8 Web Scraping APIs Compared: Nstdata Crawl and 7 Rivals
TL;DR
The right "best" web scraping API depends on the shape of the job: unit price at your actual volume, whether JavaScript rendering is bundled or billed separately, and whether you need a ready-made scraper for a specific site or a general-purpose fetch-and-render engine.
Entry-tier pricing varies by more than 6x across major providers when normalized to a rate per 1,000 pages or requests, and several vendors bill JavaScript rendering, geotargeting, or specific-site parsing as separate line items rather than folding them into the base rate.
Nstdata Crawl bundles JavaScript rendering, Markdown/HTML/screenshot output, and proxy-backed fetching into one per-page rate starting at $1.00 per 1,000 URLs on its $79/month Starter plan, with no charge for failed requests.
Firecrawl is the strongest option for teams that want to describe extraction fields in plain language instead of writing a JSON schema — its Extract feature accepts a natural-language prompt and lets the model infer the output structure.
Bright Data and Apify both lean on large pre-built libraries — 1,400+ ready-made scrapers on Bright Data and a 59,000+ Actor marketplace on Apify — which trades some pricing transparency for faster time-to-first-result on popular sites.
Oxylabs and ScraperAPI both quote a low base rate per result but bill JavaScript rendering as an add-on on at least part of their plan lineup, so the advertised entry price understates real cost for most modern, JS-heavy sites.
Zyte's pricing is genuinely dynamic per target domain rather than a single flat rate, ranging from $0.06 to over $16 per 1,000 requests depending on site difficulty and monthly commitment tier.
None of the eight APIs compared here charge for failed or blocked requests — pay-only-for-success billing is now the market standard, not a differentiator worth choosing on alone.
A web scraping API is a hosted service that takes a URL (or a list of URLs) and returns page content or structured data over HTTP, handling proxy rotation, JavaScript rendering, and anti-bot evasion on the provider's infrastructure instead of your own. That's a different job than a raw proxy: a proxy gives you an IP address and leaves rendering, retries, and parsing to your own code, while a scraping API wraps all of that behind a single request-response call. The eight services compared here all fit that definition, though they differ sharply in how far past "fetch and render" they go — some stop at clean Markdown or HTML, others bundle 1,000+ pre-built extractors for specific sites, and one accepts a plain-language description of the fields you want instead of a schema.
How We Evaluated These APIs
Every price and capability below comes from each vendor's own current pricing or product page, fetched directly rather than pulled from a competitor roundup or review aggregator, in line with this comparison's first-party verification requirement. Four factors drove the ranking: the effective rate per 1,000 pages or requests at the lowest paid tier, whether JavaScript rendering is bundled into that baseline rate or billed as an add-on, the breadth of output formats and extraction options, and whether the provider charges for failed or blocked requests. Entry 1 ranks first because it's the only API in this set that bundles JS rendering, multiple output formats, and proxy-backed access into a single sub-$1-per-1,000-URL baseline rate with no separate JS surcharge — not because any other entry is deficient; several of the alternatives below are the better fit for specific jobs, and the selection guide near the end says exactly which.
Take a Quick Look
If you're comparing scraping APIs because JavaScript-heavy sites keep breaking your own scraper, Nstdata Crawl handles rendering, retries, and proxy rotation in one API call.
1. Nstdata Crawl: Best Overall for Cost-Effective, Proxy-Backed Crawling
Nstdata Crawl is an AI-oriented web crawling API that turns a URL into Markdown, cleaned HTML, links, or a screenshot in one request, with JavaScript rendering and Nstdata's own residential, datacenter, or custom proxy pool bundled into the base rate rather than billed as a separate line item. It fits teams building AI agents that need to read live pages, RAG pipelines ingesting external content on a schedule, and competitive or price-monitoring jobs that need both single-page and site-level crawling — and it's a weaker fit if your primary need is a pre-built extractor for one specific, high-traffic site, since that's where Bright Data's and ScrapingBee's ready-made scrapers currently have more out-of-the-box coverage. Pricing runs pay-as-you-go with no subscription required: the free tier bills at $1.20 per 1,000 URLs, and the $79/month Starter plan drops that to $1.00 per 1,000 URLs, with Growth ($249/month) and Scale ($699/month) stepping down to $0.80 and $0.60 per 1,000 URLs respectively. One honest limitation worth naming directly: Nstdata Crawl does not currently offer a natural-language field-extraction layer — you work with structured output formats and configuration options rather than describing a prompt like "get me the price and rating" the way Firecrawl's Extract feature does, so teams that specifically want prompt-based field selection should weigh entry 2 for that use case.
