ScraperAPI alternative
Looking for a ScraperAPI alternative?
ScraperAPI and ScrAPI both bill in credits, but they weight them very differently. ScraperAPI charges by what you are scraping as well as how. A search engine domain costs 25 credits before you have rendered anything, and turning on JavaScript rendering costs 10 rather than 5. ScrAPI prices the features you switched on and ignores which site you pointed them at.
Two things beyond price are worth checking before you choose: ScraperAPI gates country-level geo-targeting behind its $299 plan, and it sells concurrency as a tier. Both are strong reasons to look elsewhere at low volume, and neither matters much once you are spending four figures a month, where ScraperAPI's pipeline tooling becomes worth the price.
ScraperAPI pricing and features last checked: 10 September 2026. Compare ScrAPI with other providers.
Quick comparison
ScraperAPI figures are from its pricing page and documentation, listed at the bottom of this page. ScrAPI figures are from its credit documentation and published pricing.
What it actually costs
Both bill in credits, so the arithmetic is comparable, but the credit weights are not. At the entry tier a ScraperAPI credit costs $0.00049 ($49 for 100,000) against $0.00019 for a ScrAPI pay-as-you-go credit ($19 for 100,000). Multiply that by ScraperAPI's heavier multipliers and the gap compounds.
ScraperAPI's figures below are marginal credit cost inside the Hobby plan. The $49 monthly fee is payable whether you use the credits or not.
Workload A: 10,000 plain HTTP pages on ordinary domains
No rendering, no premium proxy, no e-commerce or search-engine domain surcharge.
Assumptions
- ScrAPI: 1 credit per request.
- ScraperAPI: 1 credit per request on a normal domain. An e-commerce domain would be 5 and a search engine 25.
- Marginal credit cost only; ScraperAPI's $49 monthly plan fee is excluded.
ScrAPI
Pay as you go, $19 / 100,000 credits
10,000 × 1 credit × $0.00019
$1.90
ScrAPI
Starter, $49/month / 500,000 credits
10,000 × 1 credit × $0.000098
$0.98
ScraperAPI
Hobby, $49/month / 100,000 credits
10,000 × 1 credit × $0.00049
$4.90
At the same $49 price point, ScrAPI's Starter plan includes 500,000 credits against ScraperAPI's 100,000. That is the single largest structural difference between the two products at the entry level.
Workload B: 10,000 JavaScript-rendered pages
ScraperAPI charges 10 credits for rendering where ScrAPI charges 5 for a browser, so the multiplier gap stacks on top of the per-credit gap.
Assumptions
- ScrAPI: useBrowser, 5 credits per request. 50,000 credits total.
- ScraperAPI: render=true, 10 credits per request. 100,000 credits total, which is exactly the Hobby allowance.
- Ordinary domains on both sides, no premium proxy.
ScrAPI
Pay as you go, $19 / 100,000 credits
50,000 credits × $0.00019
$9.50
ScrAPI
Growth, $79/month / 1,000,000 credits
50,000 credits × $0.000079
$3.95
ScraperAPI
Hobby, $49/month / 100,000 credits
100,000 credits × $0.00049
$49.00
This workload consumes the entire Hobby allowance. In practice a ScraperAPI customer rendering 10,000 pages a month is on the $149 Startup plan or above, where the marginal credit price falls to $0.000149 and the same job costs $14.90. That is the fairer comparison, and ScrAPI is still cheaper on it.
Workload C: 1,000 protected pages needing a premium proxy
Both products have a top anti-bot tier that costs substantially more than their standard proxied request.
Assumptions
- ScrAPI: useBrowser + residential proxy, 15 credits per request.
- ScraperAPI: premium=true with render=true, 25 credits per request. The ultra_premium tier with rendering costs 75 and is shown separately.
- No captcha solved. ScrAPI charges 30 credits per captcha on top of the figures below.
ScrAPI
Pay as you go, $19 / 100,000 credits
1,000 × 15 credits × $0.00019
$2.85
ScrAPI
Growth, $79/month / 1,000,000 credits
1,000 × 15 credits × $0.000079
$1.18
ScraperAPI, premium + render
Hobby, $49/month / 100,000 credits
1,000 × 25 credits × $0.00049
$12.25
ScraperAPI, ultra_premium + render
Hobby, $49/month / 100,000 credits
1,000 × 75 credits × $0.00049
$36.75
Workload D: 1,000 Google Search queries
ScraperAPI applies a search-engine domain multiplier. ScrAPI does not price by target.
Assumptions
- ScraperAPI: a Google domain costs 25 credits as a search-engine target. Its structured Google endpoint returns parsed JSON.
