Explore ScrapingBee: Pricing, Features, Pros & Cons

updated on Oct 23, 2025

ScrapingBee is one of the fastest growing proxy service providers and a prominent web scraping API tool. However, choosing a web scraping tool or proxy service can be bewildering for businesses.

Explore ScrapingBee by covering its:

Pros and cons
Features and capabilities
Pricing
Its top alternatives:

ScrapingBee overview

ScrapingBee is a web scraping service that simplifies the process of gathering data from websites. It offers an HTML API that allows users to request data from websites, handle proxy management, and overcome common web scraping challenges.

ScrapingBee is designed to make web scraping more accessible and efficient for businesses, researchers, and developers, eliminating the need for managing complex infrastructure and proxies. Users can request data in various formats, making it a valuable tool for a wide range of applications, including data analysis, market research, and content aggregation.

Pros:

Easy to use: 94% of the comments on Capterra scores ScrapingBee’s ease of use as 5 (See Figure 1).
Features: Average score for ScrapingBee features is 4.9. Users specifically mentioned API reliability and premium proxy among top features (See Figure 1 & 2).
Customer support: Customer support also scores on the top for ScrapingBee. Users also mention the help of ScrapingBee blog along with customer service.

Cons:

Costs: A major downside for ScrapingBee is related to the pricing plan. As pricing is based on API use, users find it challenging to plan and scrape small numbers of sites and pages (See Figure 2&3).
Speed: 7% of comments on Capterra complained about the response wait time when ScrapingBee renders web pages.

ScrapingBee features and integration

Core anti-blocking and evasion features

Full JavaScript rendering (headless browser): Utilizing headless browser technology, ScrapingBee processes dynamic content regardless of screen size, ensuring accurate data extraction from client-side rendered web applications.
Proxy management & rotation: ScrapingBee manages a premium pool of residential and datacenter proxies, automatically rotating them to prevent IP bans and seamlessly access geo-restricted content. You can also use your own proxy provider.
CAPTCHA solving: Handles complex CAPTCHA challenges, ensuring uninterrupted access to protected websites and seamless data extraction.
Custom headers & user-agents: Users can customize HTTP headers and user-agents in their requests to mimic different devices and browser behaviors.
Geographic targeting: Select the geographic location of the proxy to access region-specific content and adhere to legal and compliance requirements.
Concurrency: Supports simultaneous requests, allowing users to scrape multiple pages or websites efficiently and quickly.

AI-powered data extraction and post-processing

AI Web scraping (New): Allows users to extract structured data by simply describing the required output in plain English (e.g., “Get the product name and price”), eliminating the need for complex CSS or XPath selectors.
Integrated generative AI: Through the ChatGPT API Action, users can integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) directly into workflows for real-time data processing, such as summarizing articles or answering questions about page content.

Workflow and integration capabilities

Workflow automation: Dedicated app integrations for no-code automation platforms, enabling users to create custom, automated data pipelines to AI Excel tools without writing complex code.
Specialized E-commerce APIs: Highly focused, ready-to-use API endpoints for extracting structured product data from major platforms like Amazon and Walmart, vital for competitive monitoring and market research.
Google search API: Provides a separate API for programmatic retrieval of Google search results, valuable for tasks like keyword research and tracking search engine rankings.

Data output and delivery

API access control: Includes robust features for managing API access, rate limiting, and detailed usage monitoring.
Web scraping API: The core API allows users to request data from websites with specific parameters, including element identification via CSS selectors.
Flexible data formats: Users can request extracted data in various formats, including HTML, JSON, and XML, for seamless integration into a wide range of analysis applications.
Screenshots: Capture screenshots of the entire web page or specific elements for visual monitoring, debugging, or creating visual archives.
Near real-time data access: Supports time-sensitive data requirements via reliable scheduled polling of target websites.

The visual lists Scraping Bee features that users verified.

Figure 4: Verified features for ScrapingBee on Capterra ¹

ScrapingBee pricing

ScrapingBee uses a credit-based, subscription model where one API request consumes a variable number of credits based on the features used.

Standard pricing plans (Monthly)

Freelance plan: The Freelance plan is designed for small-scale web scraping projects, typically starting at $49 per month, offering 150,000 API credits. These credits represent the number of requests you can make using ScrapingBee’s services and include a concurrency limit of 10 simultaneous requests, providing flexibility for individual users and small projects.
Startup plan: The Startup plan is priced at $99 per month, targeting growing businesses and serious data projects. It offers a substantial increase to 1,000,000 API credits and a higher concurrency limit of 50 simultaneous requests, enabling faster and larger-volume data collection.
Business plan: The Business plan costs $249 per month and is suitable for established businesses with high-demand scraping needs. This tier provides 3,000,000 API credits and a robust concurrency limit of 100 simultaneous requests, designed to handle enterprise-level data throughput and stability.
Business+ plan: The Business+ plan, starting at $599 per month, is tailored for the largest-scale operations and custom requirements. While pricing begins at $599, the included credits and concurrency limits are handled on a “Contact for Details” basis, indicating this plan is customized to the client’s specific high-volume infrastructure needs.

Understanding the credit system

The cost of a single API request is determined by the parameters applied.

Since JavaScript rendering is enabled by default, most standard requests cost 5 credits. Users should monitor their feature usage closely to avoid rapidly depleting their monthly credit quota.

Top ScrapingBee alternatives

Here are some of the top ScrapingBee competitors for different levels of complexity and size of projects:

Bright Data: is built for large enterprises and complex, mission-critical operations. It provides access to a massive infrastructure (over 72 million residential IPs) and offers fine-grained control over every component, including proxy types, session management, and geo-targeting down to the city level.
ScraperAPI: A direct competitor to ScrapingBee, ScraperAPI is praised for its transparent, flat-rate, subscription-only pricing based purely on successful requests, which simplifies cost forecasting for high-volume users.
Webshare: Primarily known as a proxy provider, Webshare offers highly customizable plans and a permanent free tier (10 proxies) for users to test the service, ideal for budget-conscious projects or those needing raw IP infrastructure.