What's the best web scraping tool, and which proxy should you pair with it?
A scraper without good proxies gets blocked. Proxies without a scraper collect nothing. Here's how to pick both.
Your script worked fine last week. Now every request comes back as a Cloudflare challenge page. You switch to residential proxies and your bandwidth bill jumps, because the headless browser is downloading every product photo. Most scraping projects don't fail on the parser. They fail on the layer that makes your traffic look like a real visitor.
The short answer. If you want ready-made scrapers plus the option to write your own, go with Apify: free with $5 of usage a month, then Starter at $19. If your targets are heavily protected and reliability beats price, Bright Data and its Web Unlocker, which only bills successful requests. Feeding pages to an LLM? Firecrawl. Need one clean API call per page? ScrapingBee. And if your scraper already exists and only needs residential IPs, Decodo from $2/GB on a plan.
We compared eight tools on their official pricing pages, then read user reviews, GitHub issues and forums to find what the pricing grids leave out: who charges for failed requests, which trials roll into paid plans, and who wants your ID before selling you an IP.
This ranking is editorial: a sponsored spot is always labeled on its card, and no affiliate link ever changes a score.
The best scraping tool for your setup
Thousands of Actors, Starter at $19/mo
Your targets block everythingWeb Unlocker at $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests
You're building with LLMsClean markdown output, 1,000 free credits
Nobody on the team codesPoint-and-click robots, 50 free credits a month
Your targets vary in difficultyPrice set by protection tier, $0.13 to $1.27 per 1,000 responses
One API call per pageHobby at $19 for 75,000 credits
The 8 best web scraping tools and proxies compared
The full ranking. The "vs. bot protection" column tells you how each tool gets past defenses like Cloudflare, which is what decides whether you get data or a challenge page. Prices are the first useful tier, taken from each vendor's official pricing page.
| Best for | vs. bot protection | Free plan | Team size | Visit | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Apify | Best scraping platform | Built-in residential proxy ($8/GB) and Actors that handle blocking | 4.2/5 | Free ($5 usage), then Starter $19/mo | ✓ | Growth teams, ops and developers | Visit → |
| 2 | Bright Data | Best for heavily protected targets | Web Unlocker handles blocking, billed on success | 4.2/5 | Web Unlocker $1.50 / 1,000 successful requests | ✓ | Data teams and high volume | Visit → |
| 3 | Firecrawl | Best for LLM pipelines | Managed anti-bot in the cloud, missing from self-hosted | 4.1/5 | Free (1,000 credits), then Hobby $19/mo | ✓ | Developers and AI projects | Visit → |
| 4 | Browse AI | Best no-code scraper | Hosted robots, nothing to configure, struggles on heavy sites | 4.0/5 | Free (50 credits), then $19/mo billed annually | ✓ | Marketing, research and non-technical teams | Visit → |
| 5 | ScrapingBee | Best simple scraping API | Premium and stealth proxies included, paid in credits | 3.9/5 | Hobby $19/mo (75,000 credits) | — | Developers and small tech teams | Visit → |
| 6 | Zyte API | Best pricing by site difficulty | Price set by protection tier, billed on success | 3.8/5 | $0.13 to $1.27 / 1,000 responses (HTTP) | — | Scrapy developers and steady volume | Visit → |
| 7 | Octoparse | Best desktop no-code app | Optional residential proxy at $3/GB | 3.7/5 | Free locally, then $69/mo billed annually | ✓ | Analysts and small teams without developers | Visit → |
| 8 | Thordata | Cheapest residential proxies | Rock-bottom residential and unlocker, shaky reliability | 2.9/5 | Residential $2 down to $0.65/GB | — | Tight budgets and non-critical jobs | Visit → |
Prices from official vendor pricing pages in 2026, in USD, excluding tax. Scores match our full reviews where one exists.
Is your tool missing from this page? Email us: hello@hackceleration.com
How we compared and scored
Google's first page for this query is mostly vendor blogs that rank their own product first, plus lists that lump proxies, browser extensions and frameworks together without saying which layer each one covers. Almost none tell you who charges for failed requests.