- ScrAPI: a google.com/search URL is routed through the Google SERP pipeline. It is forced to browser plus residential proxy (15 credits) and carries a 20-credit SERP surcharge, for 35 credits per search, returning the page as HTML or Markdown.
- Both products apply a premium to Google. Neither treats it as an ordinary target.
ScrAPI
Growth, $79/month / 1,000,000 credits
1,000 × 35 credits × $0.000079
$2.76
ScraperAPI
Startup, $149/month / 1,000,000 credits
1,000 × 25 credits × $0.000149
$3.73
ScrAPI
Pay as you go, $19 / 100,000 credits
1,000 × 35 credits × $0.00019
$6.65
ScraperAPI
Hobby, $49/month / 100,000 credits
1,000 × 25 credits × $0.00049
$12.25
ScraperAPI returns parsed SERP fields for that price, which is real work you would otherwise do yourself. ScrAPI is cheaper per search at comparable tiers but hands back a page. Note that ScrAPI's Google requests carry a 20-credit surcharge on top of the forced browser and residential proxy, so a search costs 35 credits rather than the 15 an ordinary hard page would.
Where the products actually differ
Pricing by target versus pricing by feature
This is the core difference. ScraperAPI charges more for domains it classifies as e-commerce (5 credits), search engines (25) or social (30), before any rendering or proxy multiplier. ScrAPI charges for the browser, the proxy tier and the captcha you actually used, and does not look at the hostname. If your targets are mostly protected commercial sites, ScraperAPI's classification will land on you repeatedly.
Geo-targeting behind a plan gate
ScraperAPI's two cheapest plans, at $49 and $149 per month, are limited to US and EU geo-targeting. Country-level targeting elsewhere starts at the $299 Business plan. ScrAPI exposes proxyCountry and proxyCity on every plan including the one-off top-up, so if you need to appear in Brazil or Japan next week that is a parameter rather than an upgrade.
Threads as a purchased resource
ScraperAPI's concurrent threads are a hard ceiling set by your plan. Twenty threads on Hobby means twenty in-flight requests, no matter how many credits remain. If your job is latency-bound rather than volume-bound, you buy a larger plan for parallelism you cannot get any other way. ScrAPI does not sell concurrency separately.
Pipelines and scheduling
ScraperAPI is ahead here. DataPipeline schedules recurring jobs, accepts CSV input, delivers by webhook, and retains results for 30 days. Its async endpoint takes up to 50,000 URLs per batch. ScrAPI has a callbackUrl for single asynchronous scrapes and a hosted ecommerce monitor, but nothing as general-purpose as DataPipeline.
Structured output
ScraperAPI's autoparse and its per-marketplace endpoints return JSON fields for Amazon, Walmart, eBay and Google. ScrAPI returns HTML or Markdown and a single CSS or XPath response selector. If the sites you need are on ScraperAPI's parsed list, that is work you do not have to do or maintain.
Language coverage
ScraperAPI ships official SDKs for Python, Node.js, PHP, Ruby and Java. ScrAPI publishes official .NET and Python SDKs and an OpenAPI specification from which typed clients for Go, Java, PHP, Ruby, TypeScript and Dart can be generated with Kiota. Generated is not the same as maintained by the vendor; if you want a hand-written Ruby client, ScraperAPI has one and ScrAPI does not.
Anti-bot, captchas and limits
ScraperAPI documents automatic captcha detection and retry against a signature database, and notes that it cannot solve captchas embedded in the page itself. It advertises unlimited bandwidth and a 99.9% uptime figure on its pricing page, and retries failed requests for up to 70 seconds without charging.
ScrAPI treats captcha solving as an explicit, separately priced operation: solveCaptchas costs 30 credits per challenge solved and covers reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, Cloudflare, FunCaptcha, GeeTest, Yandex SmartCaptcha, Lemin and Amazon WAF. ScrAPI does not meter bandwidth, and applies a single service-wide cap of 200 concurrent requests per client IP rather than selling parallelism by tier. Neither vendor publishes an independently verified success rate against named protection systems, and neither claim should be treated as one.
On data handling, ScrAPI keeps no scrape history. Requests are metered as aggregate counters against your API key, so target URLs and page content are not written to its database and responses are not cached. Screenshots, PDFs and video are stored under hash-derived filenames and deleted within 24 hours. Two honest caveats: a saved ecommerce monitor necessarily stores the URL you configured, and diagnostic logs can capture request details when a request fails. ScraperAPI documents a 30-day retention window for DataPipeline results; its retention policy for ordinary API requests is not something we found stated publicly, so we are not characterising it here.
Which one should you pick?
