By use case · Bright Data vs Oxylabs

Bright Data vs Oxylabs: pricing, proxies and scraping APIs compared

The short answer

Bright Data and Oxylabs are both enterprise proxy platforms with a scraping API layered on top, and the honest split is this: Bright Data is the larger network with prebuilt datasets and per-record billing that starts free and runs $1.50 per 1,000 records, while Oxylabs sells fixed monthly plans from $49 and bundles dedicated parsers for major targets. Pick Bright Data when you need breadth, ready-made datasets or pay-only-for-success billing. Pick Oxylabs when you want a predictable monthly bill against a small set of well-known sites. Pick neither if what you actually need is clean, LLM-ready text from ordinary public pages, which is a different and much cheaper problem. Pricing verified from each vendor in August 2026.

Clean markdown & JSON · JavaScript rendered · robots.txt respected

Extraction demo

Endpoint: POST /v1/extract · paste a URL, or pick a sample below

POST

Try:

Hit Extract to turn this page into clean, LLM-ready data.

robots.txt respected · public data only ·

Markdown · JSON · structured fields, from one API call. Crawling, rendering and extracting ... Samples are recorded. Your own URL is crawled live.

These two get compared constantly because they sell the same core thing: a very large residential proxy network, wrapped in an API that handles retries and unblocking for you. If your targets are heavily defended, that infrastructure is the product, and both companies are genuinely good at it.

The comparison gets muddy because their pricing models are not the same shape. Bright Data bills per successfully delivered record, so a month where half your requests fail costs you less. Oxylabs sells a monthly result allowance, so your bill is predictable but unused results do not roll over. Comparing a $49 plan against a $1.50 per 1,000 rate only means something once you know your volume and your success rate.

We build a scraping API too, so treat the recommendation below with the skepticism it deserves. We have tried to be useful rather than flattering, including about where ClawEngine is the wrong choice: we do not defeat anti-bot systems, and if your job is scraping a marketplace that actively fights crawlers, one of these two is the right purchase and we are not.

If the question you are really pricing is one vendor rather than the pair, the full Oxylabs pricing breakdown covers every published rate, the per-target rate bands and the status-code rule that makes a 404 billable.

CRAWL RENDER JS EXTRACT MARKDOWN JSON

Any URL in LLM-ready data out

robots.txt respected public data only

Why it works

Three things to settle before you pick one

Different billing shapes

Bright Data charges per delivered record and does not bill failures. Oxylabs sells a fixed monthly result allowance. Which is cheaper depends entirely on your success rate and how steady your volume is.

Both are proxy-first

The network is the product in both cases. Output is HTML or JSON you still have to clean, not text a model can read, so budget for a parsing layer on either platform.

Watch the headline counts

Advertised result allowances assume one cheap, well-known target. Spread across mixed domains, the effective number per site drops sharply. Price your own targets before committing.

What it handles

Any URL in, clean structured data out

Point ClawEngine at a public page and it crawls, renders the JavaScript and extracts clean markdown or typed JSON in one call. Define a schema for structured fields, and respect robots.txt and Terms of Service by default.

Compares 2026 pricing verified from each vendor
Explains per-record versus fixed-allowance billing
Covers JavaScript rendering on both platforms
Shows where output still needs a cleaning pass
Names the jobs where neither tool is the right buy
States plainly where ClawEngine does not compete

POST /v1/extract extraction result

200 · JSON

{
  "url": "https://example.com/products/atlas",
  "title": "Atlas Field Notebook",
  "markdown": "# Atlas Field Notebook\n\nDurable...",
  "data": {
    "name": "Atlas Field Notebook",
    "price": 24.00,
    "currency": "USD",
    "rating": 4.7
  },
  "links": [ "/products", "/cart" ],
  "metadata": { "rendered": true }
}

JS rendered · boilerplate stripped ✓ robots.txt respected

Side by side

11 web scraping API prices compared

Published US list prices, checked in September 2026 on each vendor's own pricing page. We include ourselves, and we say where a cheaper tool is the right call.