We read every tool's official pricing page and docs, then user reviews, GitHub issues and forums, starting with the negative ones. Our reader: someone at a startup, agency or data team who needs public data (prices, listings, company records) and keeps getting blocked.
The core criterion was checked for every ranked tool: how it gets past bot protection (built-in proxies, managed unblocking, or nothing). Scores for Apify, Bright Data, Browse AI and Thordata come from our full reviews. Decodo, mentioned for raw proxies, stays out of the ranking until we publish a full review of it. ScraperAPI, Oxylabs and PhantomBuster are left out because we couldn't read their prices on an official pricing page.
Weights aren't equal. Features weigh most because they decide whether data shows up at all. Value for money matters as much as ease of use, because a poorly tuned scraper easily costs ten times its subscription.
- Features and depthProxies, anti-bot unblocking, JavaScript rendering, scheduling, output formats.30%
- Value for moneyOfficial price, billing model (on success or per GB), expiring credits, auto-converting trials.25%
- Ease of useTime from sign-up to the first clean file, with or without code.20%
- Available integrationsAPI, SDKs, Make, n8n, Zapier, Google Sheets and AI frameworks.15%
- Customer support and assistanceResponse times reported by users, docs, refund terms.10%
Some links are affiliate links. They never change the order or the scores.
Apify
Apify is a cloud platform for "Actors", small scraping programs you can run from a form. Search the Store for the site you need, fill in a few fields, hit start, and results land as a table, JSON, or straight into Make, n8n or Zapier. When nothing fits, the SDK and the open-source Crawlee library let you build your own in JavaScript or Python.
On anti-bot, Apify sells its own residential proxy at $8/GB on smaller plans ($7 on Business), and many Actors already rotate IPs and browser fingerprints for you. You don't need a separate proxy vendor to get started.
Pricing got friendlier: Starter is $19 a month, $17 billed annually. But the bill has several parts. Compute units (1 GB of memory for one hour) cost $0.20, proxy traffic is billed per GB, storage is extra, and some Actors charge per result at a rate the developer sets. A Google Maps Actor can run anywhere from about $1 to roughly $10 per 1,000 results.
The catch is predictability. Reviewers keep saying the same thing: Playwright-based runs burn through compute units fast. Set a per-run spending cap before you launch anything big.
- Store with thousands of ready-made Actors
- SDK and Crawlee for custom scrapers
- Built-in residential and datacenter proxies
- Make, n8n, Zapier and REST API connectors
- ✓Running in minutes without writing code
- ✓Permanent free plan with $5 of usage
- ✓Per-run spending caps
- ✗Multi-part bill that's hard to forecast
- ✗Community Actors vary a lot in quality
The best starting point for most teams in 2026: run a Store Actor, cap your spend, move to the SDK when you need control.
Bright Data
Bright Data is the biggest name in scraping infrastructure. It sells everything: residential, datacenter, ISP and mobile proxies, a SERP API, a hosted scraping browser, and pre-collected datasets. That breadth earns it 4.8 in features, the top mark in this ranking.
For most teams, the product that matters is Web Unlocker. You send a URL, it picks the IP, solves challenges, manages headers and cookies, and returns the page. You only pay for successful requests: $1.50 per 1,000 pay-as-you-go, with 5,000 free requests every month. The Scale plan at $499 a month brings the unit price down.
Reviewers rate the human support well, and the AI bot that sits in front of the ticket queue less so. Know this before you sign up: residential and mobile access requires a KYC check on you and your use case, and some applications get declined.
The downside is price and complexity. The dashboard has dozens of products and rate cards, and pay-as-you-go always costs more than a plan. For a small project, it's usually overkill.
- Web Unlocker billed only on success
- Residential, ISP, datacenter and mobile proxies
- Hosted scraping browser and SERP API
- Ready-to-buy datasets
- ✓Highest pass rate on hard targets
- ✓No charge for failed Unlocker requests
- ✓5,000 free requests a month to try it
- ✗Many confusing rate cards
- ✗KYC review before residential access, sometimes declined
The pick when the data has to arrive no matter what. Start with the success-billed Unlocker before buying raw proxies.
