SCRAPFLY ALTERNATIVE

The ScrapFly alternative with a simpler credit model

ScrapFly earns its reputation on anti-bot bypass and excellent docs. WebScraping.AI offers the same core job — rendered pages through datacenter, residential, or stealth proxies plus AI extraction — with flatter, cheaper credit math and 7 official SDKs.

2,000 free API credits · No credit card required

WebScraping.AI vs ScrapFly at a glance

An honest, side-by-side comparison. Verify the numbers — this is a market where you should.

WebScraping.AI ScrapFly
Entry plan $29/mo · 250,000 credits $30/mo · 200,000 credits (Discovery)
Plain request (datacenter) 1 credit 1 credit
JS (Chromium) rendering 5 credits +5 credits
Residential proxies 10 credits (25 with JS) 25 credits (30 with JS)
Stealth / anti-bot tier 50 credits, fixed ASP: dynamic credit cost per request
Billing on failures Free — always, no threshold Free under "Scrape Failed Protection" (reverts to billed if >30% of traffic fails in an hour)
Natural-language Q&amp;A (<code>/ai/question</code>) Yes — (extraction via prompt/schema)
AI field extraction Yes (/ai/fields) Yes (Extraction API, billed as add-on)
LLM-ready text Yes (/text) Yes (markdown format)
Official SDKs 7 (Python, JS, PHP, Ruby, Go, Java, C#) Python & TypeScript
First-party MCP server Yes Yes
Screenshot API Yes

Pricing and credit costs last checked July 2026. Sources: ScrapFly pricing · WebScraping.AI pricing.

What ScrapFly does well

No tool is right for everyone. ScrapFly is a capable product, and these are the areas where it genuinely shines — worth weighing before you switch.

Anti-Scraping Protection (ASP) bypass — ScrapFly's flagship feature and a genuine benchmark for the hardest anti-bot targets.
Excellent documentation and tooling — docs, a web debugger/playground, and monitoring dashboards developers consistently praise.
Broad product surface — screenshot API, extraction API with LLM prompts and schemas, and a first-party MCP server.
Serious observability — per-request logs, webhooks, and throttling controls built into the platform.

Why developers look for a ScrapFly alternative

The most common reasons teams evaluate a switch.

The $30 plan doesn't stay $30

Residential proxies cost 25 credits and JS adds 5 more on ScrapFly, so a protected, JS-rendered scrape burns 30 credits — the 200k-credit Discovery plan collapses to ~6,600 such requests, and users report bills quietly tripling. WebScraping.AI's same configuration costs 25 credits on a 250k-credit $29 plan, and residential without JS is 10 credits, not 25.

ASP cost is dynamic

ScrapFly's anti-bot bypass consumes a variable number of credits depending on what the target requires, which makes hard-site budgets unpredictable. WebScraping.AI's stealth tier is a flat 50 credits per request — expensive targets are at least predictably expensive.

Failed-request protection has fine print

ScrapFly's Scrape Failed Protection stops applying once more than 30% of your traffic fails within an hour — exactly the scenario you're in when a target starts blocking you. WebScraping.AI simply never bills a failed request, with no fairness threshold.

No pay-as-you-go relief at entry

Exhaust Discovery's 200k credits and you're done for the month unless you upgrade tiers. WebScraping.AI's plans are self-serve and adjustable at any time, and more of your credits survive contact with real-world targets thanks to the flatter multipliers.

Transparent, published pricing

Every request type has a fixed, published credit cost — no surprises, and you only pay for successful requests.

Request type
No JS
+ JS render
Datacenter proxies
1 credit
5 credits
Residential proxies
10 credits
25 credits
Stealth proxies
50 credits
50 credits
AI extraction add-on
+5 credits

Plans from $29/mo (250k credits) · $99/mo (1M) · $249/mo (3M). Failed requests are always free. See full pricing.

Flatter credit math for the requests you actually make

Both products use credit multipliers — that's the market standard. The difference is where the multipliers sit. On ScrapFly, the moment a site needs residential IPs you're at 25 credits, and 30 with rendering. On WebScraping.AI, residential is 10 credits (25 with JS), and the whole table is published: 1 / 5 / 10 / 25 / 50, +5 for AI extraction.

