ScrapingBee Alternatives: 6 Options That Return Data, Not Just HTML

The best ScrapingBee alternative gives you the data itself, priced per result, instead of a page you still have to parse, priced in credits that multiply on hard sites. Scrape.ly is our top pick: 568 ready-made scrapers that return structured fields (Amazon products at $0.70 per 1,000), plus per-GB proxies, an anti-bot browser and an MCP server for AI agents.

ScrapingBee is a capable web scraping API: you send a URL, it fetches the page through its proxies and a headless browser, and you get the HTML back. Its credit model is where teams start looking around. This list compares six ScrapingBee alternatives on how they bill, how much hard pages cost, and what you get back, with prices checked on 22 October 2026 and a real run from the same day.

Why teams look for a ScrapingBee alternative

ScrapingBee's pricing page and documentation explain the model:

• Credits per request, multiplied by the setup. A request costs 1 credit without JavaScript rendering, 5 with it (the default), 10 with a premium proxy, 25 with a premium proxy and rendering, and 75 with the stealth proxy. AI extraction adds 5 credits.
• The same plan buys very different volumes. Plans start at Hobby, $19 a month for 75,000 credits, and Startup, $99 for 1,000,000.
• You get the page, then parse it. The core API returns HTML (or text, Markdown or a screenshot). Dedicated APIs cover a set of popular sites, but for most sites the parsing is your code.
• Monthly plans. Prices exclude VAT, and the free trial is 1,000 credits.

Here's what the multipliers do to a plan, using ScrapingBee's own credit costs:

A site that needs the stealth proxy costs 15 times as much per page as one that doesn't, and you still parse the HTML yourself.

What to look for in a ScrapingBee alternative

1. Structured output. Fields like price, rating and ASIN, ready for a sheet or database.
2. A price you can read before you run. A listed price per result beats a credit multiplier you discover per site.
3. Traffic priced by size. Paying per GB means a light page costs a fraction of a heavy one.
4. A browser for the hardest sites. Anti-bot fingerprints and Cloudflare Turnstile solving when plain requests fail.
5. A cost cap and an agent path. A hard limit per job, and a way for AI agents to run scrapers for you.

ScrapingBee alternatives compared

Every competitor figure is from that vendor's pricing page or credit documentation on 22 October 2026.

1. Scrape.ly: data instead of pages

Scrape.ly is a web data platform: a Store of 568 ready-made scrapers called Actors, a cloud runtime, managed proxies, a hosted anti-bot browser, an API with Python and Node clients, and an MCP server for AI agents. You send an input (a search URL, a keyword, a list of pages) and get a dataset of typed fields, exportable as JSON, CSV or Excel.

Ready Actors for the sites you'd point ScrapingBee at. Each lists its price per result:

• Amazon Product Scraper: $0.70 per 1,000 products, with price, ASIN, rating, reviews count and seller.
• Google Search Scraper: $3.00 per 1,000 results pages, with positions, People Also Ask and related searches. On ScraperAPI's Hobby plan, where a Google request costs 25 credits, the same 1,000 requests come to $12.25.
• Website Content Crawler: $0.50 per 1,000 crawled pages, returned as clean text and Markdown for LLMs and RAG.
• Web Scraper: $0.50 per 1,000 results, running your own page function on each page.

Browse the rest in the Store.

A real run. On 22 October 2026 we ran the Amazon Product Scraper's Keyboards from a search URL preset. It saved 5 products in 6.1 seconds and was charged $0.0046 in total: $0.0035 in result fees, $0.0008 of compute, $0.0002 of datacenter proxy traffic and $0.00006 of storage writes. No HTML to parse, and the Amazon scraping tutorial lists every field:

Proxies priced by size, not by request. When you run your own crawler as an Actor, proxy traffic is billed per GB: residential $4 per GB on Free, $3.50 on Starter, $2.75 on Scale and $2 on Business; datacenter $1 down to $0.75. As an example, a 200 KB page through the residential pool at $4 per GB is 0.0002 GB × $4 = $0.0008 of traffic. A premium-proxy request on ScrapingBee's Hobby plan costs 10 credits, or $0.0025. Compute is billed on top on Scrape.ly, and the proxy page has the details.

An anti-bot browser when you need one. The Scrape.ly browser is a hosted Chromium with anti-bot fingerprints, Cloudflare Turnstile solving and its own residential proxy, at a list price of $0.45 per browser hour. Turn it on for an Actor and your Playwright or Puppeteer code connects without changes. See anti-blocking.

Caps and agents. Every run takes a maximum charge and stops when it reaches it. The hosted MCP server at https://api.scrape.ly/mcp lets Claude, Cursor or ChatGPT search the Store, run an Actor and read the dataset, and scoped API keys with daily charge limits keep agents in budget.

See the full Scrape.ly vs ScrapingBee comparison.

2. ScraperAPI

ScraperAPI is the closest like-for-like ScrapingBee alternative: a per-request API billed in monthly credits. Hobby costs $49 a month for 100,000 credits, Startup $149 for 1,000,000 and Business $299 for 3,000,000, with about 10% off billed annually. A standard page costs 1 credit, Amazon 5, Google and Bing 25 and LinkedIn 30, and sites behind bot protection add 10, per ScraperAPI's pricing page. A max_cost setting caps a single request.

