ScrapingBee alternative
Looking for a ScrapingBee alternative?
ScrapingBee and ScrAPI are the two closest products in this comparison set. Both sell a single REST endpoint, both bill in credits, and both charge five credits to render a page in a browser. The differences are structural rather than dramatic: how you buy the credits, whether they survive the end of the month, and whether concurrency is something you pay a tier for.
The honest summary is that ScrapingBee is stronger at turning pages into fields, and ScrAPI is stronger at buying capacity on your own terms.
ScrapingBee pricing and features last checked: 10 September 2026. Compare ScrAPI with other providers.
Quick comparison
ScrapingBee figures are from the pricing page and documentation listed at the bottom of this page. ScrAPI figures are from its credit documentation and published pricing.
What it actually costs
Both products bill in credits, so these are directly comparable, which is rare in this market. ScrapingBee's Hobby plan is a monthly subscription, so its figures below are the marginal cost of the credits consumed, assuming you stay inside the plan. Buying the plan costs $19 a month whether you use 1,000 credits or 75,000.
Workload A: 10,000 plain HTTP pages
No JavaScript, no proxy. The cheapest thing either product does.
Assumptions
- ScrAPI: 1 credit per request (HTTP client).
- ScrapingBee: 1 credit per request (classic proxy, no JS rendering).
- Marginal credit cost only. ScrapingBee's $19 monthly plan fee is not included; ScrAPI's $19 top-up is a one-off purchase of 100,000 credits.
ScrAPI
Pay as you go, $19 / 100,000 credits
10,000 × 1 credit × $0.00019
$1.90
ScrAPI
Growth, $79/month / 1,000,000 credits
10,000 × 1 credit × $0.000079
$0.79
ScrapingBee
Hobby, $19/month / 75,000 credits
10,000 × 1 credit × $0.000253
$2.53
Workload B: 10,000 JavaScript-rendered pages
Both products charge five credits for this, so the comparison is purely the price of a credit.
Assumptions
- ScrAPI: useBrowser, 5 credits per request. No proxy.
- ScrapingBee: render_js with the classic proxy, 5 credits per request.
- 50,000 credits consumed on both sides. ScrapingBee's Hobby plan (75,000 credits) covers it; ScrAPI's $19 top-up (100,000 credits) covers it.
ScrAPI
Pay as you go, $19 / 100,000 credits
50,000 credits × $0.00019
$9.50
ScrAPI
Growth, $79/month / 1,000,000 credits
50,000 credits × $0.000079
$3.95
ScrapingBee
Hobby, $19/month / 75,000 credits
50,000 credits × $0.000253
$12.67
Workload C: 1,000 protected pages needing a residential-tier proxy
This is where the two credit models diverge, because the products price their hardest tier differently.
Assumptions
- ScrAPI: useBrowser + residential proxy, 5 + 10 = 15 credits per request.
- ScrapingBee: premium_proxy with render_js, 25 credits per request. Its stealth proxy tier costs 75 credits with rendering and is shown separately.
- No captcha is assumed to be solved. ScrAPI charges 30 credits per captcha solved on top; ScrapingBee does not publish a separate captcha charge.
ScrAPI
Pay as you go, $19 / 100,000 credits
1,000 × 15 credits × $0.00019
$2.85
ScrAPI
Growth, $79/month / 1,000,000 credits
1,000 × 15 credits × $0.000079
$1.18
ScrapingBee, premium proxy
Hobby, $19/month / 75,000 credits
1,000 × 25 credits × $0.000253
$6.33
ScrapingBee, stealth proxy
Hobby, $19/month / 75,000 credits
1,000 × 75 credits × $0.000253
$19.00
A note in ScrapingBee's favour: its Auto-Mode charges only for the cheapest configuration that successfully returns the page, and charges nothing if none of them work. If you do not know in advance whether a target needs the premium tier, that is a useful cost ceiling, and ScrAPI has no equivalent published mechanism.
Workload D: 1,000 Google Search queries
ScrapingBee is cheaper here, and returns more.
Assumptions
- ScrAPI: a google.com/search URL is routed through the Google SERP pipeline. It is forced to browser plus residential proxy (15 credits) and carries a 20-credit SERP surcharge, for 35 credits per search. The response is the results page as HTML or Markdown.
