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

Last updated August 2026

Live Extraction

Endpoint · POST /v1/extract

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 ...

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.

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 August 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, Hobby $16 (5k credits), Standard $83 (100k), Growth $333 (500k), Scale $599 (1M), Enterprise by quote. Prices shown are the annual-billing rate	Yes, 1,000 credits
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	Trial credits
Apify	$29/mo	Free ($5 usage), Starter $29, Scale $199, Business $999, 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	$19.99/mo	Hobby $19.99 (75k credits), Freelance $49.99 (250k), Startup $99.99 (1M), Business $249.99 (3M), Business+ $599.99 (8M), then an Enterprise ladder from $999.99 (14M) to $5,799.99 (120M). Concurrency runs from 25 threads to 900	1,000 free API credits, no card
ScraperAPI	$49/mo	5,000 credits on signup then 1,000 free a month at 5 threads, Hobby $49 (100k credits, 20 threads), Startup $149 (1M, 50), Business $299 (3M, 100), Scaling $475 (5M, 200), Enterprise by quote. Annual billing drops those to $44, $134, $269 and $427	5,000 credits, then 1,000 a month
ZenRows	$16/mo	Free tier (5,000 credits), Build $16, Launch $57, Growth $165, Scale $456 (5M credits), Enterprise custom	Yes, 5,000 credits
Oxylabs	$49/mo	Web Scraper API: Micro $49, Starter $99, Business $999, Custom+ by quote. Proxies are priced separately, residential from $6/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	Yes, fully open source
Diffbot	$299/mo	Free 10,000 credits a month, Startup $299 (250k credits), Plus $899 (1M credits), Enterprise custom	Yes, 10,000 credits a month
ScrapeGraphAI	$20/mo	Free 500 credits one-time, Starter $20 (10k credits), Growth $100 (100k), Pro $500 (750k), Enterprise custom. The Python library is MIT licensed and free to self-host.	Yes, 500 credits

What you actually pay with Firecrawl

The proxy mode decides the price: basic is 1 credit a page, enhanced is 5, and the default is auto, which retries a blocked page on enhanced and bills 5. Credits expire monthly on the self-serve plans and only roll over on Scale and Enterprise.

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.

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. 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 flat request is 1 credit, render adds 10, premium adds 10, premium with render is 25, ultra premium with render is 75, and Amazon, SERP and LinkedIn targets are 5, 25 and 30. 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

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

What you actually pay with Oxylabs

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.

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 5, a crawl adds 2 on top of per-page scrape cost), so cost per page is harder to predict. 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://api.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?

Oxylabs prices the Web Scraper API from $49 a month, which its pricing page states as a "starts from" figure. The published ladder runs Micro $49, Starter $99 and Business $999, with Custom plans by quote. Residential proxies are sold separately, from around $6 per GB. A trial covers up to 2,000 results. Verified from Oxylabs in August 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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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