ScrapingBee in 2024: A Comprehensive Review

According to AIMultiple’s analysis, 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.

Therefore, this article delivers a comprehensive deep dive to ScrapingBee, comparing it against top alternatives, providing an overview based on user evaluations and explaining its capabilities and features and pricing plan.

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.

ScrapingBee Pros & Cons

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 & capabilities

ScrapingBee provides a variety of features and capabilities to their users. On capterra, they specified 21 features with a verification for 14 of them (See Figure 4). Some of these features they mentioned on their website and other platforms include: 

1. Web scraping API: ScrapingBee’s API can request data from websites without the need to write complex web scraping code. Users can make API requests with specific parameters to extract the data they need. They can select and identify elements using a CSS selector 
2. API access control: ScrapingBee offers features for managing API access, including API keys, rate limiting, and usage monitoring, ensuring that users have control over their data extraction activities.
3. Proxy management: ScrapingBee handles proxy management, which is crucial for web scraping needs. Proxy management can prevent IP bans and access geo-restricted content. ScrapingBee accesses a pool of residential and premium proxies and automatically rotates proxies to ensure reliable and anonymous scraping. You can use your own proxy provider with the scraping API.
4. Simultaneous requests: Enables users to make multiple requests using the same IP address.
5. CAPTCHA solving: ScrapingBee can handle CAPTCHA challenges, a common obstacle in web scraping. This feature ensures that users can access websites protected by CAPTCHAs and extract data seamlessly.
6. Data formats: Users can request data in various formats, including HTML, JSON, and XML, making it convenient for a wide range of data processing and analysis applications.
7. Custom headers and user-agents: Users can customize HTTP headers and user-agents in their requests, allowing them to mimic different devices, browsers, and user behaviors.
8. Geographic targeting: ScrapingBee provides the ability to select the geographic location of the proxy, which is valuable for accessing region-specific content and adhering to legal and compliance requirements.
9. Concurrency: ScrapingBee supports concurrent requests, allowing users to scrape pages or websites simultaneously, improving efficiency and speed.
10. Real-time data: Users can access real-time data by scheduling regular API requests to websites they want to scrape. This feature is beneficial for applications that require up-to-date information.

Other features

1. Screenshots: ScrapingBee can capture a screenshot of the entire web page or specific part of it that you intend to extract data from. ,  This can be useful for various purposes, such as monitoring website changes or creating visual archives.
2. Google Search API: ScrapingBee provides an API for Google Search, which allows you to programmatically retrieve search results from Google. This can be valuable for tasks like keyword research or tracking search engine rankings.
3. Data extraction: ScrapingBee offers data extraction services, allowing you to extract structured data from websites by identifying data extraction rules. You can define the data you want to collect, and the service will retrieve and organize it for you. 
4. No Code Web Scraping API: ScrapingBee’s API allows users to perform web scraping tasks without the need for extensive programming skills, by providing a user-friendly, “no-code” API for web scraping.
5. JavaScript rendering: ScrapingBee can render JavaScript-heavy websites, which means it can handle websites that rely on client-side rendering using JavaScript. It processes dynamic content by running a custom JavaScript script, ensuring that the data collected accurately reflects the content visible in a web browser. This is important for scraping modern web applications that generate content dynamically.
6. Headless browser support: Render the JavaScript web pages using headless browsers, allowing you to scrape websites that rely on client-side JavaScript to load content, irrespective of the browser window width or height. This is particularly important for websites that generate content dynamically.

ScrapingBee pricing

ScrapingBee offers a range of pricing plans designed to different user categories, including freelancers, startups, businesses, and corporate clients. For instance, the freelancer plan targets freelancers and small-scale web scraping projects. The plan  typically starts at $49 per month and offers 150,000 API credits. API credits represent the volume of requests (150,000 API requests) you can make using ScrapingBee’s services. 

ScrapingBee also offers a free trial option for users who want to test the service before committing to a paid plan. The free trial typically provides access to a limited version of the service with some usage limitations. During the trial period, you can explore ScrapingBee’s features and evaluate how it meets your web scraping needs.

Further reading

Explore more on web scraping APIs and proxy providers by checking out

• An In-Depth Look at Smartproxy’s Web Scraping Solutions
• Top 7 Proxy Providers: Pricing & Features Compared
• Comparing the Best Enterprise Proxy Servers

External sources

External Links

• 1. “ScrapingBee Reviews.” Capterra. Retrieved at November 3, 2023
• 2. “ScrapingBee Reviews.” Capterra. Retrieved at November 3, 2023
• 3. “ScrapingBee Reviews.” Capterra. Retrieved at November 3, 2023
• 4. “ScrapingBee comparison.” Capterra. Retrieved at November 3, 2023