Every comparison
| Tool | What it is for | Entry price | Comparison |
|---|---|---|---|
| Firecrawl | Markdown-first scraping; SarvCrawl's engine is a fork of it | 1,000 free credits; from $16/mo | SarvCrawl vs Firecrawl |
| Apify | A marketplace of ready-made scrapers for specific sites | Free with $5 usage; Starter $29/mo, Scale $199/mo, Business $999/mo | SarvCrawl vs Apify |
| Bright Data | A residential proxy network with scraping products on top | Usage-based; quote-driven at scale | SarvCrawl vs Bright Data |
| Oxylabs | Enterprise proxies and scraper APIs with a services relationship | Quote-driven | SarvCrawl vs Oxylabs |
| ScrapingBee | A simple, well-documented fetch-and-unblock endpoint | 1,000 free credits, no card; from $19.99/mo | SarvCrawl vs ScrapingBee |
| ScraperAPI | Proxy rotation and anti-bot bypass behind one endpoint | 7-day trial with 5,000 credits; from $49/mo for 100,000 credits | SarvCrawl vs ScraperAPI |
| Zyte | The cheapest per-request entry price, from the Scrapy lineage | From $0.13 per 1,000 simple requests, pay as you go | SarvCrawl vs Zyte |
| Crawl4AI | The default open-source, self-hosted crawler for LLMs | Free and open source | SarvCrawl vs Crawl4AI |
| Scrapy | The classic open-source Python crawling framework | Free and open source | SarvCrawl vs Scrapy |
| Spider | A fast Rust crawler, open source and as a cloud API | Pay as you go at $1/GB plus compute; unlimited plans from $40/mo | SarvCrawl vs Spider |
| Jina Reader | Single URL or PDF to markdown, priced per token | 10M free tokens; then from $0.05 per 1M tokens | SarvCrawl vs Jina Reader |
| Browserbase | Hosted headless browsers for AI agents | Free: 1 browser-hour; Developer $20/mo for 100 hours | SarvCrawl vs Browserbase |
How to choose
- The site fights back → Bright Data, Oxylabs, ScraperAPI or Zyte.
- You want markdown out of ordinary pages → Firecrawl, Jina Reader or ScrapingBee.
- Your agent needs a real browser for logins and flows → Browserbase.
- You need a scraper for one specific site → Apify.
- You want full control in code or raw crawl speed → Scrapy, Crawl4AI or Spider.
- You want to search the result without building retrieval → SarvCrawl.
The cost of switching scraping APIs is a day. The cost of switching what owns your chunks and embeddings is a re-ingest of everything.
Questions
What is the best web scraping API?
It depends on which half of the work you want to own. Unblocking specialists win on hostile sites, developer-first APIs win on clean markdown, and SarvCrawl wins when you want the content searchable without building retrieval.
Which web scraping tool is free?
Scrapy and Crawl4AI are free and open source but you run them. Spider's crawler is open source too. Among hosted APIs, SarvCrawl starts with 1 billion free tokens, Jina Reader with 10 million, and Firecrawl and ScrapingBee with 1,000 free credits each.
Are these comparisons biased?
SarvCrawl is ours, so assume some bias. Every page says where the other tool is the better choice, and vendor facts come from their public documentation and pricing.