Best Web Scraping Services Compared (2026)

The web scraping market has reached $1.03 billion in 2025 and continues growing at 14.2% annually. With dozens of services competing for your business, choosing the right provider requires understanding what each actually delivers and where they fall short.

This guide cuts through marketing claims to compare the leading web scraping services head-to-head. We evaluate proxy-based providers, API platforms, managed scraping services, and the emerging AI + Human hybrid model that is changing what businesses should expect from data extraction.

Whether you need competitor price monitoring, lead generation, market research, or AI training datasets, the right choice depends on your technical resources, data quality requirements, and budget. Let us break down what matters.

How We Evaluated Web Scraping Services

Our comparison focuses on five critical factors that determine real-world success with web scraping:

Success Rate: Can the service actually extract data from your target sites? Anti-bot measures have become increasingly sophisticated, and many providers struggle with protected sites like LinkedIn, Amazon, and Google. We prioritize services with documented success rates above 95%.

Data Quality: Raw extraction is only half the job. Clean, structured, validated data saves downstream processing time. Services that deliver messy or incomplete data create hidden costs in cleaning and verification.

Ease of Use: Technical complexity varies dramatically. Some services require significant development resources while others offer no-code interfaces. We assess the learning curve and ongoing maintenance burden.

Pricing Transparency: Web scraping pricing can be confusing, with charges per request, per GB, per successful extraction, or monthly subscription. We favor transparent pricing that allows accurate cost forecasting.

Support Quality: When scrapers break or anti-bot measures change, responsive support matters. Enterprise clients especially need dedicated account management rather than community forums.

Proxy-Based Scraping Providers

Bright Data

Bright Data operates one of the largest proxy networks globally with over 150 million IP addresses. The company started as a proxy provider and expanded into web scraping APIs and pre-built scrapers. Their Web Unlocker technology handles sophisticated anti-bot measures including CAPTCHAs and JavaScript challenges.

Strengths include exceptional geographic coverage, powerful unblocker capabilities for difficult sites, and a no-code Scraping Browser for non-technical users. The platform offers 120+ pre-built scrapers for common sites like Amazon, Google, and social platforms.

Limitations center on complexity and cost. The extensive feature set creates a steep learning curve, and pricing can escalate quickly for large-scale projects. Entry plans start at $499 per month for the Web Scraper IDE, though pay-as-you-go options exist for smaller needs.

Best for: Enterprises with technical teams who need access to the most protected websites and can invest in learning the platform.

Oxylabs

Oxylabs matches Bright Data's scale with over 100 million IP addresses across 195 countries. Testing shows 99.95% success rates with 0.6-second response times, marginally outperforming Bright Data on raw proxy reliability. Their Web Scraper API and OxyCopilot AI assistant simplify common extraction tasks.

The company focuses primarily on proxy infrastructure, which means their scraping APIs benefit from deeply integrated proxy management. Users do not need to configure proxies separately because the infrastructure is designed for scraping from the ground up.

Pricing starts at $49 per month for 17,500 results, scaling based on usage. Enterprise plans require contacting sales, adding friction for smaller projects. Like Bright Data, the pay-per-GB model makes cost forecasting difficult since page sizes vary dramatically.

Best for: Large-scale enterprise projects with high anti-scraping challenges where proxy reliability is the primary concern.

API-Based Scraping Platforms

Apify

Apify operates as a cloud platform with a marketplace model, offering over 4,000 pre-built scrapers called Actors for virtually any website. The platform lets developers build, run, and scale custom scrapers while non-technical users can deploy community-built solutions.

The marketplace approach provides broad coverage but introduces quality variability. Some Actors are officially maintained while others come from community contributors with inconsistent update schedules. Users must evaluate individual Actors before trusting them in production.

Pricing starts with a free tier offering $5 in credits, with paid plans from $49 per month. Proxy usage consumes additional credits, adding complexity to cost calculations. Support relies primarily on Discord-based community help rather than dedicated account managers.

Best for: Developers comfortable with JavaScript who need access to a wide variety of pre-built scrapers and can evaluate quality independently.

ScraperAPI

ScraperAPI focuses on simplicity with a single API endpoint that handles proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs automatically. Developers send a URL and receive rendered HTML, making integration straightforward for teams with basic programming skills.

The service supports multiple programming languages and offers affordable entry-level pricing. However, testing reveals lower success rates on heavily protected sites compared to premium providers. The service works well for unprotected or lightly protected targets but struggles with sophisticated anti-bot systems.

Pricing is transparent and accessible, starting at $29 per month for 100,000 API credits. This makes ScraperAPI attractive for smaller projects or teams testing web scraping for the first time.

Best for: Small to medium projects targeting moderately protected websites where budget is a primary constraint.

Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub)

Zyte offers the open-source Scrapy framework alongside commercial API products. Their AI-powered extraction can automatically identify and structure data from product pages and other common formats, reducing manual configuration.

The Zyte API combines proxy management, browser automation, and intelligent parsing in a single product. For teams already using Scrapy, the integration path is natural. The platform emphasizes compliance monitoring to help users stay within legal guidelines.

