Benchmarked the 6 Best Web Scraping APIs in 2026
We benchmarked the best web scraper API services using 12,500 requests across various domains. This web crawling services comparison goes beyond marketing claims to reveal real-time performance in e-commerce (Amazon, Target), search engines (SERP), and social media.
If you are looking for the fastest latency or an affordable scraping API, our data-driven analysis below will guide your choice.
Key findings: Which API won our speed test?
Beyond the numbers, our benchmarks revealed three critical insights that will help you choose the right API without getting lost in technical jargon:
Speed or depth? Choose your priority
Our data shows a clear divide in the market. If you need instant results (e.g., real-time price tracking), Zyte and Decodo are unbeatable, delivering data in under 2 seconds.
However, if you need full reports (e.g., reviews, seller ratings, and maps), Bright Data and Apify provide much more detailed data, extracting over 200 data points per request.
Consistent success across search engines
Nimble and Oxylabs maintained near-perfect 100% success rates throughout our 28-day test. This means you can scale your SEO projects without worrying about constant maintenance.
Budget-friendly e-commerce scraping
You don’t always need the most expensive plan to get the best results. For e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Target, Decodo is an excellent choice.
It offers low latency (~2s) at a highly attractive price point for small- to mid-sized sellers who need speed without a massive enterprise budget.
Quick comparison of the best web scraping services
Web scraping API benchmark results
Response time vs. data detail
You can see the average number of fields returned by scrapers in 3 categories. The size of each data point represents the number of page types available for scraping for each provider. We also provided median response times. For definitions, see methodology.
Success rate comparison
Response time comparison
Pros & cons of the top web scraping APIs
- Benchmark highlight: It extracted 220+ data fields in our tests, capturing details that others missed.
- Pros: Massive proxy network, unmatched data depth, and enterprise-grade features.
- Cons: Higher starting price, which might be overkill for simple tasks.
Bright Data allows users to specify the data they want to retrieve, enabling faster responses through its custom IDE scrapers.
The Custom IDE module provides ready-to-use templates for commonly used websites (e.g., Amazon, YouTube, Facebook) and allows users to modify them. Bright Data’s custom IDE module reduced the response time to 3.5 seconds when we reduced the amount of data we requested.
In scraping, there is a trade-off between response time and the amount of data to retrieve. Since scraping users require fresh data, these services collect data using proxies or unblockers after the client’s request. The more pages that need to be crawled, the longer it takes to return the data.
The latter approach is what Bright Data’s Amazon Products – Discover by Search URL product follows. As a result, this product’s retrieval time can be significantly longer than that of other scraping APIs.
Get 25% off Bright Data’s Web Scraping APIs by entering the promo code API25.
Visit Website- Benchmark highlight: It showed the most consistent latency across our 28-day test, with zero major spikes in response time.
- Pros: Highly stable, excellent global coverage, and premium customer support.
- Cons: Pricing is geared more toward corporate budgets.
Oxylabs offers a general-purpose web scraping API suitable for a wide range of domains. Oxylabs provides dedicated endpoints, also known as parametrized sources, for specific websites and platforms.
Oxylabs uses a feature-based pricing model for its Web Scraper API, with costs adjusted based on the complexity of the scraping. Users pay only for what they use, with lower rates for simpler targets that don’t require JavaScript rendering.
Get 2,000 free scraping credits
Visit Website- Benchmark highlight: It was the fastest budget-friendly API for Amazon and Target, with a median response time of just ~2 seconds.
- Pros: Highly affordable ($29 starting price), incredible e-commerce speed, and a very low barrier to entry.
- Cons: Fewer data fields compared to giants like Bright Data.
Decodo offers two primary Web Scraping API services, core and advanced, for different data extraction projects. The core plan is ideal for users who need basic scraping capabilities without advanced features. Its geo-targeting is limited to 8 countries.
The advanced plan covers advanced features such as JavaScript rendering, structured data outputs (JSON/CSV), and global geo-targeting.
Apply SCRAPE30 for 30% off- Benchmark highlight: It excelled at social media scraping, maintaining stable performance even as platforms updated their anti-bot measures.
- Pros: Excellent for complex social data, very flexible, and great “fields-per-second” balance.
- Cons: Can be more complex to configure for beginners.
Apify is a developer-focused web scraping platform that offers pre-made scrapers and automation tools called Actors.
You can use Actors as they are, ask to modify them for your use case, or create your own. Developers can create and run Actors in various programming languages (such as JavaScript/TypeScript and Python) by using code templates, universal scrapers, or the open-source web scraping library, Crawlee.
- Benchmark highlight: It clocked in at under 2 seconds for basic data extraction, making it the fastest API in our test.
- Pros: Instant response times, great PAYG pricing, and highly efficient for lightweight scraping.
- Cons: Provides less data detail (fewer fields) in exchange for that speed.