Firecrawl
Firecrawl turns web pages into clean markdown, the text format LLMs handle best. Point it at a URL or a whole domain and it follows links, renders JavaScript and strips out menus and ads. It can also pull specific fields into JSON from a plain-English description.
The math is easy: 1 credit per page, 5 if you ask for JSON extraction. The free tier gives 1,000 credits with no card, Hobby is 5,000 credits for $19, Standard is 100,000 for $99. Unused credits only roll over on the top plans.
Watch out for self-hosting. Firecrawl is open source and plenty of teams run it on their own servers to save money. But the anti-bot layer stays in the hosted service. GitHub issues tell the same story: the self-hosted build fails more often behind Cloudflare, and you have to bring your own proxies.
- Markdown or JSON output ready for LLMs
- Crawl an entire site in one call
- Field extraction from a description
- Open-source codebase
- ✓Simple per-credit pricing
- ✓Plugs into common AI frameworks
- ✓Free tier good enough for a prototype
- ✗Anti-bot only in the cloud version
- ✗Credit rollover only on large plans
The best way to give an LLM the web to read. Stay on the hosted version once your targets fight back.
Browse AI
Browse AI has you "train" a robot: open the page, click what you want, and it learns the pattern. Then it runs on its own, hourly or monthly, and alerts you when the page changes. Data flows to Google Sheets, Airtable, Zapier or Make.
No proxies to buy and no browser to set up, since everything is hosted. It scores 4.7 on ease of use, the easiest tool in this ranking.
Billing term changes everything. Personal is $48 month to month, but $19 a month on an annual plan with the year's credits paid upfront. Professional drops from $87 to $69. Extra websites beyond your plan limit cost more.
Value for money is its weak spot at 3.2: credits drain fast on long lists, JavaScript-heavy sites need tweaking, and reviews mention slow support and charges after cancellation. Keep written proof when you cancel.
- Point-and-click robot training
- Change monitoring with alerts
- Scheduled cloud runs
- Sheets, Airtable, Zapier and Make exports
- ✓Genuinely usable without code
- ✓No proxies to manage
- ✓Big discount on annual billing
- ✗Credits run out fast at volume
- ✗Support and cancellation criticized in reviews
Right for a business team watching a handful of sites. Go annual only after a solid month on monthly billing.
ScrapingBee
ScrapingBee does one job: you call the API with a URL, it returns the HTML. Behind it, a headless browser runs, IPs rotate and common defenses get handled. JavaScript rendering, rotating and premium proxies, geotargeting and screenshots come with every plan.
The price is in credits, not pages, and that's where you need a calculator. A plain request costs 1 credit. JavaScript rendering, on by default, costs 5. Premium proxies cost 10 credits, or 25 with JavaScript. So the 75,000 credits on Hobby mean 75,000 simple pages, but only 3,000 protected ones.
Users praise fast support, often within minutes. The limits: credits expire after a month with no rollover, and your real cost per page can jump 25x on a tough target.
- One API call, one rendered page
- JS rendering and proxies on every plan
- Extraction rules and screenshots
- Dedicated Google and Amazon APIs
- ✓A few lines of code to integrate
- ✓Responsive support per user reviews
- ✓Billed per successful request
- ✗JS rendering is on by default and costs 5x
- ✗Unused credits vanish at month end
The easiest API to drop into existing code. Turn off JS rendering by default and save premium proxies for targets that need them.
Zyte API
Zyte is the company behind Scrapy, the most widely used open-source Python scraping framework. Its API sorts every target site into one of five difficulty tiers and prices accordingly: $0.13 per 1,000 responses on a simple site up to $1.27 on an advanced one over HTTP. With browser rendering, the range is $1.01 to $16.08.
You only pay for successful responses and never touch IP rotation or ban management. G2 reviewers like exactly that. With a $500 monthly commitment, simple pages drop to $0.06 per 1,000.
The weak point is forecasting. You only learn a site's tier after calling it, and some customers complained about cost surprises when they moved to Zyte API. Run a small batch on each target before you budget.