Testing showed 92.52% success rates with notably slower response times compared to top-tier providers. For use cases where speed matters less than cost, Zyte offers competitive value. Enterprise support includes dedicated account managers.

Best for: Teams already invested in the Scrapy ecosystem or those prioritizing AI-assisted data structuring over raw speed.

Web Scraping Services Comparison Table

The Problem with Pure Automation

Every service listed above shares a fundamental limitation: they deliver raw, unverified data that requires significant downstream processing. Even with 99% success rates, the extracted data contains errors, inconsistencies, and quality issues that pure automation cannot catch.

Consider what happens after extraction. Phone numbers appear in inconsistent formats. Business hours are parsed incorrectly from complex schedules. Reviews contain encoding errors. Addresses are incomplete. Company names include legal suffixes inconsistently. These issues compound when building databases or feeding data into business processes.

Traditional web scraping treats extraction as the finish line. In reality, extraction is only the beginning. The gap between raw scraped data and usable business intelligence represents hidden costs that most providers ignore.

This is where the scraping industry has stalled. Proxy networks have matured. Anti-bot evasion has improved. But data quality remains an afterthought, left for customers to solve with their own resources.

The Modern Approach: AI + Human Hybrid Services

A new category of web scraping service has emerged that fundamentally rethinks the delivery model. Rather than providing raw data and leaving quality to the customer, AI + Human hybrid services deliver verified, clean, ready-to-use data.

Tendem represents this approach. The service combines AI-powered automation for scale with human expert validation for quality. AI handles bulk extraction, navigating anti-bot measures, managing proxies, and parsing structured data. Human co-pilots then validate results, catch edge cases, correct errors, and ensure data meets quality standards before delivery.

This hybrid model addresses the core weakness of traditional scraping services. Instead of delivering 10,000 records with unknown accuracy, Tendem delivers 10,000 records that have been verified by human experts. The difference matters when data feeds into sales outreach, market analysis, or business decisions.

Why Human Validation Matters

Automated scrapers make predictable mistakes. They misparse edge cases. They fail silently on unusual page layouts. They extract outdated information from cached sources. They cannot distinguish between a business that is temporarily closed and permanently closed.

Human experts catch these issues. They verify that phone numbers actually connect. They confirm business addresses exist. They validate that extracted data matches reality. This verification layer transforms raw scraped data into actionable business intelligence.

The AI + Human approach also handles complexity that pure automation avoids. Login-required content, multi-step data collection, and subjective data interpretation all benefit from human judgment. Rather than building increasingly complex automation to handle edge cases, human co-pilots resolve them efficiently.

Comparing Approaches

Choosing the Right Service for Your Needs

Choose Traditional Automation When:

You have strong technical resources to build and maintain data pipelines. Your use case tolerates some data quality issues. Speed matters more than accuracy. You are scraping large volumes where manual verification is impractical. You have existing data cleaning infrastructure.

Choose AI + Human Hybrid When:

Data quality directly impacts business outcomes. You lack technical resources for data cleaning. You need verified contact information for sales outreach. Accuracy matters more than raw speed. You want to skip the operational burden of managing scraping infrastructure. Your team should focus on using data, not cleaning it.

Questions to Ask Any Provider

What is your success rate on my specific target sites? How do you handle failed extractions? What data validation or cleaning is included? How is pricing calculated, and what hidden costs exist? What support is available when issues arise? Can you provide sample data before committing?

The Future of Web Scraping Services

The web scraping industry is shifting from pure extraction toward data quality and usability. As anti-bot measures become more sophisticated and AI capabilities expand, the differentiation between providers increasingly comes from what happens after extraction.

Expect continued consolidation among proxy providers as the technology matures. The real innovation is happening at the quality layer, where AI + Human hybrid models demonstrate that verified data delivers more value than raw volume.

For businesses evaluating web scraping services, the question is no longer just whether data can be extracted. The question is whether the extracted data is actually usable without significant additional investment in cleaning and verification.

Key Takeaways

Traditional web scraping services have matured around proxy infrastructure and anti-bot evasion. Bright Data and Oxylabs lead for protected sites and enterprise scale. Apify offers marketplace variety for developers. ScraperAPI and Zyte provide accessible entry points.

All traditional services share a common limitation: they deliver raw data that requires customer-side cleaning and verification. This creates hidden costs and delays time to value.

AI + Human hybrid services like Tendem represent a fundamental shift toward verified, ready-to-use data. By combining AI automation with human expert validation, these services eliminate the gap between raw extraction and business intelligence.

The right choice depends on your resources, quality requirements, and how you value your team's time. For businesses where data quality matters, the hybrid approach delivers superior outcomes. See Tendem pricing at tendem.ai/pricing.

Related Resources

Learn more about specific scraping use cases and approaches:

• How to Scrape Google Maps: Business Listings & Reviews

• Contact Scraping Services: Finding Emails & Phone Numbers at Scale

• Hiring a Web Scraping Service vs Building In-House