Swipe to compare all columns →

Web scraping API	Entry price	Published tiers	Free tier
ClawEngine	$39/mo	Hobby $39, Startup $99, Scale $399, Enterprise custom	No free plan
Firecrawl	$16/mo	Free 1,000 credits a month (2 concurrent), Hobby $16 (5k credits, 5 concurrent), Standard $83 (100k, 25), Growth $333 (500k, 50), Scale $599 (1M, 100), Enterprise by quote. Prices shown are the billed-yearly rate; billed monthly, Hobby is $19, Standard $99 and Growth $399	Yes, 1,000 credits a month
Bright Data	Usage-based	Web Scraper API billed per record: free tier 5,000 records a month, pay-as-you-go $1.50 per 1,000, Scale $499 a month for 384,000 records then $1.30 per 1,000, Enterprise by quote. You pay only for successful deliveries. Web Unlocker and SERP API use the same $1.50 and $1.30 rates per 1,000 requests, while the Browser API is metered by bandwidth at $8 per GB pay-as-you-go	5,000 records or requests a month per product
Apify	$19/mo	Free ($5 usage), Starter $19, Scale $199, Business $999 billed monthly (about 10 percent less billed annually), each including that dollar value of usage. Actor compute is billed per compute unit at $0.20 (Free and Starter), $0.16 (Scale) or $0.13 (Business), with proxies charged on top	Yes, $5 credits
ScrapingBee	$19/mo	Hobby $19 (75k credits, 25 concurrent), Freelance $49 (250k, 50), Startup $99 (1M, 100), Business $249 (3M, 200), Business+ $599 (8M, 400), then Enterprise plans by quote with higher concurrency	1,000 free API credits, no card
ScraperAPI	$49/mo	Free plan 1,000 credits at 5 threads, plus a 7-day trial of 5,000. Hobby $49 (100k credits, 20 threads), Startup $149 (1M, 50), Business $299 (3M, 100), Scaling $475 (5M, 200), Professional $975 (10.5M, 300), Advanced $1,975 (21.5M, 500), Enterprise by quote above 22M. Annual billing takes 10 percent off every tier	1,000 credits a month, plus a 7-day 5,000-credit trial
ZenRows	$16/mo	Free tier (5,000 credits a month, 5 concurrent), Build $16 (45,000 credits, 20 concurrent), Launch $57 (250,000, 50), Growth $165 (1.2M, 100), Scale $456 (5M, 200), Enterprise custom (400 to 1000+ concurrent). Prices shown are the billed-yearly rate; billed monthly they are $19, $69, $199 and $549	Yes, 5,000 credits a month
Oxylabs	$49/mo	Web Scraper API: free trial up to 2,000 results, Micro $49 (up to 98,000), Starter $99 (up to 220,000), Advanced $249 (up to 622,500), Business $999 (up to 3,330,000), Custom by quote. Residential proxies are a separate purchase: $30/5GB, $100/20GB, $500/125GB, $2,500/1TB, which is $6.00 down to $2.50 per GB	Trial, up to 2,000 results
Crawl4AI	Free, open source	Apache-2.0, no license cost. You pay for your own servers, proxies and engineering time. A hosted Cloud API is in closed beta with no public pricing	Yes, fully open source
Diffbot	$299/mo	Free 10,000 credits a month, Startup $299 (250k credits), Plus $899 (1M credits), Enterprise custom. Overage is $0.001 a credit on Startup and $0.0009 on Plus	Yes, 10,000 credits a month
ScrapeGraphAI	$20/mo	Free 500 credits, Starter $20 (10k credits), Growth $100 (100k), Pro $500 (750k), Enterprise custom, about 15 percent less billed yearly. The Python library is MIT licensed and free to self-host.	Yes, 500 credits

What you actually pay with Firecrawl

The headline 1 credit a page is the plain scrape only. Asking for structured JSON adds 4 credits, so a page you want back as typed fields is 5 credits, which turns Standard from $0.83 into $4.15 per 1,000 pages. PDF parsing adds 1 credit a PDF page, a prompt injection check adds 4, zero data retention adds 1, Map is 1 credit a call, Search is 2 per 10 results, and Interact is 2 to 7 credits a browser minute. A page that comes back as a 403 or 404 still costs 1 credit; only a request that returns no document at all is free. Plan credits do not roll over except on annual Scale, and pay-as-you-go top-ups run $5.00 per 1,000 extra credits on Hobby, $2.50 on Standard, $2.00 on Growth and $1.00 on Scale, up to three times the in-plan rate.

What you actually pay with Bright Data

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: each product has its own meter (records, requests or gigabytes), plans carry a minimum monthly commitment billed from the 1st, and unused plan volume does not roll over.

What you actually pay with Apify

Costs stack in layers: the plan buys a dollar allowance, Actor compute burns it at $0.13 to $0.20 per compute unit, and residential proxies add $7 to $8 per GB on top. Unused allowance expires monthly, and output is generic JSON rather than LLM-ready markdown.

