Tools · SPBoucher
Menu

Scrapfly

by Scrapfly · API service

Web scraping API with anti-bot bypass, JavaScript rendering, cloud browsers, screenshots, AI extraction and a crawler, billed in credits per request

ProprietaryFreemiumPaidUsage-basedEnterpriseCloud
Visit official site Compare

Link verified Nov 2, 2026

Overview

Scrapfly is a hosted web-scraping API whose core product fetches a URL on the customer's behalf while handling the parts that make scraping fragile: anti-bot bypass, JavaScript rendering in managed browsers, proxy selection including residential and geo-targeted pools, and session persistence. Companion APIs provide remote cloud browsers with full Chrome DevTools Protocol access, full-page or element screenshots, LLM-assisted structured extraction from HTML or documents, a beta crawler with recursive link discovery, and an MCP server so agents can fetch live pages. A Proxy Saver product reduces bandwidth on proxy traffic.

SDKs are published for Python, TypeScript, Go and Rust, with a Scrapy integration and an OpenAPI specification, and the company runs a web-scraping education site. Billing is credit-based: a one-time free allotment, monthly plans with increasing credit allowances and concurrency, pay-as-you-go overflow on higher plans and custom enterprise contracts. Credit cost per request rises with options such as rendering, anti-bot bypass and residential proxies.

It is proprietary and fully hosted; there is no self-hosted version, and success on heavily protected sites is not guaranteed.

Capabilities

  • Scraping API with anti-bot bypass and JavaScript rendering
  • Residential, datacenter and geo-targeted proxies
  • Cloud browsers with CDP access
  • Screenshot API
  • LLM-based structured extraction
  • Crawler API (beta) and MCP server

Typical workflows

  1. Fetch protected pages from a Python or Scrapy project
  2. Capture screenshots of a URL list
  3. Extract product fields from HTML with a schema

Strengths

  • Handles rendering, proxies and blocking in one call
  • SDKs in several languages and an OpenAPI spec
  • Transparent credit estimator

Limitations

  • Proprietary hosted service only
  • Costs rise with rendering and residential proxies
  • No guarantee against sophisticated anti-bot systems

Prerequisites

  • API key

Who it is for

  • Developers scraping protected sites
  • Data teams outsourcing proxy and browser management

Alternatives & comparison

  • Apify

    Cloud platform and marketplace for running web-scraping and automation programs (Actors), with storages, proxies, scheduling, an API and an MCP server for agents

    MixedFreemium
  • Bright Data

    Web data platform combining residential, datacenter and ISP proxy networks with unblocking, SERP and scraper APIs, remote browsers, ready-made datasets and an MCP server

    ProprietaryFreemium
  • Firecrawl

    Web data API that scrapes, crawls, maps and searches websites and returns clean Markdown or structured JSON for LLM pipelines, with an AGPL-licensed self-hostable core

    MixedFreemium
  • Zyte

    Web-data company behind Scrapy offering Zyte API for ban-resistant fetching, browser rendering and automatic extraction, plus Scrapy Cloud for hosting spiders

    ProprietaryUsage-based
Compare Scrapfly with its alternatives →

Sources & verification

Primary sources consulted for this record. Claims are tied to the fields each source supports; the automated link checker re-verifies every URL on a schedule.

  • Official documentation
    Scrapfly documentation

    https://scrapfly.io/docs

    Supports: capabilities, languages, integrations

    checked Nov 1, 2026
  • Official site
    Scrapfly

    https://scrapfly.io/

    Supports: name, summary

    checked Nov 1, 2026
  • Pricing page
    Scrapfly pricing

    https://scrapfly.io/pricing

    Supports: pricing_model

    checked Nov 1, 2026
Confidence
High
Reviewed
Nov 1, 2026
Links
Verified · Nov 2, 2026

Spotted an error?

Broken link, outdated license, wrong category, or a tool that no longer exists? Tell us; reports are reviewed by the editor.

Playwright

Microsoft · Testing & QA

In-depth entry

Microsoft's browser automation and end-to-end testing framework driving Chromium, Firefox and WebKit from one API in TypeScript, Python, Java and .NET

Apache-2.0Open sourceFreeLocalSelf-hostedNov 2, 2026

Scrapy

Scrapy developers (maintained with Zyte) · Data collection & crawling

In-depth entry

Mature open-source Python framework for writing crawlers (spiders) that fetch pages asynchronously, extract structured items and export them through pipelines

BSD-3-ClauseOpen sourceFreeLocalSelf-hostedNov 2, 2026

Tavily

Tavily (Alpha AI Technologies Inc.) · Search & web-data APIs

In-depth entry

Web search, extraction, crawling and research API designed for LLM agents, returning concise source content with SDKs, framework integrations and a hosted MCP server

ProprietaryFreemiumUsage-basedNov 2, 2026

Puppeteer

Google (Chrome DevTools team) · Data collection & crawling

In-depth entry

Node.js library from the Chrome team for controlling Chrome and Firefox over the DevTools Protocol or WebDriver BiDi, used for scraping, screenshots, PDFs and testing

Apache-2.0Open sourceFreeLocalSelf-hostedNov 2, 2026

Browsertrix

Webrecorder · Web archiving

Webrecorder's browser-based web archiving system, available hosted or self-hosted, that crawls sites with real browsers into signed WACZ files replayable with ReplayWeb.page

AGPL-3.0-onlyPaidEnterpriseSelf-hostedNov 2, 2026

Crawlee

Apify Technologies s.r.o. · Data collection & crawling

Open-source crawling and scraping library for Node.js/TypeScript and Python that unifies HTTP and headless-browser crawlers with queues, proxies, fingerprints and storage

Apache-2.0Open sourceFreeLocalSelf-hostedNov 2, 2026