- ScrapingBee: the dedicated /api/v1/google endpoint, 10 credits per search, returning parsed JSON.
ScrapingBee
Hobby, $19/month / 75,000 credits
1,000 × 10 credits × $0.000253
$2.53
ScrAPI
Scale, $199/month / 3,000,000 credits
1,000 × 35 credits × $0.0000663
$2.32
ScrAPI
Growth, $79/month / 1,000,000 credits
1,000 × 35 credits × $0.000079
$2.76
ScrAPI
Pay as you go, $19 / 100,000 credits
1,000 × 35 credits × $0.00019
$6.65
ScrapingBee wins this one on both axes. It is cheaper than ScrAPI at every tier below Scale, and it returns organic results, ads, local results and a knowledge graph as JSON fields rather than a page to parse. If Google SERP data is a significant part of your workload, that is a straightforward reason to prefer ScrapingBee.
Where the products actually differ
Buying capacity
ScrapingBee sells monthly plans. ScrAPI sells a one-off $19 top-up of 100,000 credits alongside its monthly plans, and rolls unused credits over rather than clearing them at the end of the cycle. For bursty work such as a migration or a quarterly audit, that difference is larger than any per-credit gap.
Concurrency
ScrapingBee sells concurrency by tier, from 25 concurrent requests on Hobby to 400 on Business+. If you need to push 100 requests in parallel you are buying the $99 plan whether or not you need a million credits. ScrAPI's plans differ by credit allowance rather than by a concurrency ceiling. A service-wide cap of 200 concurrent requests per client IP applies to everyone equally, with requests queued beyond it, which is still well above ScrapingBee's entry tier.
Getting fields instead of pages
ScrapingBee's extract_rules take a JSON schema of CSS or XPath selectors and return a populated object. ScrAPI's responseSelector narrows the response to one CSS or XPath match, which is useful for trimming payload but is not an extraction schema. If your ideal request returns a finished record, ScrapingBee is ahead here.
Asynchronous work
ScrAPI accepts a callbackUrl and posts the result to your endpoint when the scrape finishes, which suits long browser runs that would otherwise hold an HTTP connection open. ScrapingBee's documentation does not describe an asynchronous or webhook mode, so it is recorded here as not clearly documented rather than absent.
Browser control
Both expose scripted interaction before extraction. ScrapingBee has JS scenarios; ScrAPI has browser commands for click, input, select, scroll, wait, wait-for and arbitrary JavaScript. Neither hands you a raw CDP connection to drive yourself. This is close to a tie.
Artefacts
ScrAPI can return a PNG screenshot, a PDF, or a WEBM recording of the browser session, at 2, 2 and 3 credits respectively. ScrapingBee documents screenshots, including full-page and per-selector captures. PDF and video are not documented on its side.
Anti-bot handling
Both products describe proxy rotation and browser rendering as their answer to bot detection, and neither publishes an independently verified success rate against a named protection vendor. Treat any such number, from either side, as marketing until someone shows you the test code.
The documented difference is in how each product exposes captcha handling. ScrAPI has an explicit solveCaptchas parameter with a published price of 30 credits per challenge solved, covering reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, Cloudflare, FunCaptcha, GeeTest, Yandex SmartCaptcha, Lemin and Amazon WAF. ScrapingBee handles challenges implicitly through proxy tiers and rendering rather than as a separately priced operation. Explicit pricing is easier to forecast; implicit handling is easier to use. Which you prefer is a genuine matter of taste.
ScrAPI keeps no scrape history. Requests are metered as aggregate counters against your API key, so target URLs and page content are not written to its database and responses are not cached. Screenshots, PDFs and video are stored under hash-derived filenames and deleted within 24 hours. Two honest caveats: a saved ecommerce monitor necessarily stores the URL you configured, and diagnostic logs can capture request details when a request fails. Nothing here should be read as a claim about what ScrapingBee retains. Check their privacy policy for that.
Which one should you pick?
ScrAPI may be a better fit if
- You want to buy credits once rather than hold a subscription. ScrAPI's $19 top-up of 100,000 credits has no monthly commitment, and unused credits roll over.
- You need high parallelism on a small budget. Concurrency is not a ScrAPI plan tier, so you are not buying a bigger credit allowance to get more simultaneous requests.
