The Best Web Scraping APIs Evaluated

Keeping up with the latest web scraping tech is expensive and time-consuming. Let's change that - weekly benchmarks and the best web scraping tech tracked!

scrapfly is number 1 service
webscrapingapi is number 2 service zenrows is number 3 service

The Latest Benchmarks

Top web scraping APIs are benchmarked weekly for their success rate, speed and cost.

  • Ecommerce
  • Social Media
  • Real Estate
  • Hospitality
  • Jobs
  • Headless Browser

Service Success % Speed Cost $/1000
1
99%
+1
8.6s
-1.0
$3.3
+0.01
2
81%
-3
21.6s
+1.1
$2.33
+0.01
3
78%
+9
7.4s
-0.4
$4.5
-0.02
4
77%
-2
8.4s
-1.2
$6.06
=
5
61%
+11
4.5s
+1.1
$1.46
+=
6
58%
+6
2.8s
-0.3
$3.42
=
7
38%
+4
15.2s
+3.2
$1.97
+0.16
Data range Oct 25 - Nov 01

Benchmark results for average of all covered scraping targets.

Get benchmark results days before anyone else!

Next report is on Tuesday.

How does this work?

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Scrapeway runs benchmarks for each of these web scraping APIs multiple times per week, aggregates and measures the average performance details like success rate and speed.

Each benchmark scrapes over a thousand urls from popular website targets and measure the success rate and performance. The results are rendered every Friday and Tuesday for the newsletter subscribers.

  • All services are tested against the same urls concurrently.
  • Cost estimations are calculated based on the entry plan pricing.
  • Scrapeway does not use any affiliate links.

Why use web scraping APIs?

Modern web scraping has the joy sucked out of it by the rise of anti-bot technologies. Web scraping API's put the joy back in it by abstracting all that away to a service and letting developers focus on making cool stuff. Let's make stuff!

FAQ

Why does success rate matters in web scraping APIs?

Success rate directly impacts overall scraping performance even if retries are used. It's the primary reason why web scraping APIs are used in the first place so it's the most critical metric for service evaluation.

Success rate and speed are in especially important in real-time scraping applications where web scraping is performed on demand.

Why does speed matters when it comes to scraping?

Speed plays an important role in real-time web scraping. When web scraping needs to be performed on demand long execution window can be a deal breaker.

Most scraping is performed in a few seconds but complex scraping scenarios like using of headless browsers can significantly increase the scraping time.

What features are important in web scraping APIs?

Headless Browsers is often required for scraping Javascript-powered websites which make this feature critical for some targets. It can also simplify the scraping process though involves extra costs.

Official SDK support is also an important convenience factor and helps to scale scrapers more easily with built-in retry and concurrency features.

Proxy geographical location can be an important factor too as some targets are only available to be scraped from specific geo locations (IPs).

As web scraping services are relatively new, each service is discovering and integrating new types of UX features like dashboards, webhooks, notifications and built-in data processing. These are harder to evaluate and vary case-by-case basis.