Site-level and single-page crawling in one API — POST /api/v1/crawl discovers and scrapes an entire site within maxDepth/maxPages bounds, while POST /api/v1/crawl/scrape handles a single URL synchronously or asynchronously.
Multiple output formats per request — Markdown, cleaned HTML, raw page links, and screenshots come back from the same call, so downstream code doesn't need a separate rendering pipeline.
Pay-only-for-success billing — a request is billed once a response is received with no network error, including 404s and 403s (since the fetch itself succeeded), but a system-side failure to retrieve content isn't charged.
Official SDKs in Node.js, Python, and Go, so integrating the API into an existing scraping or agent pipeline doesn't require hand-rolling an HTTP client.
2. Firecrawl: Best for Natural-Language Field Extraction
Firecrawl is a developer-focused scraping API built around LLM-ready output, and its standout capability is the Extract endpoint's prompt-only mode: instead of writing a JSON schema, a user can supply a plain-language prompt, and, per Firecrawl's own documentation, "the underlying model will choose a structure for you," which suits exploratory extraction where the exact output shape isn't known upfront. Pricing runs on a credit system — 1 credit per page for Scrape, Crawl, or Map — starting at $16/month (billed annually) for 5,000 credits on the Hobby plan, which works out to roughly $3.20 per 1,000 pages, dropping to about $0.83 per 1,000 on the $83/month Standard plan and $0.60 per 1,000 on the $599/month Scale plan. That entry-tier rate is markedly higher per page than several alternatives here, which is the tradeoff for the schema-free extraction convenience — teams scraping at high volume with a known, stable output shape typically get more page volume per dollar elsewhere.
3. Bright Data: Best for Pre-Built Scrapers Across Popular Sites
Bright Data's Web Scraper API pairs automatic IP rotation, CAPTCHA solving, and JavaScript rendering with a library of more than 1,400 ready-made scrapers for platforms like LinkedIn, Amazon, Instagram, and TikTok, converting results into JSON, CSV, or NDJSON and handling up to 5,000 URLs per bulk request. Pricing runs pay-as-you-go at $1.50 per 1,000 records with a 5,000-record free tier and no credit card required to start, or a $499/month Scale plan bundling 384,000 records with a $1.30-per-1,000 overage rate; the platform charges only for successfully delivered results. It's the strongest pick here for teams scraping a handful of well-known platforms where someone has already solved the site-specific parsing problem, and less suited to a long tail of arbitrary or unusual sites where a pre-built scraper won't exist.
4. Oxylabs: Best for Predictable Success-Based Pricing at Scale
Oxylabs' Web Scraper API bills on a success-based model — no charge for failed attempts — with a Micro plan at $49/month for up to 98,000 results (roughly $0.50 per 1,000 at baseline), a Starter plan at $99/month for 220,000 results (about $0.45 per 1,000), and an Advanced plan at $249/month for 622,500 results (about $0.40 per 1,000), each rate dropping as volume scales. The plan pages list JavaScript rendering as a separate add-on at roughly $1.25 to $1.35 per 1,000 results on top of the baseline rate, so a realistic cost estimate for JS-heavy targets should add that surcharge rather than quoting the headline per-result price alone. Oxylabs also lists target-specific rates for Amazon and Google that run below its general-web rate, which is worth checking directly if a project is scraping one of those platforms specifically.
5. ScraperAPI: Best for Simple Pay-Per-Credit Pricing at High Volume
ScraperAPI's plans scale from a $49/month Hobby tier with 100,000 API credits (about $0.49 per 1,000) up through a $1,975/month Advanced tier with 21.5 million credits, plus a custom Enterprise tier above that, with an annual-billing discount of roughly 10% available at every tier. The service includes rotating premium proxies, automatic retries, and CAPTCHA/anti-bot handling across all plans, along with JSON auto-parsing and dedicated parsing endpoints for structured data; geotargeting is limited to the US and EU on the two lowest tiers and opens up to country-level targeting from the Business plan up. Because JavaScript rendering and certain target-specific parsing options can consume additional credits per request depending on the plan and target site, the effective cost for JS-heavy scraping runs higher than the flat per-credit rate suggests — check the current per-feature credit cost against your actual request mix before committing to a tier.
