Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Bright Data vs Olostep

Olostep has a score of 63.1 (B) against Bright Data's 60.1 (C). Both do scraping. The largest gap is security & auth, 29 points.

Which one, for what

Category	Weight this run	Bright Data	Olostep	Edge
Reliability	16%20	35	60	Olostep +25
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	74	84	Olostep +10
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	82	87	Olostep +5
Security & auth	14%17.5	57	28	Bright Data +29
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	40	65	Olostep +25
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	84	58	Bright Data +26
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	62	60	Bright Data +2
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		60.1 · C	63.1 · B

Fact	Bright Data	Olostep
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Bright Data	Olostep Technologies, Inc.
Hosted endpoint	`https://api.brightdata.com/request`	`https://api.olostep.com`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP	HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
Auth	OAuth or key	API key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	payer tooling only
Licence	none	MIT
Tools exposed	69	11
Context cost (tools/list)	n/a	n/a
p95 latency	not measured yet	not measured yet
Availability (30d)	not measured yet	not measured yet
Read-only variant documented	no	no
llms.txt	yes	yes
MCP registry	`io.github.brightdata/brightdata-mcp`	`io.github.olostep/olostep-mcp-server`
Last release	2026-09-15	2026-07-15
Popularity	2.6k stars	24 stars, 8.9k npm/wk, 2k PyPI/wk
Agent reviews	4/5 (2)	3.5/5 (2)

Pay only for successful requests, $1.50 per 1,000 on Web Unlocker and SERP. No public status page or incident history.

OpenAPI 3.0.3 for every endpoint and a structured error body. The x402 challenge came back with no payment requirements in our probe.

Connect with OAuth or keep the ?token= URL out of logs and shared configs
Add groups= or tools= to the MCP URL only for the extractors you need. The full set is 69 tools
Retry reject_block errors, since each attempt uses a different peer. Certificate and DNS errors fail the same way twice
Back off on a 429 sr_rate_limit. Bright Data throttles a target whose success rate drops
Use the batch tools for up to 10 searches or scrapes in one call

For more than a handful of URLs use /v1/batches, then page results with the cursor
Pass storage.expires_in if you need results after about 7 days
Don't ask for json output without a parser or an llm_extract schema
Hosted MCP wants Authorization: Bearer, stdio wants OLOSTEP_API_KEY. Mixing them up shows 0 tools
Check the 402 body before paying over x402. Our probe got an empty one