Best for: developers who want a ScrapingBee-style endpoint with per-domain pricing they can look up in advance.

3. Scrapfly

Scrapfly sells five APIs, including scraping, data extraction and a browser, on one credit pool. Discovery costs $30 a month for 200,000 credits with no pay as you go, and Pro $100 for 1,000,000 with overage at $3.50 per 10,000. A base request is 1 credit, the browser or unblocker adds 5 and the residential proxy adds 25, per Scrapfly's pricing page. New accounts get 1,000 credits.

Best for: developers who want several page-level APIs behind one key and are happy to write their own extraction rules or prompts.

4. Zyte

Zyte API prices each response by the target site's difficulty tier: $0.13 to $1.27 per 1,000 HTTP responses and $1.01 to $16.08 per 1,000 browser-rendered responses pay as you go, with lower rates on $100, $200 or $500 monthly commitments. New accounts get $5 of credit for 30 days, per Zyte's pricing page.

Best for: Scrapy teams, since Zyte also hosts Scrapy spiders on Scrapy Cloud. Check your sites' tiers first: a tier-5 browser page costs over 100 times a tier-1 HTTP one.

5. Crawlbase

Crawlbase bills per successful request on a graduated ladder: $3.00 per 1,000 for the first 1,000, $2.00 for the next 10,000, $0.60 for the next 100,000, and lower beyond. JavaScript rendering doubles the price and harder sites multiply it by up to 2. Up to 5,000 requests are free, and subscriptions start at $99 a month, per Crawlbase's pricing page.

Best for: high-volume page fetching where you already have parsers and want no monthly plan.

6. ScrapingAnt

ScrapingAnt is a credit-based scraping API with headless Chrome. Enthusiast costs $19 a month for 100,000 credits and Startup $49 for 500,000, and every account gets 10,000 free credits a month. A plain datacenter request costs 1 credit, a browser-rendered one 10, a residential one 25 and a browser-rendered residential one 125, per its credit table. Unused credits don't carry over.

Best for: small projects that fit inside a monthly credit allowance on easy sites.

How to switch from ScrapingBee to Scrape.ly

1. Group your ScrapingBee calls by site. For each site, note what you parse out of the HTML.
2. Check the Store for that site. If an Actor exists, run its preset on the free credit and compare the fields with your parser's output. You can delete that parser.
3. For any other site, use a crawler Actor. The Website Content Crawler returns clean text and Markdown; the Web Scraper runs your own extraction function per page.
4. Turn on the Scrape.ly browser for your own Playwright or Puppeteer Actors that hit Cloudflare Turnstile.
5. Set a maximum charge per run and schedule the jobs you used to trigger by cron.

This Python example crawls a documentation section and prints each page's Markdown. Install the client with pip install scrapely-client-python and take your token from Settings → API & Integrations:

import os
from scrapely_client import ScrapelyClient

client = ScrapelyClient(os.environ["SCRAPELY_TOKEN"], api_url="https://api.scrape.ly")

run = client.actor("querystone/website-content-crawler").call(
    run_input={
        "startUrls": [{"url": "https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/"}],
        "maxCrawlPages": 10,
        "proxyConfiguration": {"useScrapelyProxy": True},
    }
)
print(run.status)  # SUCCEEDED, FAILED, ABORTED or TIMED-OUT
for page in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(page.get("url"), len(page.get("markdown") or ""))

Ten pages at $0.0005 each come to $0.005 in page fees. An AI agent can do the same over MCP: connect https://api.scrape.ly/mcp and ask, "Use scrapely to crawl the first 10 pages of the Python tutorial with querystone/website-content-crawler and give me each page's title and Markdown."

FAQ

What is the best ScrapingBee alternative?

Scrape.ly. Instead of returning HTML priced at 1 to 75 credits per request, its Store Actors return structured fields at a listed price per result, such as $0.70 per 1,000 Amazon products. For other sites, its crawlers and per-GB proxies keep the cost tied to what you actually download.

Is there a cheaper alternative to ScrapingBee?

For sites with a Store Actor, usually yes, because you pay per result and skip parsing. For hard sites, compare per page: 1,000 stealth-proxy requests use a whole $19 Hobby plan on ScrapingBee, while Scrape.ly charges a listed price per result plus traffic per GB.

Is there a free ScrapingBee alternative?

Scrape.ly's Free plan gives you $5 of credit every month with no card. That covers 7,142 Amazon products or 10,000 crawled pages in result fees.

Does ScrapingBee charge for failed requests?

According to its documentation, requests that return 200 are billed, while errors such as 400 (bad request), 401 (out of credits or invalid key) and 403 are not. On Scrape.ly, Store Actors charge their fee per result saved, so a page that fails saves no result and pays no result fee; the run's compute is still billed.

Can I use ScrapingBee and Scrape.ly with AI agents?

Scrape.ly runs a hosted MCP server at https://api.scrape.ly/mcp for Claude, Cursor, VS Code and other clients. An agent can search 568 Actors, start a run and read structured results, with a maximum charge on each run.