Compare · Updated July 2026

ScrapeGraphAI alternatives: 10 web scraping APIs compared for LLM-ready data

The short answer

ScrapeGraphAI is one of the strongest tools in this category and it beats us on two things worth saying up front: its Python library is MIT licensed with 28.4k GitHub stars and free to self-host, and its managed API starts at $20 a month, below our $39. It is the better pick if you want to describe what you need in plain English and let a model pull it out, or if you want to run the whole thing yourself. Teams look for a ScrapeGraphAI alternative when per-page cost gets hard to predict, because credits vary by endpoint and self-hosting means you supply the LLM key and pay model tokens on every page. ClawEngine trades prompt flexibility for a schema you define, with rendering and extraction included in the plan.

ScrapeGraphAI took a genuinely different approach to extraction. Instead of writing selectors, you describe what you want in plain English and a language model reads the page and returns it, wired together with graph logic that decides the steps. The Python library is MIT licensed and has 28.4k GitHub stars, it plugs into OpenAI, Groq, Azure, Gemini or a local Ollama model, and there is a managed API on top of it starting at $20 a month. On price floor and on open-source optionality it beats us, and pretending otherwise would not help you choose.

Where teams start looking for a ScrapeGraphAI alternative is cost predictability at volume. Credits are consumed at different rates depending on the endpoint, so the same 10,000 pages can cost very different amounts depending on whether you scraped, extracted, searched or crawled them, and whether stealth was on. Self-hosting moves that cost rather than removing it: you supply the LLM key and pay model tokens on every page, on top of the browsers and proxies you now run. ClawEngine makes a different trade. You define a schema, extraction runs deterministically against it with rendering included in the plan, and the price per page does not depend on how long the page was. It works on public and permitted data only, respects robots.txt and site Terms of Service, and honors crawl-delay.

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Crawl · render JS · extract typed fields · robots.txt respected

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robots.txt respected · public data only

Markdown · JSON · structured fields, from one API call. Crawling, rendering and extracting ...

ScrapeGraphAI is the stronger choice when you want prompt-driven extraction on messy layouts or an MIT-licensed library you can self-host, while ClawEngine is the better fit when you want deterministic schema extraction with a predictable per-page cost and no LLM key to supply.

All the options

10 ScrapeGraphAI alternatives, compared

Published US list prices, checked in July 2026. We include ourselves, and we say where each tool beats us.

Alternative	Starts at	Free tier	Output	Best for
ClawEngine	$39/mo	No free plan	Clean markdown or typed JSON	Teams that want one compliance-first pipeline returning LLM-ready data for RAG and agents
Firecrawl	$16/mo	Yes, 1,000 credits	Clean markdown, plus structured extraction	Fast site-to-markdown for LLM workflows, and teams that want the option to self-host
Bright Data	Usage-based	Trial credits	JSON and datasets, not markdown-first	Enterprise-scale proxy networks and prebuilt datasets for hard, heavily defended targets
Apify	$29/mo	Yes, $5 credits	JSON, CSV and dataset exports	Teams that want a prebuilt scraper for a specific site rather than building one
ScrapingBee	$49/mo	1,000 free API calls	Raw HTML, with some extraction rules	Simple proxy plus JavaScript rendering behind a clean REST API
ScraperAPI	$49/mo	Trial credits	Raw HTML, with structured endpoints for some sites	High-volume proxy rotation at a low cost per request
ZenRows	$69/mo	Trial credits	HTML, with markdown and parsing options	Sites behind aggressive anti-bot systems
Oxylabs	$49/mo	Trial, up to 2,000 results	HTML, JSON via parsers, and markdown	Enterprises pulling high volumes from hard, well-known targets like major marketplaces
Crawl4AI	Free, open source	Yes, fully open source	Markdown, Fit Markdown, or JSON for embedding	Engineering teams happy to run and maintain the infrastructure themselves
Diffbot	$299/mo	Yes, 10,000 credits	Structured JSON entities, plus a Knowledge Graph	Enterprises that need web-wide entity intelligence and rule-less extraction across many different site layouts

ClawEngine

Hobby $39, Startup $99, Scale $399, Enterprise custom

Where it wins. Crawl, JavaScript rendering and typed schema extraction happen in a single API call, and robots.txt plus site Terms of Service are respected by default.

What to watch. There is no free plan, so it is priced for teams running real pipelines rather than one-off experiments.

Firecrawl

Hobby $16, Standard $83 (100k credits), Growth $333, Scale $599

Where it wins. Excellent developer experience, a well-loved open-source project, and markdown output tuned for token efficiency.