- Five price tiers by site protection
- Billed per successful response
- Native Scrapy integration
- Automatic product and article extraction
- ✓Very cheap on simple sites
- ✓No proxy management
- ✓Solid discounts with commitments
- ✗Hard to predict cost before hitting a target
- ✗Developer-oriented interface
A strong fit for Scrapy shops juggling easy and hard sites. Measure each target's tier on 100 pages before committing.
Octoparse
Octoparse is a Windows and Mac app. You open the target site in its built-in browser, it auto-detects lists and suggests fields. Templates exist for major ecommerce and listing sites.
The free plan is decent for one-off jobs: 10 tasks and 50,000 rows a month, all running on your machine. Cloud scheduling needs Standard, listed at $69 a month billed annually. The official page doesn't show a monthly price. Residential proxy is an add-on at $3/GB.
Reviews are split. Support answers fast, but several customers describe a trial that became a subscription and a cancellation that took effort, and it must be done on the website at least a day before renewal.
- Automatic list detection
- Templates for major sites
- Free local runs or scheduled cloud runs
- Excel, CSV, JSON and database exports
- ✓Useful free local plan
- ✓No code at all
- ✓Built-in residential proxy option
- ✗Monthly price not shown, cloud only on paid plans
- ✗Renewal and cancellation complaints
Good for regular desktop extractions. Put the renewal date in your calendar the day you sign up.
Thordata
Thordata competes on one thing: price. Residential starts at $2/GB and drops to $0.65/GB at 5,000 GB, the lowest in this ranking. It also sells a Web Unlocker at $1.30 to $1 per 1,000 requests and a SERP API at $1.20 to $0.70.
Everything else explains the 2.9. Support scores 2.4, the weakest we compared. On Trustpilot, the rating is suspended after fake reviews were removed, and more than half of the remaining reviews are one star: refunds refused, IPs from the wrong country, and bandwidth that expires after a month if unused.
Treat it as a secondary vendor for low-stakes jobs, never as the backbone of a critical pipeline. Buy small, check IP geolocation, and use your plan within the month.
- Residential down to $0.65/GB at volume
- Web Unlocker and SERP API
- 3-day residential trial
- ISP and datacenter proxies
- ✓Cheapest residential GB in the ranking
- ✓Public tiered pricing
- ✓Trial to check on your targets
- ✗Weakest support we compared
- ✗Trustpilot rating suspended, refund complaints
A cheap add-on, not a foundation. Keep it for non-critical volume and watch IP quality.
Platform, API, no-code or raw proxies: which layer to buy
Most bad purchases come from one mix-up: buying proxies when you have no scraper, or a full platform when all you lacked was IPs. Figure out the missing piece first.
You don't code
You code and want rendered pages
Your scraper works but gets blocked
You're feeding an LLM
- Write down what's missing: the scraper, the browser, or just IPs.
- Check whether the tool bills on success (Bright Data Unlocker, Zyte, ScrapingBee) or per GB (Decodo, Thordata), failures included.
- Compare cost per usable record, not price per GB or per credit.
- Read trial terms: Decodo's converts to a paid plan unless you cancel.
- Note credit lifetimes: ScrapingBee and Apify don't roll anything over.
- Plan for Bright Data's KYC review before residential access.
- Scrape logged-out public pages only, respect robots.txt, and avoid personal data without a legal basis.
Six settings that cut your bill
These come from forums, user reviews and vendor docs. They prevent the most expensive mistakes.
Start on datacenter, go residential only where it blocks
ProxiesA datacenter IP costs a fraction of a residential one, and Webshare even gives away 10 proxies with 1 GB a month. On unprotected sites, that's enough. Run 100 requests, count failures, and only route the blocking domains through residential.
- Free
- 10 proxies, 1 GB at Webshare
Block images, fonts and video in your headless browser
BandwidthResidential proxies bill per GB, and Playwright or Puppeteer downloads every image on the page when you only want text. Intercept those requests in your script. Bandwidth drops sharply on photo-heavy ecommerce sites.
- Applies to
- Decodo, Thordata, Bright Data, Apify
Turn off JS rendering when the page doesn't need it
CreditsOn ScrapingBee, rendering is on by default and costs 5x. Lots of pages already have the data in the raw HTML or in an internal API you can spot in your browser's network tab. Check before you render.