What you actually pay with ScrapingBee

JavaScript rendering is on by default and costs 5 credits, so a Freelance plan is 50,000 rendered pages rather than the 250,000 the credit count suggests. Premium proxy is 10 credits alone or 25 with rendering, and stealth proxy is 75. Responses with a 200, 404 or 410 status are billed. You also mostly get HTML back, so the cleaning, chunking and structuring work for an LLM is still yours to do.

What you actually pay with ScraperAPI

The multipliers decide the bill: a plain request is 1 credit, render 10, premium 10, screenshot 10, premium with render 25, ultra premium 30 and ultra premium with render 75, while Amazon, Walmart and eBay cost 5, Google and Bing 25 and LinkedIn 30, and clearing Cloudflare, DataDome or PerimeterX adds 10. Two policies matter more than the rates: credits do not roll over, and pay-as-you-go overage is available only on Scaling and above, so hitting 100 percent on Hobby, Startup or Business stops the pipeline until you upgrade. Only 200 and 404 responses are billed. It is proxy infrastructure first, so an LLM pipeline still needs its own parsing, boilerplate stripping and schema layer.

What you actually pay with ZenRows

The multipliers set the real price, not the headline credit count: a plain fetch is 1 credit, a JavaScript-rendered page is 5, premium proxies are 10, and premium with rendering is 25, which is the ceiling. Residential bandwidth is billed at a flat 25,000 credits per GB, and Browser Sessions add 5 credits a minute on top of bandwidth. Launch at $57 therefore buys about 50,000 rendered pages. Failed requests are not charged, but 404 and 410 responses count as successful. You also get HTML back, so the cleaning and structuring work for an LLM is still yours.

What you actually pay with Oxylabs

Two rules move the real bill. First, rates are set by target category, roughly $0.25 to $0.50 per 1,000 for Amazon, $0.50 to $1.00 for Google, $0.70 to $1.15 for other sources and $0.95 to $1.35 with JavaScript rendering, and the headline result count is quoted against the cheapest one. Oxylabs own maximum-results table shows the same free trial buying 2,000 Amazon results but only 769 JavaScript-rendered results from an ordinary site, a 2.6 times spread that carries up the whole ladder. Second, the billing documentation counts any 2xx or 4xx response as a successful result, so a 404 on a dead link or a 403 from a site that blocked you is billed at full rate. Whole-site crawling means buying a second product.

What you actually pay with Crawl4AI

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

What you actually pay with Diffbot

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.

What you actually pay with ScrapeGraphAI

The managed API bills per credit and the rate depends on the endpoint (extract costs 5 credits, stealth adds 4 to 9 depending on the render mode, a crawl adds 2 on top of per-page scrape cost), so cost per page is harder to predict. Failed requests are not charged. Self-hosting means you supply the LLM key and pay model tokens on every page.

Why ClawEngine

One API that crawls, renders and extracts

Not a raw HTML dump, not a headless browser fleet to run, and not a brittle parser to maintain. One call crawls a public page, renders its JavaScript and returns clean markdown or typed JSON, built for RAG pipelines and AI agents.

LLM-ready output

Clean markdown or typed JSON with the boilerplate stripped, so the data drops straight into a vector store, a prompt or an agent without a cleanup step.

JavaScript rendered

Each page loads in a real browser environment before extraction, so single-page apps and client-rendered content come back complete, not as an empty shell.

Compliance-first

ClawEngine works on public, permitted data only. It respects robots.txt and site Terms of Service and honors crawl-delay, so responsible scraping is the default.

Code examples

The job neither platform is priced for

If your targets are ordinary public pages and what you want back is text a model can read, the request looks like this: one call that crawls, renders and returns clean markdown, with no proxy plan to size.

curl Crawl and return LLM-ready markdown

curl https://clawengine.ai/v1/crawl \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CLAWENGINE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://example.com/docs",
    "path_prefix": "/docs/",
    "max_pages": 200,
    "render": true,
    "format": "markdown"
  }'

# Every page comes back as clean markdown with boilerplate stripped,
# ready to chunk and embed. No proxy plan to size, no parser to write.

Bright Data vs Oxylabs: the questions buyers ask

What is the difference between Bright Data and Oxylabs?

