ScrapingBee vs ScraperAPI: I tested both, here is the real difference

Both ScrapingBee and ScraperAPI turn one HTTP call into a scraped page: you send a URL, they handle the proxy, the headless browser, and the retries, and you get HTML back. On paper they do the same job.

So I stopped reading their landing pages and ran them head to head.

I sent the same 8 target URLs through each API, in basic and JavaScript-rendering modes, three times each. 96 requests total. I measured what actually matters: did I get the real page, how long did it take, and what did it cost in credits straight from each API's own response header.

The success rate came out identical. Everything else did not.

Here is the whole result in one table, then the detail behind every row.

The short version: ScrapingBee is the faster, cheaper, more predictable default, and ScraperAPI earns its place when you want its parsed e-commerce and search endpoints. The rest of this post is how I got each number, so you can check it or reproduce it.

How I tested this

I want the numbers to be reproducible, so here is the exact setup.

The 8 targets span easy to hard: example.com, the books.toscrape.com and quotes.toscrape.com/js sandboxes, the Hacker News front page, an e-commerce sandbox, a live Amazon product page, a Best Buy search page, and a Cloudflare-protected G2 page. Each ran in basic mode and with JS rendering, three trials apiece.

I counted a request as a success only if three things were true: the API returned 200, the upstream site returned 200, and a known piece of that page's content was actually in the body. A 200 that hands back a captcha or a block page is a failure, because for your code it is.

Both ran on the standard proxy tier, no premium or stealth proxies, so the comparison is apples to apples. Credits came from the spb-cost and sa-credit-cost response headers, so cost is measured, not guessed.

They tie on success, and fail the same wall

This surprised me. On the standard tier, both APIs succeeded on 87.5% of requests (21 of 24 each).

Both returned the real page on every easy and medium target: the sandboxes, Hacker News, the e-commerce sandbox, and a live Amazon product page. Best Buy was clean for ScrapingBee (3 of 3) and nearly clean for ScraperAPI (2 of 3).

The one wall they both hit was the Cloudflare-protected G2 page. ScrapingBee got it 0 times out of 6, ScraperAPI 1 out of 6. On the standard tier, neither API beats enterprise bot protection, and both sell a premium or stealth proxy add-on for exactly that, at a higher credit cost. If your targets are Cloudflare, DataDome, or PerimeterX sites, budget for that tier on either vendor.

So if your only question is "can it fetch the page," they are close to a coin flip. The real differences are how fast you get the page and what you pay for it.

Speed: ScrapingBee is faster, and fails faster too

Basic requests were close: a median of 1.7s on ScrapingBee and 2.3s on ScraperAPI.

JavaScript rendering is where they separate. ScrapingBee returned rendered pages in a median of 3.8s. ScraperAPI took 13.5s for the same work, about 3.5x slower, and on a couple of sites it ran past 25s.

There is a second timing fact that the averages hide, and it bit me during the run. When a request is going to fail, the two APIs fail very differently.

ScrapingBee gave up on the G2 page in 3 to 6 seconds and returned a clean error. ScraperAPI retried internally and took 36 to 50 seconds to return the same failure, and one Best Buy attempt ran 57 seconds before it errored out. Neither one charged me for the failed request, so the cost was only my time, but if you are scraping at any volume those 45-second hangs add up fast.

Price: flat vs tiered, and it is not close at the low end

Here is the part that changed how I think about these two.

ScrapingBee charges a flat rate. Every request is 1 credit without JavaScript and 5 with it, whether you are scraping example.com or Amazon. I saw exactly those two numbers across all 8 sites, and the ScrapingBee docs match: 1 credit, 5 with rendering, 25 for a premium proxy, 75 for stealth.

ScraperAPI charges by domain. A plain page is 1 credit, but an e-commerce or news site cost me 10 credits in basic mode, Amazon cost 5, and the protected G2 page cost 30. ScraperAPI's own pricing confirms the pattern, and its docs note that Cloudflare, DataDome, and PerimeterX sites add 10 credits per request.

Now layer on the plans. Both start at $49 a month, but that $49 buys 250,000 credits on ScrapingBee and 100,000 on ScraperAPI. So a ScraperAPI credit costs about 2.5x more, and you spend more of them per request. Two multipliers stacking in the same direction.

At the same price, ScrapingBee hands you more credits at every tier, and spends fewer of them per request. Worked out as real dollars per 1,000 requests on the entry plans, that becomes:

To be fair to ScraperAPI, this gap is widest at the $49 entry tier, where its per-credit price is highest. Move up to the $149 Startup plan and the per-credit gap narrows, but the per-request credit multiplier does not, so scraping e-commerce still runs roughly 6x to 15x more. If most of what you scrape is plain HTML on a high-volume plan, the two get much closer.

One thing they share: neither rolls credits over. Whatever you do not use resets at the end of the month on both.

The full picture, side by side

So which should you use?

Here is how I would choose, based on the run.

Reach for ScrapingBee for most scraping. It is faster on the JavaScript pages that make up most real scraping, its flat pricing means you can predict the bill, and it came out cheaper on every workload I tested. If you are cost-sensitive or scraping a lot of e-commerce, the gap is large enough to decide it on its own.