What to watch. Credits do not roll over, and stealth mode bills 5 credits per page instead of 1, which changes the real cost on protected sites.

Bright Data

Web Scraper API billed per record, roughly $0.75 to $3 per 1,000 depending on product and tier, with pay-as-you-go and no monthly commitment

Where it wins. The largest proxy network in the category (150M+ residential IPs across 195 countries) and hundreds of prebuilt domain scrapers and ready-made datasets.

What to watch. It is a broad platform rather than a single LLM-ready endpoint, so output usually needs cleaning before you can embed it, and the pricing surface is complex.

Apify

Free tier with $5 credits, Starter $29, Scale $199, Business $999, plus per-Actor usage

Where it wins. A marketplace of thousands of prebuilt Actors, so common targets are already solved, plus a full automation and scheduling platform.

What to watch. Costs stack (platform plan plus per-Actor compute or per-result fees), and output is generic JSON rather than LLM-ready markdown.

ScrapingBee

Freelance $49, Startup $99, Business $249

Where it wins. Very easy to adopt, dependable rendering, and a Google Search API bundled into every tier.

What to watch. You mostly get HTML back, so the cleaning, chunking and structuring work for an LLM is still yours to do.

ScraperAPI

Hobby $49 (100k credits), Business $299 (3M credits), Enterprise $475 (14M credits)

Where it wins. Strong price per request at volume and a very simple drop-in proxy API.

What to watch. It is proxy infrastructure first, so an LLM pipeline still needs its own parsing, boilerplate stripping and schema layer.

ZenRows

Developer $69, Startup $129, Business $299

Where it wins. Focused on getting through Cloudflare, DataDome and PerimeterX where simpler fetchers fail.

What to watch. Protected requests consume far more credits than plain ones, so the effective price depends heavily on your targets.

Oxylabs

Web Scraper API: Micro $49, Starter $99, Business $999, Custom+ by quote. Proxies are priced separately, residential from $6/GB

Where it wins. Enterprise-grade unblocking, a large global proxy network, and dedicated parsers for major targets, plus a free Custom Parser for your own CSS or XPath rules.

What to watch. The headline result counts are best-case for a single cheap target: Oxylabs own FAQ notes the Micro plan's 98,000 results apply to Amazon, and spreading the same plan across mixed targets works out closer to 16,000 per target. Whole-site crawling means buying a second product.

Crawl4AI

Apache-2.0, no license cost. You pay for your own servers, proxies and engineering time

Where it wins. No vendor bill at all, full control, deep crawling with BFS, DFS and best-first strategies, and output already shaped for RAG ingestion. It is the most popular open-source crawler in the category, with roughly 72,000 GitHub stars.

What to watch. You own the ops: proxy rotation, browser fleet, retries, blocks and upgrades. Free software is not free infrastructure.

Diffbot

Free 10,000 credits, Startup $299 (250k credits), Plus $899 (1M credits), Professional $3,999 (5M credits), Enterprise custom

Where it wins. A pre-built Knowledge Graph of more than 10 billion entities you can query instead of crawling, and computer-vision extraction that classifies and structures pages with no per-site rules to write.

What to watch. The first paid tier is $299 a month and credits are consumed fast (a Knowledge Graph record costs 25 credits, a data-center proxy request doubles the cost), so for plain RAG ingestion it is expensive and heavier than you need.

Want the full field, including ScrapeGraphAI? Read the best web scraping API buyer's guide.

Side by side

ScrapeGraphAI vs ClawEngine, honestly

A fair look at what each does well. Both are capable tools. Here is where they differ.

What matters	ClawEngine	ScrapeGraphAI
Entry price	$39 a month, no free plan	Free 500 credits one time, then $20 a month
Pricing model	Usage-based plans, rendering and extraction included	Credits per call, rate varies by endpoint; stealth adds 5
Open source	Not offered, managed API only	Yes, MIT licensed Python library with 28.4k GitHub stars
How extraction is specified	A typed schema you define, deterministic per request	A natural-language prompt read by a language model
LLM key and token cost	None to supply, no per-page token bill	Bring your own for self-host (OpenAI, Groq, Gemini, Ollama)
Crawl, render and extract in one call	Yes, a single request	Separate endpoints: Scrape, Extract, Search, Crawl, Monitor
Best suited for	Teams wanting predictable cost and typed output for RAG and agents	Teams wanting prompt-driven extraction or a library to self-host

Comparison reflects general, publicly understood positioning. Capabilities change, so check each product for the latest.