Zyte provides a general-purpose scraper API with proxy management features and browser automation capabilities. The scraper API allows you to handle request headers, cookies, and toggle JavaScript.
- Benchmark highlight: It achieved a perfect 100% success rate in our SERP benchmark and consistently stayed under the 5-second response mark.
- Pros: Zero blocks, and very easy to set up for SEO projects.
- Cons: Focused mainly on high-performance scraping; might be more than a small hobbyist needs.
Nimble offers general-purpose, SERP, e-commerce, and maps APIs featuring integrated rotating residential proxies and unlocker proxy solutions. The web API supports batch requests, allowing up to 1,000 URLs per batch.
Web scraping pricing: Comparing value from free plans to high volume
Free web scraper API:
A free web scraper API is a useful place to start if you’re new to web scraping. The majority of providers, including Decodo, offer free features such as data parsing and proxy rotation. However, only modest projects are usually supported by free plans.
It’s important to factorin how many requests are included in the price as your needs grow.
We evaluated the market using a key metric: requests per dollar. See the Web Scraping API benchmark results section for details.
Cheapest scraping API:
Based on our benchmark data, Zyte is the most affordable provider, consistently delivering over 2,000 requests per dollar. For the highest request volume per dollar, Zyte leads this category.
Affordable e-commerce scraping API:
Our benchmark shows that Decodo is well-suited for users seeking a cost-effective e-commerce scraping API at scale. Unlike some competitors that increase per-request costs as usage grows, Decodo maintains a high ‘requests per dollar’ ratio, especially for 125,000 to 1.25 million monthly requests.
How to choose based on your volume
Low volume ( under 10,000): To cut expenses, use free tiers or entry-level plans.
Mid-to-high-volume (100,000 to 5 million): At this stage, it is important to maximise requests per dollar. Decodo has the biggest “requests per dollar” advantage over other providers.
Enterprise volume (more than 10 million): Select providers with custom pricing to make sure that your cost per request drops as you grow.
Web scraper API vs. proxies: Which is more cost-effective?
With proxies, you are still responsible for managing browser headers, rotating IPs, solving CAPTCHA, and handling JS rendering.
Web scraper APIs include a proxy layer and a management layer. They handle unblocking, bypassing anti-bot measures, and running JavaScript automatically.
Web scraping API availability
Below is a detailed breakdown of which platforms (Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc.) each provider supports and where they excel.
E-commerce APIs
E-commerce APIs are offered by most providers:
* Though Apify offers scraping APIs for these page types via its community-maintained APIs, we were not able to access these Actors as part of the plan provided to us by Apify.
** These scrapers exist, but their success rate was below our threshold (>90%).
Ranking: Providers are sorted from left to right by the number of APIs they offer. If they provide the same number of APIs, they are listed in alphabetical order.
For more, see eCommerce-scraping APIs.
Social media APIs
While some providers offer many social media APIs, some don’t provide any:
A social network is included with a ✅ only if
- It has an API for all the page types in that social network in our benchmark set, and
- Its API has a>90% success rate
Learn more about social media scraping and detailed benchmark results.
Search engine APIs
Search engine APIs are offered by all providers:
For more: SERP APIs
Web scraping API benchmark methodology
Test URLs
We analyzed 3,000+ real-world URLs across three high-stakes categories:
- 1,700 eCommerce URLs, as explained in the e-commerce scraper benchmark.
- 1,100 social media URLs as outlined in the social media scraper benchmark.
- 200 query result pages, as explained in the SERP API benchmark.
Speed & latency
- Proxies and web unblocker: Response time is measured.
- Scraping API: Response time is calculated as the difference between webhook callback time and request time.
All providers’ response times are calculated on the same set of pages on which they all returned successful responses. It would not be fair to compare the response time of an unsuccessful response to that of a successful one, since an unsuccessful response can be generated much faster.
For example, if four unblockers were run on 600 URLs and only 540 returned successful results, those 540 URLs form the basis for the response time calculation.
Success rates
Requirements for a successful request for a web scraper API:
- HTTP response code: 200
- A response longer than 500 characters
If a web scraper returns successful results more than 90% of the time for a specific type of page (e.g., Walmart search pages) and if the correctness of the results is validated by random sampling of 10 URLs, then we list that provider as a scraping API provider for that type of page.
Most scraper APIs had more than 90% success rates for their target pages. Therefore, rather than focusing on 1-2% differences between different APIs, we list all APIs that returned successful results more than 90% of the time.
Even though we used fresh URLs, a small percentage of them returned 404 during the test. They were excluded from the test.
Determining participants
- Web scraper APIs: Participants’ websites were scanned to identify relevant scrapers.
- Proxies: All providers except Zyte were included.
Average # of fields
- For each successful API result, we count the number of fields returned in the JSON file. Each key is counted regardless of its value.
FAQs about web scraping APIs
- Has 20 years of experience as a white-hat hacker and development guru, with extensive expertise in programming languages and server architectures.
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