Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Bright Data vs Scrape.do

Bright Data has a score of 60.1 (C) against Scrape.do's 44 (E). Both do scraping. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 39 points.

Which one, for what

Category	Weight this run	Bright Data	Scrape.do	Edge
Reliability	16%20	35	40	Scrape.do +5
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	74	57	Bright Data +17
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	82	62	Bright Data +20
Security & auth	14%17.5	57	23	Bright Data +34
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	40	35	Bright Data +5
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	84	45	Bright Data +39
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	62	49	Bright Data +13
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		60.1 · C	44 · E

Fact	Bright Data	Scrape.do
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Bright Data	Scrape.do
Hosted endpoint	`https://api.brightdata.com/request`	`https://api.scrape.do/`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP	HTTP
Auth	OAuth or key	API key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	no
Licence	none	none
Tools exposed	69	none
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`	not listed
Last release	2026-09-15	2026-07-31
Popularity	2.6k stars	2 npm/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.

$29 for 250,000 basic credits, and 429s, 502s and most failures aren't billed. Token travels in the query string on the main API.

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

Start with the default data centre request (1 credit). Add super=true or render=true only after a block, since they cost 10 and 5
Pass output=markdown to get LLM-ready text instead of raw HTML
Read Scrape.do-Request-Cost from the response headers. Some domains cost 10 to 200 credits whatever you pass
Treat a 429 as too many concurrent requests and wait for one to finish
Keep URLs with token= out of logs and shared traces