5 Best ScrapingBee Alternatives for Web Scraping in 2026

TL;DR

• Choose Firecrawl if you want machine-readable output your model can use immediately.
• Choose Bright Data or Oxylabs if your bottleneck is proxy scale and unblocking.
• Choose Apify if you want a marketplace of ready-made scrapers.
• Choose Octoparse if you want a visual tool and write no code.

We have to tip our hats to ScrapingBee. The team has built quite a capable web scraping API, and for many teams it handles all scraping needs well. But you may still hit a point where credit costs, output format, or the scale cap pushes you to look around. And if you're already there, this guide is for you.

I looked at five ScrapingBee alternatives, the closest competitors in 2026, and tested them myself rather than relying on secondhand reviews, so the numbers here are what I actually saw.

The data is updated as of June 16, 2026.

ScrapingBee is a web scraping API that handles proxies, headless browsers, and anti-bot defenses so you can simply request a page and get its contents back. It's positioned as the web scraping API that prevents you from getting blocked.

The core product is a scraping API that returns the page source by default, with a handful of capabilities layered on top:

• JavaScript rendering in a headless Chrome browser
• Automatic proxy rotation, with premium and stealth residential proxies for harder targets
• Geotargeting and full-page screenshots
• CSS and XPath extraction rules, so you can pull specific fields without parsing the HTML yourself
• AI data extraction via additional parameters (ai_query and ai_extract_rules) for schema-based or prompt-based output
• A Google Search API, plus dedicated Amazon and Walmart endpoints

As of June 2026, the pricing is credit based and plans run from Freelance at $49/mo (250,000 credits, 10 concurrent requests) up to Business+ at $599/mo (8,000,000 credits, 200 concurrent requests), with a free trial of 1,000 credits and no card required.

ScrapingBee's docs say a basic request is cheap, but the premium and stealth proxies you need for tough sites cost far more. A single stealth-proxy call costs 75 credits, so a plan's credits can run out much faster than the advertised number suggests when you scrape hard targets.

Each tool below wins on a different axis: Firecrawl for AI-ready output, Bright Data and Oxylabs for proxy scale, Apify for marketplace automation, and Octoparse for no-code access.

Firecrawl is an open-source, API-first platform built for teams that feed live web data into models. Where ScrapingBee returns the page source by default and offers AI extraction as an opt-in layer, Firecrawl's default response is already model-ready Markdown or schema-defined JSON in one call.

• Scrape turns any page into clean Markdown or structured JSON in one call
• Search lets you query the web and get full page content back, not just links
• Interact clicks, fills forms, logs in, and navigates JavaScript-heavy flows
• Crawl and Map pull an entire site or list every URL on a domain
• /monitor watches pages or whole sites and notifies your agent the moment content changes
• Open source, with Python, Node, and REST SDKs and 1,000 free credits per month

On the same JavaScript-rendered page (Hacker News), Firecrawl returned roughly 55% fewer characters and ran about 2.5× faster than ScrapingBee. Here are the exact numbers from that test.

ScrapingBee returned 34,873 characters of raw HTML in about 2.85 seconds, with a response cost of 5 credits for the rendered request. Firecrawl returned the same page as 15,371 characters of clean Markdown in about 1.16 seconds, with the page title already parsed into metadata.

Here is the Firecrawl call that produced the output above:

from firecrawl import Firecrawl
 
firecrawl = Firecrawl(api_key="fc-YOUR-API-KEY")
 
doc = firecrawl.scrape("https://news.ycombinator.com", formats=["markdown"])
print(doc.markdown)

For structured data extraction, you pass a schema and Firecrawl returns JSON directly, with no HTML parsing in between:

schema = {
    "type": "object",
    "properties": {
        "top_stories": {
            "type": "array",
            "items": {
                "type": "object",
                "properties": {
                    "title": {"type": "string"},
                    "points": {"type": "integer"},
                },
            },
        }
    },
}
 
doc = firecrawl.scrape(
    "https://news.ycombinator.com",
    formats=[{"type": "json", "schema": schema}],
)
print(doc.json)

Output

{
  "top_stories": [
    { "title": "MiMo Code is now released and open-source", "points": 229 },
    { "title": "Lines of code got a better publicist", "points": 271 },
    { "title": "Show HN: Homebrew 6.0.0", "points": 107 }
  ]
}

Both tools rendered the JavaScript page reliably. ScrapingBee's default scrape returns HTML for you to parse or pass to its AI extraction parameters as a follow-on step, while Firecrawl's default already returns parsed Markdown that maps to what you asked for. In this test that was less than half the characters, 15,371 versus 34,873, which means fewer input tokens reach your model on every call. Firecrawl is built to be token efficient, so every call costs less downstream.

