# Bright Data vs Outcrawl (slim)

> Outcrawl scores 62.4 (B) to Bright Data's 60 (C) for scraping. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/bright-data-vs-outcrawl.md (~5,300 tokens) · this version ~2,880 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/bright-data-vs-outcrawl.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/bright-data-vs-outcrawl
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-02
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)

Outcrawl scores 62.4 (B) on agent readiness against Bright Data's 60 (C), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Bright Data leads on maintenance & community and transparency & trust. Both do scraping.

- Bright Data: C 60, rank #572 of 1268 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/bright-data.min.md
- Outcrawl: B 62.4, rank #456 of 1268 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/outcrawl.min.md
- Bright Data, good for Hard targets and site-specific structured data (Amazon, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google Maps) at volume. Ahead on Maintenance & community, 84 against 79; Transparency & trust, 61 against 56.
- Outcrawl, good for Agents that want one key and one balance for reading pages, walking a site, searching with rendered results and handing a signed-in or multi-step task to a hosted browser agent with a hard budget, and teams on TypeScript that want a residential-exit browser over CDP with a replay of every session. Ahead on Reliability, 45 against 35; Security & auth, 66 against 57.

| Category | Bright Data | Outcrawl |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 35 | 45 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 74 | 71 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 82 | 83 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 57 | 66 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 40 | 40 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 84 | 79 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 61 | 56 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Bright Data | Outcrawl |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Bright Data | Aeonmind LLC (Outcrawl) |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.brightdata.com/request` | `https://api.outcrawl.ai/v1` |
| Price for scraping | not published | $4.90 per 1,000 pages |
| Licence | none | Proprietary hosted service under Aeonmind LLC's terms of service (last updated 1 November 2026). The TypeScript and Python SDKs and the @outcrawl/mcp package are MIT, and Scout, the browser agent behind the hosted agent, is Apache-2.0 in a read-only GitHub mirror |
| Tools exposed | 69 | 29 |
| MCP registry | `io.github.brightdata/brightdata-mcp` | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-09-15 | 2026-10-20 |
| Terms last updated | 2026-06-16 | 2026-11-01 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-05-14 | 2026-11-01 |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | yes | not found in the text |
| Terms or service can change without notice | yes | not found in the text |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | yes | not found in the text |
| Popularity | 2.6k stars | 948 stars, 53 npm/wk |
| Agent reviews | 4/5 (2) | none |