Why teams pick ClawEngine

One API that turns any website into clean, LLM-ready data

Cost you can forecast

Extraction runs against a schema with rendering included, so a page costs what a page costs. There is no model token bill that scales with how long the document was, and no endpoint-dependent credit rate to model in a spreadsheet.

Deterministic by default

A schema cannot hallucinate a price or invent a field. Model-assisted extraction is there for layouts that genuinely need it, rather than being the mechanism for every page including the predictable ones.

Honest about the trade

ScrapeGraphAI is cheaper to start, has a free tier and is MIT licensed. If prompt-driven extraction or self-hosting is what you want, it is the better tool and we would say so. ClawEngine wins on predictable cost and one managed call.

ScrapeGraphAI alternatives: the questions buyers ask

What is the best ScrapeGraphAI alternative?

For the same LLM-ready output from a managed call, ClawEngine and Firecrawl are the closest fits, and Firecrawl has the lower entry price of the two at $16. If what you value about ScrapeGraphAI is that it is open source and self-hostable, Crawl4AI is the better comparison, because it is also free to run and does not require an LLM key for basic markdown extraction. Match the alternative to which half of ScrapeGraphAI you actually use.

How much does ScrapeGraphAI cost?

The managed API has a free tier of 500 credits one time, then Starter at $20 a month for 10,000 credits, Growth at $100 for 100,000, Pro at $500 for 750,000, and custom Enterprise pricing. Credits are consumed at different rates per endpoint: a markdown scrape costs 1, extract costs 5 as a base, search costs 2 to 5 per result, and a crawl adds 2 on top of the per-page scrape cost. Stealth mode adds 5. The Python library itself is MIT licensed and free.

Is ScrapeGraphAI free?

The library is genuinely free. It is MIT licensed, so you can run it in production with no license cost. The managed API is not free beyond a one-time 500 credit allowance. The real cost of self-hosting is that ScrapeGraphAI drives extraction with a language model you supply, through OpenAI, Groq, Azure, Gemini or a local Ollama model, so you pay model tokens on every page, plus the browsers and proxies you run.

What is the difference between ScrapeGraphAI and ClawEngine?

Mostly how extraction is specified and paid for. ScrapeGraphAI leans on a language model reading the page from a natural-language prompt, which is flexible on messy layouts and costs model tokens per page. ClawEngine leans on a schema you define, which is deterministic, cannot hallucinate a value and carries no per-page token bill, but will not infer a field you did not describe. ScrapeGraphAI also offers a self-host path. ClawEngine does not.

Should I use ScrapeGraphAI or build with the open-source library?

Use the library if crawling is close to your product, you already run infrastructure, and you want control over which model reads each page. Use a managed API if crawling is a dependency rather than the thing you sell, because the library still leaves you operating headless browsers, proxy rotation, retries and an LLM budget. The license is free. The pipeline around it is what costs.

Good questions

ScrapeGraphAI vs ClawEngine, answered

It is if you are using the managed API for RAG ingestion and the per-endpoint credit math has become hard to forecast. ClawEngine returns the same kind of clean markdown or typed JSON from one call, with rendering and extraction included. It is not the right swap if what you value is the MIT license and running it yourself, because ClawEngine is a managed API with no self-host option.

On price floor, on the free tier and on optionality. It starts at $20 a month against our $39, gives you 500 credits to try, and the library is MIT licensed so you can run it yourself and choose which model reads each page, including a local one for data that should not leave your network. Those are real advantages and they matter for a lot of teams.

No. Schema extraction is included in the plan, so there is no separate model key to supply and no per-page token bill. That is the main structural cost difference against a prompt-driven scraper, where every page you extract is a model call you are billed for, and a long page costs more than a short one.

It depends on how uniform the pages are. For thousands of pages that share a layout, a schema is cheaper and more consistent than asking a model to re-read each one, so ClawEngine has the better cost curve. For a few hundred pages across wildly different layouts where writing a schema per source is the bottleneck, prompt-driven extraction genuinely saves time and ScrapeGraphAI is a good answer.

More comparisons

See how ClawEngine compares

vs Firecrawl

Turn any website into clean, LLM-ready data

One API: a URL in, clean markdown or typed JSON out. ClawEngine crawls, renders JavaScript and extracts typed structured fields in a single call, ready to embed for your RAG pipelines and AI agents.

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LLM-ready output · one API call · public, permitted data only · robots.txt respected