The main difference is billing and packaging. Bright Data charges per successfully delivered record, starting with 5,000 free records a month then $1.50 per 1,000, so failed requests cost nothing. Oxylabs sells fixed monthly Web Scraper API plans from $49 with a set result allowance. Bright Data leans on breadth and prebuilt datasets; Oxylabs leans on dedicated parsers for major targets and a predictable bill.

Is Bright Data or Oxylabs better?

Neither is better across the board, and the choice comes down to volume shape. Bright Data suits spiky or uncertain workloads because you only pay for successful deliveries and can start free. Oxylabs suits steady, predictable pulls from a small set of well-known sites, where a flat monthly fee is easier to budget and its ready-made parsers save you writing extraction rules.

How much does Bright Data cost?

For the Web Scraper API, Bright Data publishes a free tier of 5,000 records a month, pay-as-you-go at $1.50 per 1,000 records, and a Scale plan at $499 a month covering 384,000 records with additional records at $1.30 per 1,000. Enterprise is by quote. You are billed only for successful deliveries. Verified from Bright Data in August 2026.

How much does Oxylabs cost?

The Web Scraper API ladder runs Micro $49 for up to 98,000 results, Starter $99 for up to 220,000, Advanced $249 for up to 622,500 and Business $999 for up to 3,330,000, with Custom plans by quote and a free trial covering 2,000 results. Residential proxies are a separate purchase at $30 for 5GB up to $2,500 for 1TB. Verified from Oxylabs in September 2026.

Is Oxylabs cheaper than Bright Data?

Only at low, steady volume. At 30,000 records a month, Bright Data pay-as-you-go costs roughly $45 and the Oxylabs Micro plan costs $49, so they are close. Bright Data wins when volume is unpredictable or your success rate is poor, because failures are free. Oxylabs wins when you would otherwise blow past a usage estimate and want a bill you can forecast.

Why do the advertised result counts not match what I get?

Because headline allowances are quoted against a single, cheap, well-known target. Oxylabs own FAQ notes that the Micro plan's 98,000 results figure applies to Amazon; spread the same plan across a mix of domains and the effective number lands closer to 16,000 per target. Price the specific sites you intend to scrape rather than the number on the pricing page.

Do both handle JavaScript rendering?

Yes. Oxylabs exposes it as a render parameter on the request, and Bright Data renders as part of its unblocking pipeline. On both platforms rendering costs more than a plain fetch, which is normal across the category. If most of your targets are server-rendered, check whether you are paying a rendering premium on requests that never needed it.

Do I need a proxy network to scrape a website?

Often no. Proxy networks exist to get past anti-bot systems on defended sites like large marketplaces. Documentation sites, company sites, blogs, news and most public directories serve their content to any well-behaved client that respects robots.txt and crawl-delay. If your targets are ordinary public pages, an enterprise proxy platform is a large bill for a problem you do not have.

What is a good alternative to Bright Data and Oxylabs?

It depends on the job you are actually doing. For hard, defended targets at scale, these two are the category leaders and a smaller tool will not substitute. For turning ordinary public pages into clean markdown or typed JSON for a RAG pipeline or an AI agent, a crawl-and-extract API is a better fit and costs far less. ClawEngine sits in that second group, starting at $39 a month.

Are Bright Data and Oxylabs legal to use?

The tools themselves are lawful commercial services, and collecting publicly available data is broadly lawful in the United States. Legality turns on what you scrape and how, not on which vendor you buy from: a site's Terms of Service, its robots.txt, copyright in the content and privacy law all still apply to you as the customer. This is general information, not legal advice.

Good questions

Questions about Bright Data vs Oxylabs

Bright Data, by its own published figures: more than 150 million residential IPs across 195 countries, alongside hundreds of prebuilt domain scrapers and ready-made datasets. Oxylabs also runs a large global network with enterprise-grade unblocking and dedicated parsers for major targets. For most jobs both are far past the point where network size is your bottleneck.

Not straightforwardly. Both are built around fetching a URL you already know. On Oxylabs, whole-site crawling is a separate product you buy in addition to the Scraper API. On Bright Data it is a different product line again. If your job starts with a seed URL and needs to discover pages, check that pricing before you commit to either.

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More ways to turn the web into data with ClawEngine

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Stop wrangling raw HTML. Get LLM-ready data.

Point ClawEngine at a public page and one call crawls, renders the JavaScript and extracts clean markdown or typed JSON, ready for your RAG pipeline or AI agent. Public, permitted data only.

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Crawl · render JS · extract markdown & JSON · robots.txt respected, public data only