6. Apify: Best for a Marketplace of Ready-Made Scraping Actors
Apify's core product is its Actor marketplace — more than 59,000 pre-built scraping and automation tools covering targets from Google Maps to TikTok — priced through compute units (one unit equals one GB of RAM for one hour) rather than a flat per-page rate, with per-unit cost dropping from $0.20 down to $0.13 as usage scales. Plans run from a free tier with $5 of monthly platform credit, through a $29/month Starter and $199/month Scale plan, up to a $999/month Business tier, with residential and datacenter proxies built into the platform and included datacenter IP allowances that scale with plan tier. This compute-unit model makes Apify structurally different from the flat per-page pricing used elsewhere in this list — it rewards teams who can reuse an existing Actor rather than building custom extraction logic, since someone else has typically already paid the development cost of handling that specific site's quirks.
7. Zyte: Best for AI-Powered Parsing With Usage-Based Pricing
Zyte API combines full JavaScript execution with headless browser automation, AI-powered structured-data parsing, and automatic IP rotation across residential, datacenter, and mobile networks with CAPTCHA solving and session persistence built in. Its pricing is genuinely dynamic rather than a flat rate: pay-as-you-go HTTP requests run $0.13 to $1.27 per 1,000 depending on target-site difficulty, and browser-rendered requests run $1.01 to $16.08 per 1,000 on the same no-minimum tier, with both ranges dropping as a customer commits to a $100, $200, or $500 monthly minimum — at the $500 minimum, browser-rendered pricing can fall as low as $0.48 per 1,000. That wide range makes Zyte hard to quote a single representative price for, but it also means genuinely easy targets can cost meaningfully less than the headline range suggests, and genuinely hard ones cost more regardless of which competitor you pick.
8. ScrapingBee: Best for Built-In Dedicated Scrapers on Major Platforms
ScrapingBee combines headless Chrome rendering, screenshot capture, and CSS/XPath extraction rules with its own natural-language extraction option and dedicated, purpose-built scraping endpoints for Amazon, Google Search, YouTube, Walmart, ChatGPT, and Gemini. Plans start at $49/month for 250,000 credits on the Freelance tier, scaling to $99/month (1,000,000 credits), $249/month (3,000,000 credits), and $599/month (8,000,000 credits) on Business+, with JavaScript rendering and premium/stealth proxy options consuming more credits per request than a basic fetch. The service only charges for requests that return HTTP 200, 404, or 410 — a definition of "successful" that's worth reading carefully, since it means a request that technically reaches the target server still bills even if the returned page isn't the content you wanted.
Side-by-Side: Pricing Model and Standout Feature
API
Pricing Model
Standout Feature
Watch For
Nstdata Crawl
Pay-as-you-go, per 1,000 URLs
JS rendering + multi-format output bundled in base rate
No natural-language field extraction
Firecrawl
Credit-based subscription
Prompt-only extraction, no schema required
Highest baseline rate at entry tier
Bright Data
Pay-as-you-go or subscription
1,400+ pre-built site-specific scrapers
Per-record rate higher than several peers
Oxylabs
Subscription, results-based
Success-based billing, target-specific rates
JS rendering billed as a separate add-on
ScraperAPI
Subscription, credit-based
Simple flat entry pricing, broad plan range
Feature-specific credit costs need checking
Apify
Compute-unit metered
59,000+ ready-made Actor marketplace
Not directly comparable to flat per-page pricing
Zyte
Dynamic, pay-as-you-go or subscription
AI parsing, per-domain difficulty-based pricing
Wide price range makes budgeting harder upfront
ScrapingBee
Credit-based subscription
Dedicated scrapers for named platforms
"Successful" billing includes 404/410 responses
How to Choose the Right Web Scraping API
Start from your actual page volume and target-site mix rather than the headline entry price, since several of the lowest advertised base rates above don't include JavaScript rendering. If most of your targets are modern, JS-rendered sites and you want that cost bundled into one predictable rate, Nstdata Crawl or Bright Data avoid the separate-line-item surprise that Oxylabs and potentially ScraperAPI can introduce. If your extraction schema changes often or you'd rather describe fields in plain language than maintain a JSON schema, Firecrawl's Extract endpoint is built specifically for that. If you're scraping a small set of well-known platforms — Amazon, LinkedIn, Google Search — Bright Data, ScrapingBee, and Apify all offer pre-built coverage that can save real development time versus building an extractor from a general-purpose fetch API. And if your volume is genuinely unpredictable and you don't want to commit to a monthly minimum, Bright Data's and Zyte's pay-as-you-go tiers avoid locking in a plan sized for the wrong month.
