Web Scraping APIs Compared: ScraperAPI, Zyte, Firecrawl and More

November 8, 2026

General-purpose web scraping APIs fetch a URL for you and return the page. They differ in how they price that fetch, what they return, and what happens to credits you do not use. This comparison uses each vendor's own pricing page, then shows when a social-specific API does the job better.

The six at a glance

What each is good at

• ScraperAPI is simple to start with and has async jobs and structured endpoints for sites like Amazon, Google and Walmart. Watch the multipliers: Amazon costs 5 credits, Google and Bing 25, LinkedIn 30, and bot-protected sites add 10.
• ScrapingBee has the cheapest entry plan here and a clear credit table: JS rendering costs 5 credits, premium proxies 10 or 25.
• Zyte API charges only per successful response and needs no subscription. HTTP responses run $0.13 to $1.27 per 1,000 on pay as you go depending on site difficulty; browser-rendered ones run $1.01 to $16.08. Zyte also maintains Scrapy.
• Oxylabs drops to $0.25 per 1,000 results at very high volume. Read our Oxylabs comparison for its social coverage.
• Bright Data sells prebuilt scrapers that return structured records, billed only for successful deliveries, with a $499 a month Scale plan for 384,000 records.
• Firecrawl returns clean Markdown or JSON made for LLMs, and adds crawl, map and search. JSON output costs 4 extra credits per page.

Compute your real cost per page

List prices are per credit. What you pay per useful page depends on multipliers and success rate:

cost per 1,000 good pages = (plan price / plan credits) × 1,000 × credits per page / success rate

Two worked examples, assuming you use the whole plan:

• ScraperAPI Hobby: $49 / 100,000 = $0.49 per 1,000 credits. A LinkedIn page at 30 credits works out to $14.70 per 1,000 pages before failures.
• ScrapingBee Hobby: $19 / 75,000 = $0.25 per 1,000 credits. With JS rendering at 5 credits that is $1.27 per 1,000 pages; with premium proxies and JS at 25 credits, $6.33.

Run a test on 200 of your real URLs before you commit. The success rate on your target sites matters more than any list price.

When a social media API is the better tool

A general scraper gives you a page. For social platforms, the page is often the wrong unit:

• You want fields, not HTML. Followers, plays and comment counts are buried in scripts or missing from logged-out pages. Parsing them is your job, and it breaks when markup changes.
• You want lists. Comments, a creator's last 50 videos, or search results come from paginated calls, not one URL.
• You want media-specific data. Transcripts, sounds, reel play counts and ad library entries do not live in page HTML.
• You compare platforms. Six parsers produce six schemas. A social API returns one.
• Login walls. Many social pages show little to logged-out visitors. A data API returns the public fields as JSON, so you do not manage accounts or parse login prompts.

The reverse is also true. For product pages, news sites, documentation or any site no social API covers, a general scraper is the right choice, and Firecrawl's Markdown output is hard to beat for feeding an LLM.

Doing it with ScrapeIO

ScrapeIO is the social-specific side of that split: 194 endpoints across 33 platforms, such as the TikTok profile videos API, YouTube comments API and LinkedIn company posts API, all returning the same field names. Most calls cost 1 credit, from $1.88 per 1,000, and failed calls are not charged. Many teams use a general scraper for the open web and ScrapeIO for social platforms.

Sources

Checked on 8 November 2026 from each vendor's own pages. Prices and limits change; follow the links before you decide.

• https://www.scraperapi.com/pricing/
• https://www.scrapingbee.com/pricing/
• https://www.zyte.com/pricing/
• https://oxylabs.io/pricing/web-scraper-api
• https://brightdata.com/pricing/web-scraper
• https://www.firecrawl.dev/pricing
• https://github.com/scrapy/scrapy