Concretely, 100k JS-rendered residential requests cost 3M credits on ScrapFly's model (30 each) versus 2.5M on ours (25 each) — and each plan dollar buys more credits to begin with (250k at $29 vs 200k at $30). Every request that fails along the way costs you nothing, unconditionally.

AI answers, not just extractions

ScrapFly's Extraction API is capable — prompts, schemas, and auto-extract models. WebScraping.AI adds the endpoint developers reach for first when prototyping: /ai/question. Ask "what's the price?" or "is this in stock?" about any URL and get the answer back as a string — no schema required. When you're ready for structure, /ai/fields returns typed JSON for the fields you name.

Both ship first-party MCP servers, so the choice isn't about AI-agent readiness — it's about how much credit math and schema ceremony sits between you and the data.

Switching is one API call

Point your requests at WebScraping.AI — here's the equivalent call in your language.

curl -G "https://api.webscraping.ai/ai/fields" \
  --data-urlencode "api_key=YOUR_API_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "url=https://example.com/product" \
  --data-urlencode "fields[title]=Product title" \
  --data-urlencode "fields[price]=Current price with currency" \
  --data-urlencode "fields[availability]=In stock or out of stock"
# Response:
# {
#   "title": "Example Product",
#   "price": "$99.99",
#   "availability": "in stock"
# }
# pip install webscraping_ai
# https://pypi.org/project/webscraping-ai/
from webscraping_ai import Client

client = Client(api_key="YOUR_API_KEY")
result = client.fields(
    "https://example.com/product",
    fields={
        "title": "Product title",
        "price": "Current price with currency",
        "availability": "In stock or out of stock",
    },
)
print(result)
# Response:
# {
#   "title": "Example Product",
#   "price": "$99.99",
#   "availability": "in stock"
# }
// npm install webscraping-ai
// https://www.npmjs.com/package/webscraping-ai
import { WebScrapingAI } from 'webscraping-ai';

const client = new WebScrapingAI({ apiKey: 'YOUR_API_KEY' });
const result = await client.fields({
  url: 'https://example.com/product',
  fields: {
    title: 'Product title',
    price: 'Current price with currency',
    availability: 'In stock or out of stock',
  },
});
console.log(result);
// Response:
// {
//   "title": "Example Product",
//   "price": "$99.99",
//   "availability": "in stock"
// }
<?php
// composer require webscraping-ai/webscraping-ai-php
// https://packagist.org/packages/webscraping-ai/webscraping-ai-php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';

use WebScrapingAI\Client;

$client = new Client('YOUR_API_KEY');
$result = $client->fields('https://example.com/product', [
    'title'        => 'Product title',
    'price'        => 'Current price with currency',
    'availability' => 'In stock or out of stock',
]);
print_r($result);
// Response:
// {
//   "title": "Example Product",
//   "price": "$99.99",
//   "availability": "in stock"
// }
# gem install webscraping_ai
# https://rubygems.org/gems/webscraping_ai
require 'webscraping_ai'

client = WebScrapingAI::Client.new(api_key: 'YOUR_API_KEY')
result = client.fields(
  'https://example.com/product',
  fields: {
    title:         'Product title',
    price:         'Current price with currency',
    availability:  'In stock or out of stock',
  }
)
puts result.inspect
# Response:
# {
#   "title": "Example Product",
#   "price": "$99.99",
#   "availability": "in stock"
# }
// go get github.com/webscraping-ai/webscraping-ai-go/v4
// https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/webscraping-ai/webscraping-ai-go/v4
package main

import (
    "context"
    "fmt"

    webscrapingai "github.com/webscraping-ai/webscraping-ai-go/v4"
)

func main() {
    client, _ := webscrapingai.NewClient(&webscrapingai.Config{APIKey: "YOUR_API_KEY"})
    result, _ := client.Fields(context.Background(), &webscrapingai.FieldsOptions{
        URL: "https://example.com/product",
        Fields: map[string]string{
            "title": "Product title",
            "price": "Current price with currency",
            "availability": "In stock or out of stock",
        },
    })
    fmt.Println(result.Result)
}
// Response:
// {
//   "title": "Example Product",
//   "price": "$99.99",
//   "availability": "in stock"
// }
// Maven: ai.webscraping:webscraping-ai:4.0.0
// https://central.sonatype.com/artifact/ai.webscraping/webscraping-ai
import ai.webscraping.Client;
import ai.webscraping.Config;
import ai.webscraping.option.FieldsOptions;
import ai.webscraping.result.FieldsResult;

