7 Best ScrapingBee Alternatives in 2026 (Real Cost Math)

7 Best ScrapingBee Alternatives in 2026 (Real Cost Math)

Oxylabs acquired ScrapingBee in an eight-figure deal confirmed in mid-2025, with ScrapingBee formally joining the group in January 2026. The product's still running, no price hikes yet, and Google API credits actually dropped from 25 to 15. But if you've been through an enterprise acquisition before, you know the playbook: 12-18 months of "nothing changes," then everything changes.

Time to evaluate your options before you're forced to.

We've tested most of these tools on protected e-commerce sites, and the credit math is where the real surprises hide. Here are seven alternatives worth your time - with the actual cost-per-request numbers most comparison articles skip.

Our Picks (TL;DR)

Why Teams Switch From ScrapingBee

The credit math doesn't add up on protected sites. ScrapingBee's stealth proxy mode costs 75 credits per request. On the Business plan (3,000,000 credits for $249/mo), that's roughly 40,000 stealth requests - about $0.0062 per request before failures and retries.

Performance degrades under load. The Proxyway December 2025 benchmark tested 12 providers across 15 protected sites. ScrapingBee hit 84.47% success at 2 requests per second. Crank it to 10 rps and that drops to 72.98%, with an average response time of 25.46 seconds. That's brutal for any production pipeline.

Acquisition uncertainty is real. Enterprise acquisitions follow a pattern, and "independent entity" language has a shelf life. If you're building infrastructure on this API, have a backup evaluated now - not six months from now when the pricing page quietly changes.

The Credit Multiplier Problem

Here's the thing: the most common complaint on r/webscraping and developer forums isn't about features. It's about credit math. Teams sign up expecting "credits = requests" and discover multipliers the moment they turn on stealth proxies, premium proxies, or JS rendering. Some providers even enable JS rendering by default, so every request costs 5-10x before you've changed a single setting.

If you're also evaluating non-scraping ways to source leads, compare options in our guide to B2B lead scrapers.

Here's what scraping 50,000 protected pages per month actually costs:

*ScrapingAnt's $49 plan includes 500,000 credits, but each request costs 10 credits by default because JavaScript rendering and standard proxies are enabled. That means 50,000 actual requests at this tier.

The pricing pages show big credit numbers. The docs reveal the multipliers. Most buyers don't read the docs until their credits evaporate in a day.

The Best ScrapingBee Alternatives

Prospeo - Skip Scraping for B2B Data

If you're scraping websites to extract business emails, phone numbers, or company data, you're solving the wrong problem. You don't need proxies, headless browsers, or credit multipliers. You need a data platform that already has the contacts.

Prospeo covers 300M+ professional profiles with 143M+ verified emails and 125M+ verified mobile numbers. The API runs a 92% match rate, emails verify at 98% accuracy, and everything refreshes on a 7-day cycle - compared to the 6-week industry average. For B2B prospecting, this replaces your entire scraping stack: no rotating proxies, no CAPTCHA solving, no parsing HTML that changes every two weeks.

The Chrome extension (40,000+ users) pulls verified contacts from any website or professional profile in one click. The API handles bulk enrichment at ~$0.01 per email. Free tier gives you 75 emails per month to test.

If you need to validate what you find, pair enrichment with an email ID validator (or a full email checker tool) before you send.

Use this if: Your scraping goal is business contact data. Skip this if: You need to scrape product prices, real estate listings, or non-contact web data.

Scrape.do - Best Overall Replacement

Scrape.do fixes ScrapingBee's billing model. You're only charged for successful API calls - timeouts, blocks, and errors don't consume credits. If you get a 200 OK but the content is garbage, their support will reclaim those credits too.

Pricing runs from free (1,000 credits) to $699/mo (10M credits), with concurrency scaling up to 200. The Pro plan at $99/mo adds JS rendering, geo-targeting, and browser interaction. Scrape.do reports a 98.19% success rate in their own testing - that's vendor-reported, so treat it as directional rather than gospel. But the success-based billing model means you're not paying for failures regardless.

In our experience, this is the default recommendation for anyone leaving ScrapingBee. Similar API surface, better billing model, no multiplier surprises. The only reason to look elsewhere is if you need the absolute highest success rates on heavily protected sites - Zyte wins there.

ZenRows - Good for Basic HTML, Pricey for Protected Sites

ZenRows markets itself with "no hidden costs" on its pricing page. Let's test that claim.

The Developer plan at $69.99/mo includes 250,000 basic results - or 10,000 protected results. JS rendering costs 5x, premium proxies cost 10x, and combining both costs 25x. Your CPM jumps from $0.28 to $7.00. That's a 25x price increase buried in the documentation.

The Proxyway benchmark isn't kind either: 70.39% success at 2 rps, cratering to 31.76% at 10 rps. At those success rates combined with the 25x multiplier, the real cost per successful protected-page scrape gets ugly fast.