Firecrawl uses transparent, credit-based pricing where one credit covers one page.

Pick Firecrawl when your output feeds a model, an agent, or a vector store and you want Markdown or JSON without a parsing layer. The combination of scrape, search, interact, and monitoring in one API also suits teams that want a single web-data dependency rather than several.

Firecrawl is the complete web data API. For teams that need to go one layer up and need web search along with web scrape and web crawl, Firecrawl is your best choice.

Bright Data is built around one of the largest proxy networks in the market, with a family of scraping products layered on top. It suits organizations whose main challenge is sustained, high-volume access to heavily defended sites.

The product line includes a Web Scraper API, Web Unlocker, Scraping Browser, SERP API, residential and datacenter proxies, and ready-made datasets. The company reports more than 20,000 customers, and the breadth is aimed at large data operations rather than quick one-off jobs.

• Web Scraper API with pre-built scrapers for specific domains, returning structured JSON, NDJSON, or CSV
• Web Unlocker returns unblocked HTML with automatic CAPTCHA solving, retries, and JS rendering
• Scraping Browser for Playwright or Puppeteer automation routed through the proxy network
• SERP API for structured search-engine results
• Residential, datacenter, ISP, and mobile proxies on one of the largest networks available
• Ready-made datasets marketplace for common sources
• Bulk async jobs up to 5,000 URLs, delivered to webhook, API, or your own storage
• Pay only for successfully delivered records

Bright Data returns already-structured JSON, NDJSON, or CSV from pre-built scrapers for specific domains like Amazon, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Zillow, delivered to a webhook, the API, or your storage. It is a bulk, async tool (up to 5,000 URLs per job, billed per delivered record), so it fits supported-domain datasets at scale more than one-off arbitrary pages.

As of June 2026, Bright Data's Web Scraper API offers a free trial of 5,000 records per month, pay-as-you-go at $1.5 per 1,000 records, and a monthly plan that includes 384,000 records with additional records at $1.3 per 1,000.

Other products such as proxies and the Web Unlocker are priced separately, each on its own page.

Pick Bright Data when proxy scale and unblocking are your bottleneck and you have the volume to justify an enterprise-grade setup. The per-product pricing rewards teams that know exactly which capabilities they need.

Apify is a platform built around Actors, which are reusable scraping and automation programs you can run, customize, or publish. Its marketplace holds more than 40,000 prebuilt Actors, so common targets often have a ready-made scraper.

The platform gives you full control over each Actor, with scheduling, storage, and a complete API. That makes it a strong fit for teams that want to assemble workflows from existing parts rather than build every scraper from scratch.

• Marketplace of 40,000+ prebuilt Actors for common targets
• Website Content Crawler turns sites into clean text, Markdown, or HTML for LLMs and RAG
• Native integrations with LangChain, LlamaIndex, Pinecone, Qdrant, and OpenAI Assistants
• Crawlee open-source library to build, run, and publish your own Actors
• Scheduling, dataset and key-value storage, and a full REST API
• Export results as JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML
• Built-in proxies and anti-blocking
• Free plan with $5 of monthly platform usage

Apify is a marketplace of 40,000+ Actors, so instead of one endpoint you pick the Actor that matches the job. To see what that returns, I ran its Google Maps Actor for specialty coffee shops in San Francisco. It came back with ranked places as structured JSON, each record already carrying the title, rating, review count, category, address, phone, website, opening hours, and coordinates, with no HTML to parse. The run took about 13 seconds, since Apify launches an Actor rather than answering a single synchronous request.