Reach for ScraperAPI when you want its structured endpoints or batch tooling. It exposes parsed Amazon, Google, and SERP results and an async data-pipeline product for very large scheduled jobs, and it matched ScrapingBee on raw success rate. If you would otherwise write and maintain your own parsers for those sources, that is real value the price gap has to be weighed against.

For anything Cloudflare-class, you are buying the premium or stealth tier on whichever you pick, so compare them there too.

A third option, if neither model fits

Both of these are the same shape of product: a single-vendor subscription, priced in credits that expire every month, where you decode a credit table to know what a request costs. That model is fine when scraping is your whole job. It chafes when scraping is one feature among many and your usage is spiky.

That mismatch is why I work on AnyAPI. It is one key across hundreds of data APIs, you pay per successful request in real US dollars with no monthly plan, nothing expires, and if one provider fails on a request the gateway falls back to another automatically. An AI agent can even sign itself up and pay per call without a human in the loop.

It is not the right tool for everyone. If you want to manage proxy modes and browser sessions yourself, or you need raw residential-proxy scale at enterprise volume, go straight to one of the vendors above. But if you just want the data and would rather not babysit a credit balance, the catalog lists the live per-call price in dollars for every endpoint.

Try the kind of call this replaces

The same request shape works across the catalog: send a URL, get structured data back, pay only when it succeeds.

curl -X POST https://api.getanyapi.com/v1/run/tiktok.video_transcript \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ANYAPI_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://www.tiktok.com/@zachking/video/7650468599424945422"}'

import os, requests

res = requests.post(
    "https://api.getanyapi.com/v1/run/tiktok.video_transcript",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['ANYAPI_KEY']}"},
    json={"url": "https://www.tiktok.com/@zachking/video/7650468599424945422"},
)
print(res.json()["output"]["data"])

const res = await fetch("https://api.getanyapi.com/v1/run/tiktok.video_transcript", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: {
    Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.ANYAPI_KEY}`,
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({ url: "https://www.tiktok.com/@zachking/video/7650468599424945422" }),
});
const { output } = await res.json();
console.log(output.data);

Frequently asked questions

Is ScrapingBee or ScraperAPI better?

For most scraping, ScrapingBee. In my run they tied on success rate, but ScrapingBee was about 3.5x faster on JavaScript-rendered pages and cheaper on every workload because of its flat per-request pricing. ScraperAPI is the better pick if you want its structured Amazon, Google, and SERP endpoints or its async batch product for very large jobs.

Is ScrapingBee cheaper than ScraperAPI?

Yes, at the plans I compared. On the $49 entry tier, ScrapingBee ran from 2.4x cheaper on plain pages to about 24x cheaper on e-commerce pages, because it charges a flat 1 credit where ScraperAPI charges up to 10, and a ScrapingBee credit costs about 2.5x less. The gap narrows on higher-volume plans but does not close.

Why is ScraperAPI slower than ScrapingBee?

In my test its JavaScript rendering took a median of 13.5s versus ScrapingBee's 3.8s, and when a request was going to fail it retried internally for 36 to 57 seconds before returning an error. ScrapingBee failed the same pages in 3 to 6 seconds.

Do ScrapingBee or ScraperAPI credits roll over?

No. On both vendors, unused credits reset at the end of each billing cycle and do not carry forward.

How many credits does a request cost on each?

ScrapingBee is flat: 1 credit without JavaScript rendering, 5 with it, on any site. ScraperAPI is tiered by domain: 1 credit for a plain page, more for e-commerce, news, and SERP, and an extra 10 per request for Cloudflare, DataDome, or PerimeterX-protected sites.

Can ScrapingBee or ScraperAPI scrape Cloudflare-protected sites?

Not reliably on the standard tier. Both failed a Cloudflare-protected page in my run. Both sell a premium or stealth proxy option for these sites that costs more credits per request, so compare them on that tier if protected sites are your use case.

Do they charge for failed requests?

No. Both ScrapingBee and ScraperAPI bill only for successful requests, so a 500 or a block does not cost a credit. The hidden cost is time: a slow failure still makes your code wait.

Which has a better free trial?

ScraperAPI gives 5,000 credits for 7 days. ScrapingBee gives 1,000 credits with no card and no time limit. ScraperAPI's trial is larger; ScrapingBee's lets you take longer to evaluate.

Is there an alternative to both ScrapingBee and ScraperAPI?

If the monthly-subscription-and-credits model is the friction, a pay-per-request gateway like AnyAPI bills in US dollars per successful call with nothing to expire and one key across many providers. Go direct to ScrapingBee or ScraperAPI instead if you want to control proxy modes yourself or need dedicated residential-proxy scale.

How was this benchmark run?

I sent 96 requests, 8 target URLs in two modes with three trials each, through both APIs on their standard proxy tier on 2026-06-26. Success required a 200 from the API, a 200 from the upstream site, and the real page content in the body. Credit costs came from each API's own response headers.

Want one key and one dollar-denominated bill across hundreds of data APIs instead of another monthly credit balance? Browse the catalog or see how pricing works.