Client client = new Client(Config.builder().apiKey("YOUR_API_KEY").build());
FieldsResult result = client.fields(FieldsOptions.builder()
    .url("https://example.com/product")
    .addField("title", "Product title")
    .addField("price", "Current price with currency")
    .addField("availability", "In stock or out of stock")
    .build());
System.out.println(result.getResult());
// Response:
// {
//   "title": "Example Product",
//   "price": "$99.99",
//   "availability": "in stock"
// }
// dotnet add package WebScrapingAI
// https://www.nuget.org/packages/WebScrapingAI
using WebScrapingAI;

var client = new WebScrapingAIClient(new WebScrapingAIClientOptions { ApiKey = "YOUR_API_KEY" });
var result = await client.FieldsAsync(new FieldsRequest {
    Url = "https://example.com/product",
    Fields = new Dictionary<string, string> {
        ["title"] = "Product title",
        ["price"] = "Current price with currency",
        ["availability"] = "In stock or out of stock",
    },
});
Console.WriteLine(result.Result);
// Response:
// {
//   "title": "Example Product",
//   "price": "$99.99",
//   "availability": "in stock"
// }

Switch to WebScraping.AI if…

Your workload leans on residential proxies — 10 credits here vs 25 there adds up fast.
You want fixed, published costs per request type, including a flat stealth tier instead of dynamic ASP billing.
You want failed requests free with no fairness threshold, especially on targets that block in bursts.
Your team works across many languages — 7 official SDKs vs Python and TypeScript.

Stick with ScrapFly if…

You're fighting the very hardest anti-bot targets and want ScrapFly's ASP plus its debugging tooling around it.
You need a screenshot API or ScrapFly's webhook/throttling infrastructure.
You're invested in ScrapFly's monitoring dashboards and per-request observability.

Frequently asked questions

Is WebScraping.AI a good ScrapFly alternative?

For most scraping workloads, yes: the same datacenter/residential/stealth proxy tiers and JS rendering with flatter credit costs (residential at 10 credits vs 25), unconditionally free failed requests, AI question answering and field extraction, and 7 official SDKs. ScrapFly keeps the edge on its specialized ASP anti-bot bypass and screenshot tooling.

How do the credit models compare?

Both use multipliers. WebScraping.AI: 1 credit plain, 5 with JS, 10 residential (25 with JS), 50 stealth, +5 for AI — all fixed and published. ScrapFly: 1 credit plain, +5 for JS, 25 residential, and a dynamic credit cost when ASP engages. Entry plans are $29/mo for 250k credits here vs $30/mo for 200k there.

Does ScrapFly charge for failed requests?

Normally no — its Scrape Failed Protection covers failures with eligible status codes. But the protection is suspended when more than 30% of your traffic fails within an hour, which is precisely what a blocking event looks like. WebScraping.AI never bills failed requests, with no threshold or fine print.

Does WebScraping.AI handle anti-bot systems like ScrapFly's ASP?

Hard targets route through rotating residential proxies (10–25 credits) or stealth proxies (50 credits) designed for protected-site scraping. ScrapFly's ASP is a strong specialized system and may win on the most aggressively protected sites; the difference is our cost is flat and known before you send the request.

Can I use WebScraping.AI with AI agents like ScrapFly's MCP?

Yes — both ship first-party MCP servers. WebScraping.AI's exposes question answering, field extraction, HTML/text retrieval, and CSS-selector tools to Claude, Cursor, and other MCP clients, with an optional content-sandboxing mode against prompt injection.

Compare other alternatives

Try WebScraping.AI as your ScrapFly alternative

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