ScrapingBee's dedicated endpoints cover Amazon and Walmart but not Maps, so this dataset has no one-call equivalent there. For AI pipelines, a separate Apify Actor, the Website Content Crawler, returns clean Markdown instead of structured fields.

As of June 2026, Apify's plans are Free at $0 ($5 of platform usage, $0.20 per compute unit), Starter at $29/mo, Scale at $199/mo ($0.16 per compute unit), and Business at $999/mo ($0.13 per compute unit), with pay-as-you-go usage on top and an Enterprise tier.

Pick Apify when a prebuilt Actor already exists for your target or when you want to schedule and orchestrate scraping jobs on a platform. The marketplace can save significant build time for common sources.

Oxylabs is an enterprise proxy provider with a managed Web Scraper API on top of its network. It targets the same proxy-heavy, high-volume work as Bright Data, with a focus on reliability and support.

The catalog covers residential, datacenter, mobile, and ISP proxies, plus scraper APIs for general web and search targets. The emphasis is on sustained scale and unblocking rather than developer-experience features.

• Web Scraper API with dedicated per-domain parsers that return Parsed JSON
• OxyCopilot generates parsing instructions from a natural-language prompt
• SERP scraping including Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, parsed into structured data
• Residential, datacenter, ISP, and mobile proxies sold as separate products
• JavaScript rendering and geotargeting
• Real-time (sync) or async batch jobs, with push (webhook) or pull delivery
• Headless Browser and an AI Agents SDK for agent workflows
• Enterprise reliability with 24/7 support

Oxylabs returns Parsed JSON from dedicated per-domain parsers, with JavaScript rendering and geotargeting available, and its OxyCopilot assistant can generate those parsers from a plain-language prompt instead of hand-written selectors.

It can also scrape newer SERP surfaces like Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, which comes in handy if AI search results are what you are after.

As of June 2026, Oxylabs prices its Web Scraper API from $49/mo, with proxy products billed separately by gigabyte or by IP. Enterprise plans and custom commitments are available for larger volumes.

Pick Oxylabs when you need granular control over a premium proxy network at scale and value enterprise support. The separation of proxies and scraper API helps teams that manage the network layer deliberately.

Octoparse is a desktop no-code scraper built for people who want web data without writing code. You point and click to select fields, and a visual workflow builder handles the rest.

A template marketplace covers popular sites, so non-technical users can often start without configuring a scraper at all. The tool runs as a desktop application with optional cloud execution on paid plans.

• Visual point-and-click desktop builder for Windows and macOS
• Auto-detect plus 500+ prebuilt site templates
• Local extraction or Octoparse Cloud runs with scheduling
• IP rotation, residential proxies, and automatic CAPTCHA solving on paid plans
• Export to Excel, CSV, JSON, and HTML
• Send data to databases (MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Oracle), Google Sheets, Google Drive, Dropbox, or S3
• Advanced API and automatic export on higher tiers
• Free plan with 10 tasks and 50,000 rows of monthly export

ScrapingBee is a code-first API, while Octoparse is a point-and-click desktop app with auto-detect and 500+ templates that runs in the cloud and exports straight to spreadsheets, databases, Google Sheets, or cloud storage. Its Advanced API is a task-based add-on, not an ad-hoc endpoint. Which one fits depends on who does the work: an engineer wiring an API into a pipeline, or an analyst clicking through a visual builder.

As of June 2026, Octoparse offers a Free plan with a 50,000-row monthly data export, a Standard plan from $69/mo, a Professional plan at $249/mo, and an Enterprise tier.

Pick Octoparse when the people collecting data do not write code and prefer a visual workflow. The template marketplace is a fast start for common, well-structured sites.

ScrapingBee remains a solid web scraping API, and the right alternative depends entirely on what you are optimizing for. Proxy scale points toward Bright Data or Oxylabs, marketplace automation points toward Apify, and no-code access points toward Octoparse.

For teams feeding web data into models and agents, Firecrawl is the most natural fit because it returns Markdown and structured JSON from one API and adds search, interaction, and change monitoring in the same stack. The fastest way to decide is to run your own hardest target through two or three of these and compare the output you actually get back. You can try Firecrawl keyless with no signup, or start with the free tier and 1,000 monthly credits.