--- title: "The best web scraping APIs in 2026, compared" category: "comparisons" url: https://keirolabs.cloud/blog/best-web-scraping-apis-2026 --- ## The 60-second version "Best web scraping API" depends on what you scrape and what reads the output. We compared twelve scraping APIs in 2026 on the four things that decide the bill and the quality: price per 1,000 pages at real volume, how much JavaScript rendering and proxies multiply that price, whether failed pages are billed, and whether the output is clean enough to hand straight to an LLM. - **Best for AI agents and RAG (clean markdown out):** Firecrawl for crawls, Keirolabs when you also need search, Jina Reader for free or low-volume work. - **Cheapest name-brand rate for rendered pages:** ScrapingBee, about $0.99 per 1,000 at 100,000 pages a month. - **Best for hard, bot-protected sites:** Bright Data, with ZenRows and ScraperAPI as cheaper middle grounds. - **Best for one specific big site (Google Maps, Amazon, LinkedIn):** Apify's Actor marketplace. - **Never pays for failures:** Tavily Extract and Jina Reader. **The number that matters is not the headline rate, it is the credit multiplier.** A scraping API that costs $1 per 1,000 plain pages can cost $25 per 1,000 once you turn on JavaScript rendering and residential proxies, which is what most modern sites need. ## What is a web scraping API? **A web scraping API fetches a URL for you and returns its content, handling the parts that make scraping hard: proxies, JavaScript rendering, retries, CAPTCHAs and anti-bot systems.** You send a URL; you get back HTML, markdown or structured JSON. That is different from a search API. A search API takes a query and finds pages; a scraping API takes a page you already have and reads it. Agents usually need both, which is why several products on this list now do both. We cover the difference in [search API vs scraping API for LLMs](/blog/search-api-vs-scraping-api-for-llms). There are three kinds of scraping API in 2026: 1. **Proxy-and-render APIs** (ScrapingBee, ZenRows, ScraperAPI, ScrapingAnt, Crawlbase, ScrapeOps, Bright Data): you get raw HTML back, rendered and unblocked. Cheap per page, but you parse it. 2. **LLM-ready extractors** (Firecrawl, Jina Reader, Tavily Extract, Keirolabs): you get clean markdown or JSON, boilerplate stripped. More per page, much less work and fewer tokens. 3. **Marketplaces** (Apify): ready-made scrapers for specific sites, each priced on its own. ## How much do scraping APIs cost per 1,000 pages? Monthly plan prices from each vendor's pricing page, as published in our [cheapest scraping API guide](/blog/cheapest-scraping-api-for-ai-agents) on September 23, 2026. The per-1,000 figure is for standard pages at each plan's full credit allowance. | Service | 10k pages/mo | 100k pages/mo | 1M pages/mo | |---|---|---|---| | ScrapingBee | $19 ($1.90/1k) | $99 ($0.99/1k) | $599 ($0.60/1k) | | ScrapingAnt | $19 ($1.90/1k) | $249 ($2.49/1k) | about $0.70/1k custom | | ZenRows | $57 ($5.70/1k) | $165 ($1.65/1k) | $456 ($0.46/1k) | | ScraperAPI | $49 ($4.90/1k) | $299 ($2.99/1k) | custom | | Crawlbase | about $2.84/1k pay as you go | $99 ($0.99/1k) | $599 ($0.60/1k) | | ScrapeOps | $29 ($2.90/1k) | $199 ($1.99/1k) | custom | | Firecrawl | $83 Standard | $83 ($0.83/1k) | $599 ($0.60/1k) | | Apify | $19 + compute | $19 + compute | $19 + compute | | Keirolabs /extract | $50 Pro | $2.40/1k on Startup | n/a, it is an index | **At 100,000 pages a month the cheapest headline rate is Firecrawl at $0.83 per 1,000, with ScrapingBee and Crawlbase at $0.99.** At a million pages, ZenRows drops to $0.46. But these are standard-page rates, and the next table is where real bills come from. ## What do JavaScript rendering and proxies really cost? **Most scraping APIs bill in credits, and a JavaScript-rendered page through residential proxies costs 10 to 75 times a plain page.** This table is the one to read before you pick. | Service | Standard page | JavaScript render | Residential or premium proxy | Hardest sites | |---|---|---|---|---| | ScrapingBee | 1 credit | 5 (on by default) | 10, or 25 with JS | 75 (stealth) | | ScrapingAnt | 1 | 10 | 25 | 125 (JS + residential) | | ZenRows | 1 | 5 | 10 | 25 (JS + premium) | | ScraperAPI | 1 | 10 | 25 (JS + premium) | 75, +10 on bypassed anti-bot | | Crawlbase | 1 | x2 | included | x1.5 to x20 by difficulty | | Firecrawl | 1 | included | n/a | JSON format +4 | | Apify | compute units | compute units | $8/GB residential | Unblocker $1.50/1k | **ScrapingBee renders JavaScript by default, so its "1 credit" page is really a 5-credit page unless you turn rendering off.** Firecrawl is the outlier: rendering is included in the page price, which is why its $0.83 holds up on modern sites while others multiply. ## Which scraping API is best for AI agents and RAG? **For agents, the best scraping API is the one whose output your LLM can read without a cleaning step, because tokens cost more than pages.