from 25 on Hobby to 400 on Business+. Spider credits never expire, where ScrapingBee’s reset monthly, so a team that scrapes in bursts is not buying a plan for the quiet months.

Open engine. The crawler behind the API is spider-rs/spider, MIT licensed, and you can run it yourself. ScrapingBee has no self-host option.

Migration: the same task in both SDKs

Fetch a JavaScript-rendered product page behind bot protection and get its content as markdown.

ScrapingBee

import os
from scrapingbee import ScrapingBeeClient

client = ScrapingBeeClient(api_key=os.getenv("SCRAPINGBEE_API_KEY"))

response = client.get(
    "https://example.com/products/123",
    params={
        "render_js": "true",            # 5 credits
        "stealth_proxy": "true",        # 75 credits, rendering required
        "return_page_markdown": "true",
    },
)
# 75 credits consumed if the request returns 200, 404 or 410.
markdown = response.text

Spider

import os
from spider import Spider

client = Spider(api_key=os.getenv("SPIDER_API_KEY"))

pages = client.scrape_url(
    "https://example.com/products/123",
    params={
        "request": "smart",
        "return_format": "markdown",
    },
)
# Billed on bytes transferred and CPU minutes; $0 if it fails.
markdown = pages[0]["content"]

Set "request": "chrome" to force a rendered fetch, or send the same URL to the unblocker endpoint for sites that block the standard path. To crawl the whole catalog instead of one page, swap scrape_url for crawl_url and add "limit": 500; everything else stays the same.

When to pick which

Pick ScrapingBee when you scrape server-rendered pages in small volume, want a fixed monthly bill under $50, and value a thin API you can hold in your head. Its Google Search API is a reason on its own if search results are your main target.

Pick Spider when your targets need rendering or sit behind bot protection, when you want markdown or JSON instead of HTML, when the job is a site rather than a URL, or when you would rather not watch a credit balance divide by 75. Start on pay as you go, move to Unlimited if the bill becomes predictable enough to want flat.

If you are weighing more than these two, the compare page has every vendor we have written up in one table, and the ScraperAPI and ZenRows posts cover the two APIs with the closest credit models.

Whichever you lean toward, run the same URL through the playground before you decide. It shows the returned markdown, which mode served it, and what that one request cost, and that beats any table on this page.