Whichever API you choose, scrape only publicly accessible data you're authorized to collect, respect a target site's robots.txt and terms of service, and avoid extracting personal, financial, or other regulated data without a clear legal basis for doing so — every provider compared here markets itself for legitimate data collection, not for bypassing authentication or access controls.
Common Use Cases
AI agent and RAG pipelines that need fresh, LLM-ready page content favor Nstdata Crawl or Firecrawl, since both prioritize clean Markdown output over raw HTML. E-commerce price and inventory monitoring across a handful of major retailers tends to favor Bright Data or ScrapingBee's dedicated site scrapers, while monitoring an unpredictable long tail of e-commerce sites favors a general-purpose renderer like Nstdata Crawl or Zyte. SEO and SERP-position tracking benefits from Oxylabs' or ScraperAPI's search-engine-specific handling. Teams automating a repeatable, well-defined extraction job that someone in the community has likely already built lean on Apify's Actor marketplace instead of writing custom scraping logic from scratch.
Conclusion
There's no single "best" web scraping API across every use case here — the eight options above split cleanly by whether JavaScript rendering is bundled or billed separately, whether pricing is a flat per-page rate or usage-metered, and how much of the site-specific parsing work the provider has already done for you. Nstdata Crawl's combination of bundled rendering, multiple output formats, and a sub-$1-per-1,000-URL entry rate makes it a strong general-purpose default, particularly for AI agent and RAG use cases, while Firecrawl, Bright Data, Apify, and the rest each win outright on a specific axis — natural-language extraction, pre-built site coverage, or a marketplace of ready-made scrapers. Match the choice to your actual request mix and target sites rather than the headline number on a pricing page.
There isn't one universal answer — Oxylabs and ScraperAPI both advertise baseline rates near $0.49-$0.50 per 1,000 results at their entry tiers, but Oxylabs bills JavaScript rendering as a roughly $1.25-$1.35-per-1,000 add-on, so for JS-heavy targets, Nstdata Crawl's bundled $1.00-per-1,000 rate or ScraperAPI's included rendering can end up cheaper once rendering is factored in; compare total cost at your actual request mix, not the headline number alone.
Q: Do any of these APIs let me describe what data I want in plain English instead of writing a schema?
Yes — Firecrawl's Extract endpoint accepts a natural-language prompt and lets the underlying model infer the output structure, and ScrapingBee also offers a natural-language extraction option; Nstdata Crawl, Bright Data, Oxylabs, ScraperAPI, Apify, and Zyte all work with defined output formats or schemas rather than free-form prompts.
Q: Do these providers charge for requests that fail or get blocked?
No, all eight compared here bill only for successful responses in some form, though the exact definition of "successful" varies — ScrapingBee, for example, counts HTTP 404 and 410 responses as billable successes since the request itself reached the server, even if the page content wasn't what you wanted.
Q: Is web scraping legal?
Scraping publicly accessible data is broadly practiced, but legality depends on what you scrape, how you access it, and where you and the target are located — respect a site's robots.txt and terms of service, avoid collecting personal or regulated data without a legal basis, and don't use these APIs to bypass authentication or paywalls.
Q: What's the difference between a web scraping API and a proxy service?
A proxy service gives you an IP address and leaves JavaScript rendering, retries, and parsing to your own code; a web scraping API wraps proxy rotation, rendering, and often parsing behind a single request-response call, which is why several vendors here — including Nstdata, Bright Data, and Oxylabs — sell both a standalone proxy product and a higher-level scraping API built on top of it.
Q: Can I use a general-purpose scraping API instead of a site-specific pre-built scraper?
Yes, for most targets — a general-purpose API like Nstdata Crawl, Firecrawl, or Zyte can fetch and render nearly any public page, but a pre-built scraper from Bright Data, ScrapingBee, or Apify's Actor marketplace usually gets you working, structured output for a specific popular site faster, since someone has already solved that site's layout and anti-bot quirks.
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