The Best Web Scraping APIs for 2024
Web scraping APIs are easier to set up and maintain than custom scrapers but still require basic programming skills. In scraping, an API provider plays a crucial role – it sends a request to your target website on your behalf and returns the data. Meanwhile, you don’t have to worry about technical details like proxy management, headless browsers, or anti-detection measures.
If you’re looking for the best web scraping API providers, this page will help you to choose the perfect fit from a curated list.
The Best Web Scraping APIs – Quick Summary:
- Oxylabs – best performing web scraping API with a robust parser.
- Bright Data – fastest web scraping APIs with convenient proxy-like integration.
- Smartproxy – best value for quality web scraping APIs.
- Zyte – a promising scraping ecosystem & cheap prices for basic configuration scraping.
- Rayobyte – a customizable API without monthly subscriptions.
- ScraperAPI – cost-efficient API for scraping unprotected websites.
- Shifter – a feature-rich SERP API for parsing major search engines.
What Is a Web Scraping API?
There are several ways to go about web scraping, and one of them is to use an API (Application Programming Interface). It’s like a remote web scraper – you send a request to the API with the URL and other parameters like language, geolocation, or device type. Then, the API accesses the target website, downloads the data, and comes back to you with the results.
Let’s say you want to get product listings from Amazon. Building a scraper might take a lot of time and resources – you’ll have to write a script, choose and set up a proxy server, and rotate headers. A web scraping API takes care of these details for you. Some API services include parsing functionality, so you’ll get structured results in formats like JSON or CSV. However, specific features will vary depending on the service.
Why Pay for an API?
- It overcomes website protection mechanisms for you. The scraper handles IP blocks, CAPTCHA challenges, and other website protection mechanisms.
- You won’t need to maintain a scraper yourself. API services have an economic interest in keeping the infrastructure robust. This involves ensuring high uptime and keeping the scraper up to date with changes in bot protection and page layouts.
- Some scrapers return structured data. Many specialized web scraping APIs have the ability to parse data, so you don’t have to clean it up yourself. Usually, you can get the data in JSON, and some services offer CSV format.
- They perform very well. APIs are designed to handle large amounts of requests, making them well-suited for large-scale tasks. Furthermore, they’re capable of rendering JavaScript, which can be challenging for custom-built web scrapers.
- They offer high flexibility. With an API, you can keep your infrastructure lean and scale up or down as needed. Some providers don’t even require signing a contract, which makes their scrapers perfect for one-off or irregular projects.
How We Made the List
To choose the best web scraping APIs, we tested a bunch of companies that offer such services and presented the results in our first Web Scraping API Research. Most of these companies are well-known in the field, so you can be sure that you’ll get a quality service.
We compared their features, scraping performance, parsing capabilities, and cost-effectiveness. Our benchmarks targeted the most popular websites: Google, Amazon, and photo-focused social media platform.
| Oxylabs | Bright Data | Smartproxy | Zyte | Rayobyte | ScraperAPI | Shifter | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Success rate | 99.90% | 99.71% | 99.85% | – | 99.93% | 96.88% | 96.65% |
| Avg. response time | 6.15 | 6.03 | 6.04 | – | 10.03 | 13.24 | 10.08 |
| Oxylabs | Bright Data | Smartproxy | Zyte | Rayobyte | ScraperAPI | Shifter | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Success rate | 100% | 98.42% | 100% | 85.50% | 95.60% | 95.80% | 98.80% |
| Avg. response time | 4.69 | 4.31 | 4.66 | 4.51 | 20.70 | 9.69 | 5.35 |
GraphQL
| Oxylabs | Bright Data | Smartproxy | Zyte | Rayobyte | ScraperAPI* | Shifter | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Success rate | 100% | 73.40% | 100% | 98.40% | 80% | 24.80% | 54.80% |
| Avg. response time | 17.89 | 3.71 | 8.95 | 2.59 | 4.52 | 8.08 | 1.77 |
Headless
| Oxylabs | Bright Data | Smartproxy | Zyte | Rayobyte | ScraperAPI* | Shifter | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Success rate | 100% | 100% | 100% | 94.00% | 98.60% | 98.20% | 62.40% |
| Avg. response time | 28.88 | 4.10 | 29.09 | 28.14 | 23.05 | 16.05 | 4.42 |
The Best Web Scraping APIs
1. Oxylabs
Best performing web scraping APIs with a robust parser.
Oxylabs – a major name in the proxy industry – also offers a premium scraper. It provides a multipurpose web scraping API that can be used to scrape e-commerce, travel, entertainment, and other websites.
The tool uses a 100M residential proxy pool and offer country-level targeting in 195 locations worldwide. The API includes features like scheduling tasks, and crawling, which is rare to find.
