Top 10 Web Scraping APIs Reviewed and Compared (2023)

Justin Shin

Are you looking for the best web scraping API to reduce blocks as a developer when web scraping? Then come in now and discover the best 10 web scraping APIs in the mart that you can use for your effortless data collection experience.

Table Of Contents

Overview of Best Web Scraping APIs

10 Best Web Scraping APIs Compared 2023

API Name Pricing Free Trials Data Output Format Special Features
Crawlbase Scraper API Starts from $29 for 50K Credits 1K Free Credits HTML, JSON Specialized parsers for many websites
ScraperAPI Starts from $49 for 100K Credits 5K Free Credits HTML, JSON Effective anti-blocking system
ScrapingBee Starts from $49 for 100K Credits 5K Free Credits HTML, JSON Extraction support, advanced JavaScript execution
Apify Starts at $49 per month for 100 Actor compute units Starter plan comes with 10 Actor compute units JSON Huge collection of site-specific scraping APIs
WebScrapingAPI Starts from $49 for 100K Credits 5K Free Credits HTML, JSON Fastest scraping API
ScrapeStack Starts from $20 for 200K Credits Free plan available with limited features HTML, JSON Cheapest scraping API
Bright Data SERP API Starts from $3 per CPM Available HTML, JSON Best for scraping search engines
Smartproxy scraping API Starts from $50 for 25K requests 3K Free Credits HTML, JSON Best for e-Commerce and Social Media Scraping
Shifter Web Scraping API Starts from $45 for 100K Credits Available HTML, JSON Good for Enterprise Usage
Zyte AutoExtract API Starts from $60 for 100K Requests Free Trial Available HTML, JSON Best for Parsing Structured Data from Generic Pages

Web scraping is always simplified by most tutorials. And for most, you are told all you need are rotating proxies and you are good to go. The reality on the ground is very different. In fact, proxies alone will not solve your problem. Popular websites that are the target of data scraping have devised other means of identifying scrapers that just changing your IP address randomly will not help you.

This is where web scraping APIs come in. Web scraping API will help you handle not only proxies but captchas and other forms of anti-bot systems such as Cloudflare. Most web scraping APIs also handle browsers for Javascript rendering. With a web scraping API, all you need to scrape a web page is to send a simple web request and the web scraping API will return either the structured data of interest or HTML as a response.

This ensures you focus on data usage rather than how to collect data. And for most, you only get to pay for successful requests. I have personally tested 20 web scraping APIs to ascertain their performance and below are the best in the market so far.

1. Crawlbase Scraper API — Best Web Scraping API in the Market

Formerly known as Proxycrawl, Crawlbase is arguably the best scraping API. This scraping platform does not just handle proxies, captchas, and browsers, it also comes with specialized parsers for many websites. These websites include Google, Bing, Amazon, eBay, Walmart, AliExpress, Airbnb, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Quora, and Immobilienscout24.

For the aforementioned websites, it automatically parses important data into structured JSON. For other websites, you can use the crawling API to get raw HTML. Aside from the REST API endpoint, it also provides client libraries and SDKs for popular programming languages Python, PHP, Java, Ruby, NodeJS, and C#. There’s also support for Scrapy. The Crawlbase proxy infrastructure powers this Scraper API.

Crawlbase Scraper API is reliable, fast, and scales well as it has the likes of Shopify, Yahoo, Oracle, and Expedia on its customer list. This scraping API is quite affordable and remains our overall best scraping API. Aside from its Web scraping API, it does have a standalone proxy service too.

2. ScraperAPI — Most Effective Anti-blocking API for Scraping

This article was not written without testing. I tested about 20 scraping APIs against known difficult-to-scrape websites and Scraper API comes best against evading block. They are perfect against websites protected with strong anti-bot systems such as Cloudflare, PerimeterX, Akamai, and the several captcha types on the Internet.

However, from the test carried out, I discover ScraperAPI does not support scraping Facebook and Instagram. I recommend you use Crawlbase for these 2 websites. ScraperAPI does allow you to choose between using datacenter, residential, and mobile proxies depending on your target website.