ScrAPI may be a better fit if
- You are price-sensitive at low to moderate volume. At the same $49, ScrAPI's Starter plan carries 500,000 credits against ScraperAPI's 100,000, and rendering costs 5 credits rather than 10.
- You need country or city geo-targeting without paying $299 a month to unlock it.
- You want to buy credits once. ScrAPI's $19 top-up has no subscription and the credits roll over.
- Your targets are e-commerce, search or social sites, which carry a 5, 25 or 30 credit domain multiplier on ScraperAPI before any other option is applied.
- You need PDF or video capture of the browser session, which ScraperAPI does not document.
ScraperAPI may be a better fit if
- You want scheduled, recurring pipelines. DataPipeline handles scheduling, CSV input, webhook delivery and 30-day result retention as a product, not something you assemble.
- You scrape Amazon, Walmart, eBay or Google and want parsed JSON rather than pages to parse yourself.
- You submit very large asynchronous batches. ScraperAPI accepts up to 50,000 URLs in one job.
- You want a vendor-maintained SDK in PHP, Ruby or Java rather than a client generated from an OpenAPI spec.
Common questions
What is the cheapest way to start on each product?
ScraperAPI's cheapest paid plan is Hobby at $49 per month for 100,000 API credits and 20 concurrent threads. ScrAPI's cheapest paid option is a $19 one-off top-up that also buys 100,000 credits, with no subscription. Both offer a free start: ScraperAPI gives 5,000 credits over a 7-day trial, ScrAPI gives 1,000 credits on a verified account with no time limit. Neither asks for a card.
How do ScraperAPI's concurrent threads differ from ScrAPI's concurrency model?
ScraperAPI sells concurrency as a plan feature: 20 threads on Hobby, 50 on Startup, 100 on Business, up to 500 on Advanced. A thread is one in-flight request, so the plan sets a hard ceiling on parallelism regardless of how many credits you have left. ScrAPI's plans differ by credit allowance rather than by a concurrency tier. A service-wide limit of 200 concurrent requests per client IP applies to every customer equally, with requests queued beyond it rather than rejected, and ScrAPI does not meter bandwidth.
Is geo-targeting restricted on ScraperAPI?
Yes, by plan. ScraperAPI's pricing page lists geo-targeting as US and EU only on the Hobby and Startup plans, and global from the Business plan at $299 per month upward. ScrAPI exposes proxyCountry and proxyCity on every plan, including the pay-as-you-go top-up, so country and city targeting is not something you upgrade to reach.
Which one is better for scraping Amazon or Google?
ScraperAPI, if you want the data already parsed. It has structured endpoints for Amazon, Walmart, eBay and Google that return JSON fields rather than HTML, and its DataPipeline product schedules those jobs for you. The trade-off is the credit multiplier: an e-commerce domain costs 5 credits and a search engine domain costs 25 before any rendering or proxy is added. ScrAPI applies its own Google premium. A search costs 35 credits, being a forced browser and residential proxy plus a 20-credit SERP surcharge, and it returns the results page rather than fields. On price ScrAPI is ahead at comparable tiers; on output ScraperAPI is.
Do either of them charge for failed requests?
Both publish a policy of not charging for failures. ScraperAPI documents that only HTTP 200 and 404 responses are billed, and that it retries failures for up to 70 seconds at no extra charge. ScrAPI consumes no credits for failed requests that return no HTML or Markdown content, except that solved captchas are charged at 30 credits each even when the request ultimately fails.
Sources checked
Every ScraperAPI figure on this page comes from one of the official pages below, read on 10 September 2026. Scraping providers change pricing often, so check the source before relying on a number for a purchasing decision.
- ScraperAPI pricing, https://www.scraperapi.com/pricing/
- ScraperAPI documentation, https://docs.scraperapi.com/
Plan prices come from ScrAPI's published pricing table and per-feature credit costs from its credit documentation. A few figures on these pages were taken from the service implementation rather than the documentation, because the two currently disagree: the 20-credit Google SERP surcharge, the 1-credit charge for supplying a callback URL, the 200-concurrent-request-per-IP limit, and the 15-minute session window are all read from the code. Where they conflict, the implementation is what you will be billed for.
Start with 1,000 free credits
Sign in with an email address, verify it, and ScrAPI issues an API key with 1,000 starter credits. There is no card to enter and no trial clock. Run your own URLs in the Playground and compare the result against whatever you use today.
ScraperAPI and other product names and trademarks referenced on this page belong to their respective owners and are used only to identify those products. ScrAPI is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by ScraperAPI. Pricing and features were checked against publicly available information on 10 September 2026 and may since have changed.