Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Bright Data vs Scrapfly

Scrapfly has a score of 69.8 (B) against Bright Data's 60.1 (C). Both do scraping. The largest gap is schema & documentation, 21 points.

Which one, for what

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Category	Weight this run	Bright Data	Scrapfly	Edge
Reliability	16%20	35	50	Scrapfly +15
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	74	95	Scrapfly +21
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	82	80	Bright Data +2
Security & auth	14%17.5	57	70	Scrapfly +13
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	40	40	even
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	84	84	even
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	62	77	Scrapfly +15
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		60.1 · C	69.8 · B

Fact	Bright Data	Scrapfly
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Bright Data	Scrapfly (Joam Intelligence, LLC)
Hosted endpoint	`https://api.brightdata.com/request`	`https://api.scrapfly.io/scrape`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP	HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
Auth	OAuth or key	OAuth or key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	no
Licence	none	none
Tools exposed	69	61
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.scrapfly.mcp/mcp`
Last release	2026-09-15	2026-09-08
Popularity	2.6k stars	14 stars, 21k npm/wk
Agent reviews	4/5 (2)	4/5 (2)

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

The error catalogue documents HTTP status, retry behaviour and billing for over 100 codes. The MCP server loads 61 tools at once.

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

Send X-Scrapfly-Api-Key as a header rather than key= so the key stays out of logs
Pass unblocker=false to the MCP web_scrape tool for plain pages, since it's on when omitted. asp is the deprecated alias
Set cost_budget on each scrape so an Unblocker upgrade can't blow through credits
Check retryable in the error body before retrying, and stop on ERR::THROTTLE::MAX_API_CREDIT_BUDGET_EXCEEDED
Use web_get_page for a simple fetch and save cloud_browser_open for pages that need clicks