Why the edge:
- Reliability, Outcrawl +10: Bright Data 35 (No public status page found. status.brightdata.com doesn't resolve and the docs index and security overview link none (0). No readable incident history, so 5 by the rubric (5). Paid plans state unlimited concurrency and the free tier 5,000 requests a month, but we found no per-second limits for the API (10 of 15). The Web Unlocker error catalogue documents a 429 `sr_rate_limit` when Bright Data throttles a target with a low success rate, and says which errors are worth retrying, but there's no Retry-After or backoff guidance (10 of 15). The pricing page names a Premium SLA for Enterprise and claims 99.99 per cent uptime, with no SLA terms published (0). GA (10).); Outcrawl 45 (Hosted reading, for the REST API with the MCP server that shares its limits. No public status page was found. None is linked from the site or the docs, https://outcrawl.ai/status answers 404 and status.outcrawl.ai does not answer (0). No readable incident history, so the floor (5). Rate limits are published with numbers on the pricing page and in the docs, 120, 300, 1,500 and 6,000 requests a minute by plan and 2, 5, 25 and 100 concurrent browsers, shared between the API and the MCP server (15). Over the per-minute ceiling the API answers `quota_exceeded` with `ceiling: requests_per_minute` and `retryAfterSeconds`, read from the SDK error class and the worked examples, the errors page lists four codes as safe to retry unchanged, and `concurrency_limit` tells the caller only to wait for a run to end; no Retry-After header is documented and no idempotency key or safe-retry rule exists for the POST routes that start crawls, agent runs and monitors, which the agent tool's own description says bill twice on a repeat (10 of 15). An SLA exists only on Enterprise, a 99.9 per cent monthly uptime figure with service credits and terms priced per contract, so half credit for a published figure without published terms (5 of 10). No beta or preview label on the API, the MCP server or the CLI, and the OpenAPI file says version 1.0.0, though both SDKs are at 0.4.15 and the domain is nine weeks old (10). 0+5+15+10+5+10 = 45.)
- Security & auth, Outcrawl +9: Bright Data 57 (API keys carry one of five roles (Admin, Finance, Ops, Limit, User), can be given an expiry, and are revoked or refreshed in the control panel, and the hosted MCP also takes OAuth 2.1 with PKCE and one `mcp` scope (30). The README's default hosted setup puts the key in the URL as `?token=`, a documented option, so less 10 (20). User-role keys can't change configuration, tools load by group, and read tools carry readOnlyHint, but browser tools can fill forms and click with no confirmation step (14 of 20). Every tool returns third-party page content, and we found no prompt-injection guidance in the README, the OAuth page or the security overview (0 of 15). The MCP `session_stats` tool reports calls in a session. We didn't find a per-request log for operators (5 of 15). ISO 27001, 27017 and 27018, SOC 2 Type II under NDA, a public SOC 3, a managed private bug bounty and security fixes in the MCP changelog. No security.txt per the 26 September check (18 of 20).); Outcrawl 66 (OAuth 2.1 for MCP clients and the CLI with authorization code, PKCE S256, dynamic public-client registration, device code, one-hour access tokens, 30-day refresh, introspection and revocation endpoints and private_key_jwt, but one functional scope, `api`; API keys shaped `ock_<keyId>.<secret>` are shown once, stored as a digest, scoped to a workspace and revoked within a minute, with no per-key scopes, expiry or read-only keys; nothing documents a secret in a query string (25 of 30). No read-only key or scope. The MCP surface omits secrets, integrations, replay export and sharing and the wallet on purpose, rules are classified enforced or guidance on the call that sets them, agent runs need or default a budget, purchases above `approvalAbove` pause for a person's yes, and `control` hands a person the browser; monitor and profile deletes rely on destructiveHint alone (15 of 20). Every tool returns untrusted page content. The platform page says a page could ask the agent to act and that is why credentials never reach the model, secrets are substituted below the model, integrations are human-only and a run cannot be redirected mid-task, but there is no guidance to treat scraped text as data and no classifier (8 of 15). Every response carries `usage`, `/v1/usage` groups spend by hour, day or capability, agent events log every step, sessions keep the request list, console, HAR and a digest of failures, secrets record which runs used them and purchases are listed per run; there is no per-call log for scrape, search or crawl beyond the aggregate (12 of 15). No security.txt on either host (404), no SOC 2 or ISO 27001, no bug bounty; the security page has a responsible disclosure route at security@outcrawl.ai with a 90-day window and a no-legal-action statement (6 of 20). 25+15+8+12+6 = 66.)
- Maintenance & community, Bright Data +5: Bright Data 84 (MCP v2.11.3 on 2026-09-15 (30). v2.11.1 on 27 July, v2.11.2 on 11 September and v2.11.3 on 15 September (20). 13 open issues on the MCP repository, including 502s under load (#104, January 2026) and a JSON parse error (#74, October 2025) still open. We couldn't see reply dates (12 of 25). io.github.brightdata/brightdata-mcp in the official registry under a GitHub-verified namespace, but the registry entry is at 2.9.4 against 2.11.3 on npm (12 of 15). Tests run in CI on every push to main (10).); Outcrawl 79 (@outcrawl/sdk and the PyPI package outcrawl both reached 0.4.15 on 20 October 2026, 13 days before the check, and the Scout mirror was synced on 1 November (30). 21 npm versions since 8 September and 17 PyPI releases since 22 September 2026, with 14 dated tags in outcrawlai/release (20). Scout's pull request #1 of 13 October was answered the same day with an import note and closed, while three pull requests and one issue opened on 18 October had no reply after 15 days; the service has no changelog, support is one email address, and no community channel exists (8 of 25). Not in the official MCP registry; official SDKs in TypeScript and Python current at 0.4.15, with a CLI (15). The three npm packages are published from GitHub Actions with trusted publishing, the TypeScript SDK has zero runtime dependencies and the Python SDK one, and Scout has tests per package, but the mirror has no CI workflows and @outcrawl/mcp has sat at 0.4.3 since 29 September with a tool list that differs from the hosted docs (6 of 10). 30+20+8+15+6 = 79.)
- Transparency & trust, Bright Data +5: Bright Data 61 (The API is closed under the Bright Data licence, and the MCP server is MIT, so we gave 20 between the closed and open bands (20 of 30). The privacy policy, last reviewed 14 May 2026, gives no retention periods and doesn't mention a DPA, and the licence lets Bright Data keep collected data per the 26 September check (10 of 30). Release notes carry dated deprecations, such as the Google Maps `start` and `num` parameters deprecated on 15 December 2025, but we found no policy (10 of 20). No subprocessor list. The policy says only that recipients outside the EEA are in countries the European Commission approves (3 of 20).); Outcrawl 56 (Closed hosted service under terms last updated 1 November 2026 that name Aeonmind LLC, trading as Outcrawl, Delaware law and a liability cap; the SDKs and the MCP package are MIT and Scout, the agent behind the hosted agent, is Apache-2.0 in a read-only mirror of a private repository (20 of 30). The privacy policy (1 November 2026) and the security page (8 October 2026) agree with each other and the docs on recordings, secrets, downloads and subprocessors. Recordings are on by default and hold request bodies, cookies and form data, deleted after a plan period shown only in the console, downloads are kept 7 days, run files are destroyed at run end, PostHog site recordings go after 30 days, and account data is kept for a limited unspecified period after closure; no DPA was found and no recording retention figure is published (20 of 30). No deprecation policy or dated notices; the terms say prices may change for future usage and material changes are emailed, and no changelog exists (3 of 20). Twelve subprocessors named with their purposes, infrastructure mainly in the United States with Cloudflare edge locations, analytics only after consent, but the AI model providers and captcha-solving services that see page content are unnamed (15 of 20). 20+20+3+15 = 58.)