It’s relatively customizable: you can select a location, device, and pass custom headers. The provider supports three integration methods: a proxy server and two API formats with optional asynchronous delivery, which allows you to get results in batches.
The scraper includes a parsing functionality for any website. From the list of providers we tested, Oxylabs is the only provider that can structure any e-commerce website with its adaptive AI-based parser.
Oxylabs displayed the best overall results in our tests. Its API reached a 100% success rate on Google and Amazon, and the response time beat most providers. However, it took time to return data from social media, especially when headless browsers were involved.
The pricing model is based on successful requests, and you can request a 7-day free trial. However, Oxylabs is more expensive compared to the competition.
- Locations: 195 with country-level targeting
- Price: starts at starts at $49 for 24,500 results ($2/1K)
- Pricing model: based on successful requests
- Data parsing: all type of websites
- Free trial: 7 days with 5,000 requests
Read the Oxylabs review for more information and performance tests.
2. Bright Data
Fastest web scraping APIs with convenient proxy-like integration.
Bright Data is a premium proxy provider focusing on data collection solutions. It offers two proxy-based APIs for data collection: Web Unlocker and SERP API. Web Unlocker is a general-purpose scraper that can target various websites, and SERP API is fit for scraping and parsing major search engines.
Bright Data’s scrapers come with a 72M residential proxy pool, country, and city targeting in any location you can think of. They include all the necessary features: JavaScript rendering, IP rotation, and anti-detection techniques. However, Web Unlocker is less customizable than some APIs because it integrates primarily as a proxy server.
The provider showed almost perfect results. Its Google API reached a success rate of over 98% and was one of the fastest to retrieve data. Bright Data’s Amazon scraper also lined up at the top. The only website that gave Web Unlocker a run for its money was the social media platform, specifically its GraphQL endpoint.
In terms of pricing, Bright Data has two options: subscription or pay as you go. The first one is cheaper, but you have to commit to at least $500/month. With pay as you go, the price starts at $3. The provider keeps the same price for all configurations and websites. However, it’s not very efficient for unprotected websites, since you’ll overpay.
- Locations: global with country & city targeting
- Price: starts at $500: Web Unlocker $2.55/1K results; SERP API $2.25/1K results. Pay as you go $3/1K results.
- Pricing model: successful requests
- Data parsing: major search engines
- Free trial: 7 days for companies
Read the Bright Data review for more information and performance tests.
3. Smartproxy
Best value for quality web scraping APIs.
Aside from having an excellent proxy infrastructure, Smartproxy offers three great-performing scraping APIs: Web Scraping API, eCommerce scraping API, and SERP Scraping API.
The scraper plans include Smartproxy’s residential proxy network and country-level targeting. You can choose from any of 195 locations, with coordinate-level targeting for the Google scraper. Smartproxy offers all the basic features for small to large-scale scraping: proxy rotation, anti-detection techniques, and JavaScript rendering. However, it lacks the ability to establish sessions or to handle cookies.
The APIs can parse two major websites – Amazon and Google – and fetch results in JSON format. The scrapers integrate as a proxy server or an API and return results via open connection.
During our tests, Smartproxy did well in all three website categories. It returned data with a 100% success rate and an average response time of 4.66s on Amazon, and 6.04s on Google. The provider beat the competition on photo-focused social media platform when targeting its GraphQL endpoint (100% success rate), which was a struggle for most providers.
Compared to other Oxylabs or Bright Data, Smartproxy costs less. However, it still might be too expensive for smaller scraping tasks.
- Locations: 195 with country-level targeting
- Pricing: starts from $30: SERP Scraping API $2.0/1K results; eCommerce Scraping API $2.0/1K results. Web Scraping API starts from $50 ($2/1K results).
- Pricing model: based on successful requests
- Data parsing: Google, Amazon
- Free trial: 3 days and 3,000 requests
Read the Smartproxy review for more information and performance tests.
4. Zyte
A promising scraping ecosystem & cheap prices for basic configuration scraping.
Zyte is a veteran in the web scraping industry. It offers an API with advanced proxy management features wrapped in.
The API is relatively versatile in terms of features: it comes with automatic IP rotation and retries. In addition, you can pass on cookies, fill in forms, and scrape JavaScript-dependent websites. The API supports 19 locations, but Zyte has a system that automatically tries to match the location with the provided URL.
Zyte is one of a few providers with a TypeScript API for scripting browser actions. Enterprise clients can write scripts to do everything from hovering on elements to entering individual symbols.
Since the API doesn’t offer an in-built parser, there’s an option to build a parser manually by creating extraction rules with CSS selectors.
Zyte’s API performed well on Google – it brought back 99.47% of raw HTML results and was faster than most competitors. However, there’s space for improvement with e-commerce websites – the success rate on Amazon was only 85.5%, but it was very fast with an average response time of 4.51s.
