We Benchmarked the Best Web Scraping APIs

We benchmarked web data providers in categories ranging from e-commerce and social media to jobs, real estate and food delivery, sending more than 600,000 requests to 10,000+ live domains to see how they handle enterprise data collection.

Our web data scraping page summarizes the results of all our web data benchmarks in one place. Below, we break those results down benchmark by benchmark, with links to each methodology.

Web unblocking benchmark results

We benchmarked 4 leading web data providers across the top 10,000 domains, running a total of 260,000 requests. Each provider was tested at multiple concurrency levels.

Web unblocking benchmark markdown output performance

We also tested the markdown output of these web data providers.

For the detailed methodology and analysis, read our web unblockers benchmark.

E-commerce scraping benchmark

Because e-commerce domains carry the heaviest anti-bot protection, we benchmarked the web data scraping providers on the top 100 e commerce domains.

See our e-commerce scraping benchmark for details.

Web data scraping benchmark results by use cases

We benchmarked each category with its own methodology and target domains. For the full methodology and domain-level results, see:

• Real estate scraping
• Job postings scraping
• Food delivery scraping
• Social media scraping

Marketplace scraping benchmark

Success rates hit nearly 100% for every provider in some benchmarks. We used available metadata fields and completion time instead. Most of our web data scraping articles also break down the metadata fields each provider returns per domain.

This metric applies only to products with a dedicated API that returns JSON. When a provider returns raw HTML, we extract the fields ourselves using CSS selectors and record 0 metadata fields for it. A 0 therefore means the provider returned HTML rather than structured data, not that the request failed.

See our App Store scraping and Google Play scraping benchmarks for the full breakdown.

Video scraping benchmark

Read video scraping benchmark for more details about our methodology.

Web scraping API pricing

Effective cost of 1,000 successful product pages depends on monthly volume: Nimble is $1 flat, Bright Data $1.30–$1.50, Zyte $4.08–$8.55, and Apify $3.29–$13.70 (adjusted for its 70.1% success rate since it bills every attempt). 

Bright Data, Nimble and, Zyte bill only for successful deliveries.

Best web scraping APIs

Bright Data offers dedicated scraper APIs for sites such as Amazon, YouTube and Facebook, a SERP API, a web unblocker for any other URL, and pre-built datasets. The dedicated APIs return parsed JSON and let you choose which fields to retrieve; the unblocker returns HTML or markdown. Non-technical users can build scrapers in a no-code interface, and developers call the same products over an API.

• More than 1,400 ready-made scrapers covering 800+ websites, each returning parsed JSON.

• If your target is a niche domain with no ready-made scraper, you can build one with Bright Data Scraping Studio, which turns a plain-language prompt into an API that returns the same JSON fields on every call. In our tests, a build took about 10 minutes.

• Its Web Archive API sells pages Bright Data has already collected, at $0.20 per 1,000 pages from the last 24 hours and $1 per 1,000 for older pages.

• The unblocker costs $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests on pay-as-you-go, or $2.50 on domains with strong anti-bot protection; failed requests are not billed.

Oxylabs offers a general-purpose Web Scraper API and dedicated sources for specific sites such as Amazon, Instacart, Zillow, Google Maps and each major search engine. YouTube alone has eight sources, from search results to subtitles and full channel data. The universal source returns rendered HTML for any URL, many dedicated sources return parsed JSON, and requests can run in Realtime, Push-Pull or Proxy Endpoint mode.

• Oxylabs AI Studio adds five AI tools under one SDK (AiScraper, AiCrawler, BrowserAgent, AiSearch and AiMap) that extract data from a prompt or a JSON schema on every call.

• The highest search engine score in our index (97.4), and 99.6% success on X posts, tied with Zyte for the top rate.

• JavaScript rendering doubles or triples the base rate, and the Web Unblocker bills 2xx and 4xx responses, including 403 block pages.

Decodo, formerly Smartproxy, sells its scraping products as Web Data API, with four endpoints under one API key: /scrape for single pages and pre-built targets, /search for Google results, /crawl for up to 10,000 pages of a site and /map for a site’s URLs. /scrape replaced the Web Scraping API and takes real-time, async and batch requests. Site Unblocker and residential, datacenter, mobile and ISP proxies are sold separately, so you can buy the anti-bot layer without the scraping API.