** Raw HTML from a proxy API is often five to ten times longer than the article it contains, and your model pays for every character. | API | Output | Price | Failed pages billed? | Best for | |---|---|---|---|---| | **Firecrawl** | Markdown, JSON by schema | $0.83/1k (Standard) | Yes, error-status pages cost 1 credit | Crawling whole sites | | **Jina Reader** | Markdown | Free key: 500 requests/min; paid by output tokens | No | Free and low-volume work, PDFs | | **Tavily Extract** | Markdown | 1 credit per 5 successful URLs (basic) | No | Batches of URLs in RAG pipelines | | **Keirolabs /extract** | Dense markdown | $2.40/1k on Startup | Billed per request | Agents that also search | We ran twenty real pages through these extractors on October 12, 2026. **Jina Reader returned meaningful content on 15 of 20 pages at an 829 ms median, but shipped 597,719 characters for the set where Keirolabs returned 163,914.** Denser output is cheaper downstream: your LLM reads a third of the tokens. The full scoreboard is in [Firecrawl vs Jina Reader vs Tavily Extract](/blog/firecrawl-vs-jina-reader-vs-tavily-extract). Our picks: - **Crawling a docs site or a whole domain:** Firecrawl. Crawl, map and schema extraction are its core, and rendering is included. - **Prototyping or scraping a few thousand pages:** Jina Reader. `r.jina.ai/` is the easiest scraping API there is, and a free key covers 500 requests a minute. - **Agents that search, then read:** Keirolabs. Search, SERP and extraction share one key and one bill, and the output is the densest we measured. (Disclosure: it is ours.) - **Pipelines that hit lots of dead URLs:** Tavily Extract, because failures are free. ## Which scraping API is best for hard, protected sites? **When a site actively blocks bots, you are paying for the proxy network and the unblocking, not the scraper.** Bright Data has the largest proxy network and its Web Unlocker handles CAPTCHAs and fingerprinting; its MCP server runs on the same network with 5,000 free requests a month ([Bright Data docs](https://docs.brightdata.com/products/mcp-server/overview)). ZenRows and ScraperAPI are the middle ground: cheaper than Bright Data, with "premium" or "ultra" modes for protected sites. Budget them at their hard-site multipliers, 25 credits a page on ZenRows and 75 on ScraperAPI, not their standard rate. **If more than a quarter of your pages need premium proxies, price every vendor at its premium multiplier before comparing.** ## Which scraping API is cheapest? **For plain pages at volume, ZenRows at $0.46 per 1,000 (1M pages a month) and ScrapingBee, Crawlbase and Firecrawl at $0.60 are the cheapest published rates.** For JavaScript-heavy pages, Firecrawl's included rendering usually wins, because the others multiply. For small volumes, free allowances go a long way: Jina's free key, Tavily's 1,000 credits a month, Bright Data's 5,000 requests and Keirolabs' 1,250 credits a month all cost nothing. Our [full cost guide](/blog/cheapest-scraping-api-for-ai-agents) prices nine services at three volumes with every multiplier. ## When should you use Apify instead? **Use Apify when you need one specific big site, like Google Maps, Amazon, Instagram or LinkedIn, as structured data, and someone has already built the scraper.** The Apify Store has thousands of Actors; you run one and get JSON with the fields already named. The tradeoff is predictability. Each Actor has its own author, maintenance and price, billed in compute units on top of a $19 Starter plan. A well-maintained Actor is the fastest path to clean data from one site; an abandoned one breaks the day the site changes its layout. Check the Actor's run history before depending on it. ## How do you choose? A five-question checklist 1. **Who reads the output, a parser or an LLM?** Parser: a proxy API's HTML is fine and cheapest. LLM: pay for markdown, you will save it in tokens. 2. **What share of your pages need JavaScript?** If most do, compare prices at the rendering multiplier, or pick an API that includes rendering. 3. **How protected are the sites?** Unprotected: anything works. Cloudflare or Akamai protected: budget Bright Data, ZenRows premium or ScraperAPI ultra. 4. **Do failures cost money?** If your URL list has dead links, Tavily Extract and Jina Reader never bill a failure. 5. **Do you also need search?** If your agent has to find pages before reading them, one API that does both saves a second bill and a second integration. ## The short answer For AI agents, start with **Firecrawl** for crawling and **Jina Reader** for free work, and use **Keirolabs** if you also need search. For hard sites, **Bright Data**. For the cheapest raw HTML, **ScrapingBee** or **ZenRows**. For one specific big site, an **Apify** Actor. Whatever you pick, price it at the multiplier your pages actually need, not the number on the pricing page.