While it has got the most effective anti-blocking systems against anti-scraping systems, it does not do anything to help you with parsing— except for GoogleSearch, Amazon, and Google Shopping. It returns raw HTML for you to extract the required data yourself. For REST API that helps with extraction, I recommend Crawlbase Scraper API for the specific websites supported by Crawlbase or ScrapingBee for other websites.

3. ScrapingBee — Best Scraping API with Extraction Support

ScrapingBee is a good alternative to ScraperAPI only that from the performance test I carried out, ScraperAPI was faster and better at evading blocks. This does not mean ScrapingBee does not have a strong anti-blocking system — ScraperAPI is just better but for most websites, this wouldn’t matter. What it lacks in the area of speed, it has in the area of parsing.

Turns out ScrapingBee comes with one of the best parsing support. With its extraction rule, you can extract data using CSS selectors. Aside from parsing, one area ScrapingBee shines compared to Crawlbase and ScraperAPI is in JavaScript execution.

While others support it, ScrapingBee has advanced support including support for clicking buttons and waiting for certain elements to load. ScrapingBee also has the best geo-targeting support with IPs from all countries as opposed to ScraperAPI and Crawlbase with support for a little over 20 countries.

4. Apify — Huge Collection of Site-Specific Scraping APIs

Apify is a web scraping and automation platform for developers. This platform makes it easy for you to build and host web scrapers using their SDKs. You can also make use of the already-made scrapers and bots on the platform. These are known as actors. On this platform, you can find scraping API for most of the popular sites ranging from e-commerce platforms like Amazon to social media like Facebook, Booking sites like booking.com, and even SEO like Google.

There are over 100 actors on the platform you can use. Apify actors are fundamentally different from the other scraping APIs mentioned on the list. This is because they are not accessed via URLs as you would access the others above — you will have to install the API library. This is available for both NodeJS and Python developers.

One thing I like about Apify is that they all scrape structured data, thereby saving you the stress of parsing as you will have to experience if using ScraperAPI or Scrapestack. The pricing for this platform is also cheap but I recommend you make use of your own proxies.

5. WebScrapingAPI — Fastest Scraping API

WebScrapingAPI is another good scraping API that passes our performance test. And this works well for projects that require superfast speed. From the API latency speed, we got a response from some websites for less than a second which is quite fast. And it is not just fast, it also keeps blocks to the minimum via a good number of different anti-blocking methods.

However, the anti-blocking system is still not on the same level of effectiveness as ScraperAPI. This service also has one of the best parsing support as it has got support for extraction using CSS selectors. The WebScrapingAPI also does have client library support for NodeJS and Python. In terms of geolocation support, it is in the same class as ScraperAPI and Crawlbase only that they have better anti-blocking systems.

6. ScrapeStack — Cheapest Scraping API

Scrapestack is the cheapest scraping API on our list. Unlike the others that you need at least $30 to get started, for Scrapestack you will get 200K API credits for just $19. No doubt, you shouldn’t expect the level of performance you get from the other REST APIs for web scraping from this service. I recommend it for scraping sites that are not too difficult to scrape. It actually failed some of my scraping tests against known websites that are extremely difficult to scrape.

But for most websites including popular websites, it works. It is also important you know that this web scraping API is available only as a REST API endpoint. There is no SDK as offered by some of the other scraping APIs above. Generally, I will recommend ScrapeStack to programmers looking for a modest web scraping API without too many advanced features. In terms of performance, I find out that Scrapestack is actually a fast scraping API especially when Javascript rendering is turned off.

7. Bright Data SERP API — Best for Scraping Search Engines

Bright Data formerly known as the Laminate Networks started as a proxy service before adding data collection to it. Currently, it is a leader in the field of both data scraping and proxy services. In this article, Bright Data was included for its SERP API. The Bright Data’s SERP API is the best when it comes to scraping data from search engines. It does have support for many search engines including Google, Bing, Yandex, DuckDuckGo, Baidu, Naver, and Yahoo. This tool is highly customizable allowing you to set advanced features via parameters.

The data scraped is available to you as structured data which means, you will not have to deal with raw HTML documents. It also means you will not have to worry about the frequency of change of the SERP design layouts that normally break scrapers. As a new user, there is a free trial available to you. It is important you know that you only pay for successful requests.