Bottom line: Genuinely good for basic HTML pages where the multiplier stays at 1x. Avoid for JS-heavy, bot-protected targets.

Scraping Fish - Simplest Pricing

If your targets don't have aggressive bot protection, Scraping Fish at $0.002/request is probably all you need. Most teams overpay for CAPTCHA-solving capability they use on 5% of their targets. We've seen teams running $300/mo plans when a $100 Scraping Fish subscription would've covered their actual workload.

Apify - Full Scraping Platform

Apify isn't a scraping API - it's a platform. You get compute units, storage, scheduling, pre-built scrapers ("Actors"), and a marketplace. Starter runs $29/mo, Scale $199/mo, Business $999/mo, with compute at $0.20-0.30 per unit and residential proxies at $7-8/GB on top. Unused prepaid expires monthly, which stings if your scraping volume fluctuates.

This is overkill for simple URL scraping. But for teams that need the whole pipeline - scheduling, storage, pre-built scrapers for specific sites - nothing else in this list matches the breadth.

Zyte - Best for Protected Sites

Zyte posted the highest success rates in the Proxyway benchmark: 93.14% at 2 rps and 85.89% at 10 rps, with 15,422 results per hour. Nothing else in this list touches that throughput on protected sites.

Pricing ranges from $0.06 to $15.98 per 1,000 successful requests depending on tier and rendering requirements. PAYG is available up to $100/month with no minimum commitment. The pricing complexity rivals ZenRows, so budget carefully - but the success rates justify the homework. For heavily protected e-commerce or travel sites, Zyte is the tool that actually works at scale.

ScraperAPI - Hard to Recommend

ScraperAPI starts around $49/mo with a free tier of ~1,000 requests. It's been around for years, but the Proxyway benchmark puts it at 68.95% success at 2 rps and 62.2% at 10 rps - the lowest among tested providers. We can't recommend it over Scrape.do or Zyte at similar price points.

Benchmark Comparison

The Proxyway December 2025 benchmark tested 12 providers across 15 well-protected sites, scraping 6,000 pages each. Vendors weren't told the target sites in advance. Here are the numbers that matter:

This data comes from a Zyte blog post summarizing Proxyway's independent methodology. Zyte benefits from publishing numbers where they rank first, but the relative rankings align with what we've seen in our own testing.

Pricing Comparison

How to Choose

Direct ScrapingBee replacement: Scrape.do. Success-based billing, similar API surface, no multiplier surprises.

If you're building a broader outbound motion (not just scraping), map your stack against our sales prospecting platforms and lead generation software guides.

B2B contact data: Prospeo. If your end goal is emails and phone numbers, skip the scraping infrastructure entirely.

If you're enriching lists for outreach, use a dedicated workflow for data enrichment for cold email and keep an eye on B2B contact data decay.

Tightest budget: Scraping Fish. $0.002/request with no multipliers, but no CAPTCHA solving.

Highest success rate on protected sites: Zyte. 93% at 2 rps, 86% at 10 rps. The benchmark numbers speak for themselves.

Full scraping platform: Apify. Overkill for simple API scraping, perfect when you need scheduling, storage, and pre-built scrapers in one place.

Enterprise-scale needs: Bright Data or Oxylabs. Expect $500+/mo starting prices.

ScrapingBee Alternatives FAQ

Is ScrapingBee still safe to use after the Oxylabs acquisition?

Yes - it's fully operational with no price increases announced, and Google API credits actually got cheaper. Enterprise acquisitions historically lead to pricing and roadmap changes within 12-18 months, so evaluate alternatives now rather than scrambling later.

Why do scraping APIs charge more credits for JavaScript rendering?

JS rendering requires spinning up a headless browser instance per request, consuming 5-25x more server resources than a simple HTTP call. The issue isn't the surcharge itself - it's that most providers bury the multiplier in their docs while advertising inflated base credit counts on pricing pages.

Can I use a data platform instead of scraping for B2B contacts?

Yes. Prospeo's API delivers 143M+ verified emails at ~$0.01 each with a 98% accuracy rate - no proxies, headless browsers, or credit multipliers needed. For business contact data, a dedicated platform costs a fraction of what scraping infrastructure runs and returns cleaner results.

What's the cheapest scraping API with no credit multipliers?

Scraping Fish charges a flat $0.002 per successful request with no multipliers - JS rendering included at the same price. The tradeoff: no built-in CAPTCHA solving or anti-bot bypass, so it works best on sites without aggressive bot protection.

Which ScrapingBee alternative has the highest success rate?

Zyte leads with 93.14% success at 2 rps and 85.89% at 10 rps in the Proxyway December 2025 benchmark - the highest among all 12 tested providers. ScrapingBee itself scored 84.47% at 2 rps, making Zyte the clear upgrade for heavily protected targets.