Top 5 Best Web Scraping APIs in 2024
Quick summary: The top 3 of all of the tested web scraping APIs are:
I tested the 5 most popular web scraping APIs on 10 different key metrics to find the best web scraping API in 2024. See a quick summary in the table below. Later in the article, I go into details on each scraping API tested, the metrics used, and explain the rankings of each of the scraping services.
Web Scraping APIs Comparison Table
As summarized in the comparison table in the top of the article, my top 5 list for best web scraping APIs in 2024 is:
Personally I use ZenRows due to the competitive pricing, that it checked all of the boxes for me, and for the dedicated email-support (which is handy when questions come up). I would suggest you sign up for free trials on the different scraper APIs, and find the one you like the best.
Even though I numbered the list, I think most on this list is worth signing up for and trying out. I based the rankings on the metrics I think are most important for our use case. In the next section, I go through each of the services, and explain why I ranked them as I did. I also go over each of the metrics and explain why they are important when choosing a web scraping API.
How I compared the Scraping APIs
All modern web scraping APIs offer support for Python, Go, C#, Java, etc., so there is no need to specify those in the comparison table. Instead, I tried to quantify what I look for in a good web scraper API. The things I look for comes down to: price, JavaScript rendering, reviews from others (Capterra), proxy support, dedicated email support, and whether they have a free trial.
The data is summarized in the comparison table, but I also want to briefly describe each of the scraping APIs’ pros and cons:
- ZenRows basically scored perfect in all of the categories. They have a high Capterra rating, while also having many reviews, meaning that the score can be trusted. The price is low (actually most of them have the same price), and they offer all of the features that I was looking for.
- ScraperApi also performed very well in the analysis. Good ratings, price, etc. Putting them in second place is because I’ve dealt most with the first place and I use them myself, but from the test I did here they could just as well have been placed in first place. From what I read elsewhere about them, people seem quite happy with them.
- ScrapingBee also did very well in the test. They also have a high Capterra rating with many reviews. The price is also good, and they have most of the features I’m looking for. One thing that they fell short in was dedicated email support, which based on their pricing schema, seems to be a feature that you have to pay extra to access. This is one of the only things that puts them in the 3rd place compared to the two others.
- ScrapingAnt performed well on the most important things like JavaScript rendering and pricing. However, from what I could find, they don’t have a strong proxy residential support. This could just be because the information was difficult for me to find on their site, so I would still sign up for a trial to test if they have good support.
- BrightData ticks most of the boxes, but their price comes in rather high. Now they do actually have a cheaper subscription option, but I picked the subscription price that I think best matched the credit amount of the other services in this test, which is why they come in at a higher price point. They do seem to cater more towards enterprises, which could be why their pricing is a bit higher, and why I put them in the 5th place.
I do want to stress, though, that all of the services reviewed here are of high quality, and I chose 5 of the most popular services I could find. So all of them would be worth a try, and in the end, you have to find the one that matches your needs the best.
Motivation for the Study
For my price comparison site, Lenspricer, we scrape 200+ sites in 30 countries every day, so it’s quite important for us to have a good web scraping API to handle Cloudflare and proxies.
When trying to figure out which web scraping service we should use, I did a comprehensive study of the web scraping APIs available, and compared them on 10 different metrics. I thought this could be useful for other people trying to find a web scraping API to use.
In this article, I show my findings, and explain why I ended up choosing the web scraping service that I did. My research is summarized in the comparison table in the top.
What is a Web Scraping API?
If you’ve never heard about a web scraping API before, then it’s essentially an API that you call with a URL that you want to scrape, and the API then returns the contents of the page at the URL. The great thing is that the API is able to render JavaScript, bypass Cloudflare, use residential proxies etc., essentially making it possible to scrape websites that would otherwise be very difficult (or even impossible) to scrape using normal approaches like http clients or headless browsers.
As an example, if you wanted to scrape https://example.com, then calling a scraping API could look like:
https://scrapeapi.com?api_key=456?bypasscloud=true?get=https://example.comAnd it would return the HTML of https://example.com as its own response.
Why we use a web scraping API
We use web scraping APIs to scrape content from multiple sites in multiple countries, and to get around Cloudflare anti scraping measures. We first tried to build infrastructure for this ourselves, but ended up realizing that it was much easier to just pay for this. See my other post on how to bypass Cloudflare if you’re interested in reading more about this.
Conclusion
I hope you learned a bit about some of the different scraping APIs, and that my research can help you decide which service to choose.
If you have any questions or suggestions for this article, please feel free to reach out. Finally, I want to mention that some of the links in this article is partnered, but the content truly reflects my personal opinion, and we really do use the Zenrows in production for scraping 200+ sites in 30 countries every day at Lenspricer.com.