8. Smartproxy — Best for e-Commerce and Social Media Scraping

Of all the proxy services that venture into the business of offering scraping API, Smartproxy is the first to start. And currently, it provides the best collection of scraping APIs offering scraping APIs for social media, Ecommerce, SERP API, and even a general web scraping API for downloading raw HTML documents. With this, you can scrape both synchronously and asynchronously with no hassle. As of the time I tested the Smartproxy Scraping APIs, 99 percent of my requests were successful and fast.

This is expected since it already has a robust residential proxy service that works and they only make money if requests are successful.  Currently, the social media scraping API works only for Instagram and TikTok. The E-commerce API only works for the popular Amazon product scraping. The pricing for this scraping API is quite affordable and as a new user, there is a good free trial package available for you to try out the service.

9. Shifter Web Scraping API — Good for Enterprise Usage

Shifter is another proxy service with support for a web scraping API. This web scraping API at first will look to you as a regular web scraping API since it does not have support for parsing data — it only downloads the raw HTML for you. However, I had a change of mind after testing it out. It is one of the web scraping APIs that do not get slow with an increase in the number of concurrent requests.

This is because of how nicely it scales even for enterprise usage. One thing you will come to like about this web scraping API is how resilient and robust it is. It automatically tries unsuccessful requests using different IPs and anti-bot evasion techniques until it succeeds. This provider makes use of datacenter, mobile, and residential IPs for its operations. Because of the location support its proxy infrastructure offer, you can use it to scrape localized data as it has IPs from most countries of the world.

10. Zyte AutoExtract API — Best for Parsing Structured Data from Generic Pages

Formerly known as Scrapinghub, Zyte is a leading and one of the foremost web scraping companies in the market. Automatic Extraction API is one of the services it offers which happens to be a web scraping API. This API is quite different from what is obtainable from the other APIs mentioned above. For Zyte, it is not meant for a specific site. It does have generic scrapers for scraping structured data.

Currently, the extraction API for product details, news and articles, real estate data, social media, SERPs data, and job posting data. If you feed it a page that has any of these data points, it spits out a response with the structured data. I have made use of this and though you can have some level of error, in most of the requests sent, the data came out as expected.

FAQs

Q. What is a Web Scraping API?

Web scraping APIs are data extraction tools that scrape data from websites via an API call. These tools have been developed to evade all kinds of blocks. And for this reason, most web scraping APIs make use of proxies, and captcha solvers and incorporate other anti-bot evasion systems to make sure requests for data sent through them are successful.

Because websites are becoming more dynamic and driven by Javascript, most of these APIs also come with headless browsers for Javascript rendering. Other advanced features you can get from web scraping APIs include the provision of an SDK, localized data scraping, and structured data parsing, among others.

Q. Why Use Web Scraping APIs?

Web scraping APIs are a recent invention. But why should one use them when he can just make use of a web scraper? Turns out web scraping has become difficult in recent times. Website no longer uses only IP tracking for blocking bots. They have become sophisticated. Except you are highly skilled, scraping popular sites at a large scale will frustrate you even with proxies and captcha solvers.

Web scraping APIs have been developed to abstract away, all of the difficulties web scraping is known for including blocking and managing scrapers. With Web scraping, you only have to focus on the data rather than how to collect it in the first place.

Q. Are there Free Web Scraping APIs?

They're currently no free web scraping APIs out there that you can use for any reasonable usage. Web scrapers are difficult and cost a lot to develop and even more to manage. This coupled with the fact that proxies are required makes it difficult for you to get free web scraping APIs.

All you can get are free-tiered web scraping APIs that are highly limited enough to make them useless. On the other hand,  most of the web scraping APIs mentioned above do have free trial plans for new users, enough to adequately test out their service before making a purchase. And they have become a lot cheaper for the average user out there.

Conclusion

No doubt, web scraping APIs have made web scraping easier. But this is only true if you choose the right web scraping APIs as some of them can underperform and ruin your projects. To avoid getting into the hands of such bad APIs, I have compiled the list above based on my experience with the web scraping APIs currently in the market. If you go through all of the above, you will notice even though they are all web scraping APIs, each of the APIs have its unique selling and the reason it was added to the list. You should use that as a guide to choose the best for your task.

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