The short version
- Choose Scrapfly if your targets fight back and you need residential proxies, an unblocker, geo-targeting and a remote browser under one bill.
- Choose SarvCrawl if you are crawling public sites and documents and want them parsed, chunked, embedded and searchable without building retrieval.
SarvCrawl and Scrapfly, side by side
| SarvCrawl | Scrapfly | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Crawl-to-knowledge-base API | Web scraping API with extraction, screenshot, crawler and cloud browser products |
| Best for | Content you want to search — web pages and documents together | Scraping protected sites, with every tool on one credit pool |
| Output | Markdown, HTML, JSON, links, images | Raw or clean HTML, markdown, text, JSON; LLM or template extraction |
| JavaScript rendering | Yes, where a page needs it | Yes (render_js, +5 credits), plus a cloud browser |
| Documents | PDF, Office, EPUB, images and audio; OCR for scans | Fetches PDFs and other binaries as base64; parsing is yours |
| Chunking, embeddings, search | Built in (search on paid plans) | Not offered |
| Anti-bot and proxies | Not the focus | Core feature: the Unblocker, datacenter and residential proxies, geo-targeting |
| Pricing | 1 billion free tokens, no card; paid plans | 1,000 free credits, no card; Discovery $30/mo for 200,000 credits |
| Hosting and licence | Hosted, or self-host: Apache-2.0 with an AGPL-3.0 engine | Hosted, proprietary; SDKs are open source |
| Integrations | REST, Node, Python, CLI, n8n, 21 MCP tools | Python and TypeScript SDKs, MCP server, LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, n8n, Zapier, Make |
Where they really differ
Scrapfly puts a set of tools on one credit pool: a scraping API with its Unblocker and proxy pools, an extraction API, a screenshot API, a crawler and a cloud browser you drive with Playwright or Puppeteer. When the hard part is getting a protected site to answer, that breadth is useful, and SarvCrawl does not compete with it.
Credits multiply with options. A request is 1 credit on datacenter proxies and 25 on residential, JavaScript rendering adds 5, and binary files such as PDFs are billed for bandwidth, so a large PDF can cost over a hundred credits and still arrives as base64 for you to parse.
Its crawler returns pages, including markdown, as WARC or HAR archives. SarvCrawl ends somewhere else: pages and linked documents parsed into markdown, OCR for scans, then chunked, embedded and searchable in a knowledge base.
Using both
Fetch the protected targets through Scrapfly, crawl documentation, help centres and public reference content with SarvCrawl, and upload anything Scrapfly collected as files so it sits in the same searchable knowledge base.
SarvCrawl vs Scrapfly: questions
Is SarvCrawl a Scrapfly alternative?
For public content you want searchable, yes. For sites that block scrapers, Scrapfly's Unblocker and residential proxies are the better fit.
How does Scrapfly pricing work?
Plans include a monthly pool of credits, from $30 for 200,000. Each request costs credits depending on proxy type, rendering and response size.
Does Scrapfly parse PDFs?
It fetches them and returns the file as base64. SarvCrawl parses PDF, Office, EPUB, image and audio files into markdown, with OCR for scans.
Does Scrapfly do chunking or search?
No. It returns pages and extracted data. SarvCrawl chunks, embeds and indexes content, with search on paid plans.