- Saving
- 1 credit instead of 5
Set a spending cap before your first big run
BudgetApify lets you cap cost per run, Bright Data lets you set a monthly limit on the Unlocker. A looping selector or endless pagination can drain a plan overnight. A cap turns that bug into a clean stop.
- Where
- Apify, Bright Data
Validate the content, not just the 200 status
QualitySome sites serve decoy pages to detected bots with a perfectly normal status code. Check that a required field (a price, a title) is present before counting the request as a success, and retry elsewhere if it's not.
- Check
- one required field per page
Set a reminder the day before every trial ends
CancellationDecodo's trial converts to your plan, Octoparse asks you to cancel at least a day before renewal, and several Browse AI reviews mention charges after canceling. Cancel on the website and keep the confirmation.
- Timing
- at least one day before
Tool picked, what's next
These pages go deeper on one tool, one budget or one use case.
Firecrawl, ScrapingBee, Zyte, the math.
You're torn between the top twoApify vs Bright DataPlatform or infrastructure.
Apify isn't quite rightApify alternativesBased on why you're leaving.
You need a Bright Data budgetBright Data pricing explainedEvery product, every rate card.
You scrape online storesBest web scraping for ecommercePrices, stock and catalogs.
You'd rather hand it offOur scraping agencyWe build and maintain the pipeline.
Web scraping tools and proxies · FAQ
What is the best free web scraping tool?
Apify, with $5 of free usage every month and no time limit, enough for light Actor runs. For AI projects, Firecrawl gives 1,000 credits without a card. Without code, Browse AI offers 50 credits a month and Octoparse has a free plan that runs on your computer. None of them handle real volume.
Do I need proxies for web scraping?
Not always. On a lightly protected site at a slow pace, your own connection works. Once you send thousands of requests or hit Cloudflare, your IP gets blocked. Platforms (Apify, Browse AI) and APIs (ScrapingBee, Zyte, Bright Data Unlocker) already include proxies, so you only buy them separately for your own scripts.
Residential, datacenter or ISP proxies: which should I use?
Datacenter is cheapest and fastest but easy to flag. Residential routes through real home connections and gets past defenses better, from $0.65 to $8/GB in this ranking. ISP proxies are static IPs hosted in data centers but registered to consumer ISPs, a good middle ground for long sessions.
How much does web scraping cost per month?
Anywhere from zero to several hundred dollars. Small projects fit in free tiers. Regular monitoring runs about $19 to $50 (Apify Starter, ScrapingBee Hobby or Freelance, Firecrawl Hobby). A pipeline on protected sites quickly passes $100, especially with residential traffic. Budget per usable record.
Is web scraping legal in the US?
Scraping public, logged-out pages is generally lower risk. In hiQ v. LinkedIn, the Ninth Circuit held in 2022 that scraping public data isn't unauthorized access under the CFAA, though the case later ended in a settlement. In 2024, a federal court ruled in Meta v. Bright Data that Meta's terms didn't bar logged-off scraping of public data. Logged-in scraping and personal data carry more risk. Talk to a lawyer for a real project.
Can you scrape a site protected by Cloudflare?
Often, with the right layer. Datacenter IPs and plain scripts usually fail. Unblocking APIs (Bright Data Web Unlocker, Zyte, ScrapingBee with premium proxies) or specialized Apify Actors get through most cases. Even a clean residential IP can be challenged, so build in retries.
Do you pay for failed requests?
It depends on the billing model. Bright Data Web Unlocker, Zyte and ScrapingBee bill successful requests. Per-GB proxies (Decodo, Thordata, Apify residential) charge for all bandwidth, failures and retries included. That's the first line to check on any rate card.
What's the difference between a scraper and a scraping API?
A scraper extracts data from a page: your script or a no-code robot. A scraping API fetches the page without getting blocked, with a browser and proxies, and returns the HTML. Many teams combine both: their own parser, an API to fetch.
Apify or Bright Data: which one?
Apify if you want ready-made scrapers and a platform to build your own, with a free plan and Starter at $19. Bright Data if your targets are heavily protected and you want the widest proxy choice, with the Unlocker billed on success. Plenty of teams run both.