- You want results delivered asynchronously to a callbackUrl instead of holding a connection open for a slow browser run.
- You need PDF or video capture of the session, not only screenshots.
- Your hard targets are cheaper under ScrAPI's 15-credit browser-plus-residential request than ScrapingBee's 25- or 75-credit premium and stealth tiers.
ScrapingBee may be a better fit if
- You want parsed Google SERP data. ScrapingBee's Google endpoint returns organic results, ads, local results and a knowledge graph as JSON; ScrAPI returns the page for you to parse.
- You want an extraction schema rather than a single selector. extract_rules turns one request into a populated object without you writing parsing code.
- You do not know in advance which proxy tier a target needs. Auto-Mode bills only the cheapest configuration that worked, and nothing if all of them failed.
- You want a documented, explicit list of which HTTP status codes are billable, which ScrapingBee publishes in more detail than ScrAPI does.
Common questions
Is ScrAPI cheaper than ScrapingBee?
It depends on the request. Both charge 5 credits for a JavaScript-rendered page, but ScrAPI's credits are cheaper per unit: $0.00019 on the $19 pay-as-you-go top-up against $0.000253 on ScrapingBee's $19 Hobby plan. The gap widens on hard pages, where ScrAPI charges 15 credits for a browser plus a residential proxy and ScrapingBee charges 25 for premium proxy with JavaScript rendering. For plain HTTP fetches the two are close enough that the difference is unlikely to decide anything.
Does ScrapingBee have a pay-as-you-go option?
ScrapingBee's public pricing page lists monthly plans only, from $19 to $599 per month plus a custom Enterprise tier. ScrAPI sells a $19 one-off top-up of 100,000 credits with no subscription, which is the main structural difference at the entry level.
Do ScrapingBee credits roll over?
No. ScrapingBee documents that unused credits are not rolled over to the next month. ScrAPI's plans are configured to roll credits over, including the monthly subscriptions, so unused balance is not lost at the end of a billing period.
Which one is better for scraping Google Search?
ScrapingBee, on price and on output. Its Google Search API is a dedicated endpoint returning structured JSON with organic results, ads, local results and a knowledge graph for 10 credits per search, about $2.53 per thousand on the Hobby plan. A Google search on ScrAPI costs 35 credits. It is forced through a browser and a residential proxy and carries a 20-credit SERP surcharge, and it returns the results page as HTML or Markdown for you to parse. That is $6.65 per thousand on pay-as-you-go and $2.76 on the Growth plan. ScrAPI's case is that Google runs through the same endpoint and the same credits as everything else you scrape.
Does ScrapingBee charge for failed requests?
ScrapingBee documents that it charges for HTTP 200, 404, 410 and 413 responses, and does not charge for 400, 401, 403, 429 or 500. ScrAPI consumes no credits for failed requests that return no HTML or Markdown content, with one exception worth knowing: captchas are charged at 30 credits each even when the request ultimately fails. Neither policy is a blank cheque, since a page that returns 200 with a block message is billable on both.
Sources checked
Every ScrapingBee figure on this page comes from one of the official pages below, read on 10 September 2026. Scraping providers change pricing often, so check the source before relying on a number for a purchasing decision.
- ScrapingBee pricing, https://www.scrapingbee.com/pricing/
- ScrapingBee documentation, https://www.scrapingbee.com/documentation/
- ScrapingBee Google Search API, https://www.scrapingbee.com/features/google/
Plan prices come from ScrAPI's published pricing table and per-feature credit costs from its credit documentation. A few figures on these pages were taken from the service implementation rather than the documentation, because the two currently disagree: the 20-credit Google SERP surcharge, the 1-credit charge for supplying a callback URL, the 200-concurrent-request-per-IP limit, and the 15-minute session window are all read from the code. Where they conflict, the implementation is what you will be billed for.
Start with 1,000 free credits
Sign in with an email address, verify it, and ScrAPI issues an API key with 1,000 starter credits. There is no card to enter and no trial clock. Run your own URLs in the Playground and compare the result against whatever you use today.
ScrapingBee and other product names and trademarks referenced on this page belong to their respective owners and are used only to identify those products. ScrAPI is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by ScrapingBee. Pricing and features were checked against publicly available information on 10 September 2026 and may since have changed.