• Pre-built parsers return JSON for targets such as Amazon (18 fields per search listing in our Amazon benchmark), Google and Bing search results, and TikTok posts, comments and search results.

• Proxy access is self-serve, and its residential pool of 115M+ addresses gave the most GB per dollar in our proxy pricing benchmark, from 10 GB to 10 TB.

SerpApi offers a separate API for each search engine and platform: Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex and YouTube, plus Google Play, the Apple App Store, Google Maps reviews, Yelp and Tripadvisor. Every endpoint returns parsed JSON fetched live on each request; SerpApi does not sell pre-built datasets.

• The fastest provider in our benchmarks.

• No general-purpose endpoint, so it cannot fetch an arbitrary URL as HTML or markdown.

Zyte API is a single endpoint that handles bans, headless browser rendering and data extraction. Instead of site-specific APIs, its AI extraction turns pages such as retail product pages into typed fields like name, price and rating; for other pages it returns HTML or markdown. Zyte maintains Scrapy, the open-source scraping framework, and hosts Scrapy spiders on Scrapy Cloud.

• Pay-as-you-go pricing starts at $0.13 per 1,000 simple HTTP requests, with a $5 free credit.

• Browser-rendered requests are priced in five tiers by site difficulty, from $1.01 to $16.08 per 1,000, so the cost of a target is known only after a test run.

Apify is a platform of ready-made scrapers called Actors, many of them built by its community. Each Actor targets one site or task, and its output can be parsed JSON, HTML or markdown depending on the Actor. Developers can modify an Actor or write their own in JavaScript, TypeScript or Python with Crawlee, Apify’s open-source library.

• The most expensive provider in our benchmarks at $13.70 per 1,000 successful pages.

• Some community Actors are not available on every plan.

Nimble offers general-purpose, SERP, e-commerce and maps APIs on its own rotating residential proxies, with geo-targeting down to country, state, city and ZIP code. Its web API returns HTML or markdown and accepts up to 1,000 URLs in one batch request. The Extract Template API returns structured data for supported sites at $3 per 1,000 requests, versus $1 for the standard extraction API.

• The lowest cost in our benchmarks: $1.00 per 1,000 successful pages.

• Dedicated JSON coverage for 6 of the 100 most visited domains.

• The lowest search engine score in our index: 50.7.

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Benchmark methodology

This web data benchmark includes the benchmarks below, and the methodology for each benchmark is explained in its specific page:

• eCommerce scrapers
• Real estate scraping
• Job postings scraping
• Food delivery scraping
• Social media scrapers
• Web unblockers
• App Store scraping
• Google Play
• Video scraping benchmark
• Review scraping

FAQs

Cite this benchmark

Pick the format that matches where you're publishing. Pasting the link version into your CMS preserves the backlink.

@misc{dogan2026,
  author = {Dogan, Sedat and Şipi, Nazlı},
  title  = {{We Benchmarked the Best Web Scraping APIs}},
  year   = {2026},
  month  = aug,
  howpublished    = {\url{https://aimultiple.com/web-scraping-apis}},
  note   = {AIMultiple. Retrieved August 13, 2026}
}

Changelog

22 updates

All22General21Methodology1

2026202520242023

1. Aug 13

   Added Bright Data's coverage of all 5 tested social platforms to benchmark highlights.

2. Feb 24

   Expanded Bright Data's description with customizable pricing and pay-as-you-go options.

3. Jan 26

   Added a section on web scraping pricing.

Sedat Dogan

CTO

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Sedat is a technology and information security leader with 20 years of experience in software development, network infrastructure and cybersecurity. Sedat:
- Has 20 years of experience as a white-hat hacker and development guru, with extensive expertise in programming languages and server architectures.
- Is a board advisor at a VC investing in early-stage technology firms and at Ödeal, a regional digital payment platform serving 125,000 merchants.
- Has led the technology infrastructure and cybersecurity of seven national elections, and has been recognized in the cybersecurity Hall of Fame by global technology leaders including Twitter.

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Researched by

Nazlı Şipi

AI Researcher

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Nazlı is a data analyst at AIMultiple. She has prior experience in data analysis across various industries, where she worked on transforming complex datasets into actionable insights.

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