The provider did surprisingly well on social media when targeting the GraphQL endpoint – it reached an almost perfect success rate in about 2.59s. The headless test wasn’t that forgiving – Zyte’s speed dropped to 28.14s.
Zyte has custom pricing – it calculates the price per request for each website dynamically, based on its difficulty and the features you select. There’s a dashboard tool to help you estimate request cost. Overall, it’s a price-efficient service for basic configuration scraping. But if you need features like JavaScript rendering, the price rises sharply.
- Locations: 19
- Price: Custom
- Pricing model: pay as you go or monthly subscription with request price calculated dynamically
- Data parsing: No
- Free trial: $5 credit
5. Rayobyte
A customizable API without monthly subscriptions.
Rayobyte is known for its expansive datacenter proxy infrastructure. Its general-purpose scraping API – Scraping Robot – can target any website and has custom modules for parsing Amazon and Google Search pages. They come without additional charge but are relatively basic compared to the competition.
You can choose from 130 locations with country-level targeting. The scraping API is very customizable. You can pass parameters like geolocation, specify device type and selectors (both CSS and XPath), create sessions, pass cookies and data to websites. Like other scraping APIs, Scraping Robot is capable of JavaScript rendering, and you can additionally snap a screenshot or imitate browser actions.
Rayobyte’s Google API returned raw HTML with a perfect score and an average response time (6.53s). But it was over three seconds slower in JSON. Also, the speed dropped significantly on Amazon with an average response time 20.7s. Rayobyte was one of a few providers that did relatively okay with the GraphQL endpoint and reached an 80% success rate.
The pricing starts from $0.0018/request. There’s no monthly commitment – you simply buy the amount of requests you need and scrape until they’re depleted. You can also get 5,000 free scrapes/month.
- Locations: 130
- Price: $0.0018/request
- Pricing model: based on requests
- Data parsing: Amazon and Google
- Free trial: 5,000 free scrapes/month
Read the Rayobyte review for more information and performance tests.
6. ScraperAPI
Cost-efficient web scraping API for scraping unprotected websites.
ScraperAPI is a general-purpose scraper for various websites. It has great documentation for major programming languages: Python, NodeJS, PHP, Ruby, and Java.
The scraper lets you adjust request headers, establish sessions, and scrape using premium proxies if needed. It’s also capable of parsing Google Search, Shopping, and multiple Amazon properties by passing an additional parameter. However, Scraper API has relatively limited location coverage – only 12 countries.
The provider was behind the competition during our tests – it was twice slower than the average while targeting Google and failed around 5% of the requests. It showed nearly identical results on Amazon. Scraper API blocks certain social media platforms by default, so keep that in mind.
ScraperAPI supports four integration methods: a proxy server, SDK, and two API formats (open connection and asynchronous). Asynchronous delivery allows to get results in batches.
The tool’s pricing starts from $49/100,000 API credits. The system uses a different number of credits for specific website groups (like search engines and social media), premium proxies, or JavaScript rendering. The rate can differ up to 75 times based on the target. This makes the service very efficient for scraping simple websites and expensive for protected targets that require JavaScript.
There’s an option to use the service for free – the plan comes with 1,000 API credits per month and up to 5 concurrent connections. If you need to test the service at a larger scale, there’s a 7-day free trial with 5,000 free requests.
- Locations: 12 countries
- Pricing: starts from $49/100,000 API credits
- Pricing model: based on requests & optional features
- Data parsing: Amazon, Google
- Free trial: 7 days & 5,000 API credits, or a free plan with 1,000 API credits/month
7. Shifter
A feature-rich SERP API for parsing major search engines.
Shifter is another proxy provider that offers two scraping APIs: Web Scraping API and SERP API.
With paid plans, you can target 10 locations. The SERP API comes with an in-built parser for most Google properties, Yandex, and Bing.
Shifter allows you to customize requests by selecting a geolocation, device type, establishing sessions, sending cookies or text to the website. The general-purpose API also lets you emulate clicking and scrolling operations when rendering JavaScript, and you can build a custom parser with CSS selectors.
Shifters’ SERP API had the lowest success rate (96.65%) and an average response time – 10.08s – on Google. The Amazon scraper was close behind the best-performing providers – it was twice as fast (5.35s) compared to Google. The provider struggled with social media – it was fast (1.77s when targeting GraphQL endpoint), but the scraper errored out on every third request
Shifter’s prices start from $44.99. It’s a cheap option if you stick to easy targets. However, the rate goes up when you need optional features like a headless browser or premium proxies.
- Locations: 10
- Price: starts from $44.99
- Pricing model: based on requests & optional features
- Data parsing: major search engines & manual
- Free trial: 7 days for companies
