Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Bright Data vs ScrapingAnt

Bright Data has a score of 60.1 (C) against ScrapingAnt's 35.9 (F). Both do scraping. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 79 points.

Which one, for what

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Category	Weight this run	Bright Data	ScrapingAnt	Edge
Reliability	16%20	35	30	Bright Data +5
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	74	43	Bright Data +31
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	82	66	Bright Data +16
Security & auth	14%17.5	57	10	Bright Data +47
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	5	Bright Data +79
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	62	57	Bright Data +5
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		60.1 · C	35.9 · F

Fact	Bright Data	ScrapingAnt
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Bright Data	ScrapingAnt (DATAANT)
Hosted endpoint	`https://api.brightdata.com/request`	`https://api.scrapingant.com/v2/general`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP	HTTP, Streamable HTTP
Auth	OAuth or key	API key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	no
Licence	none	none
Tools exposed	69	3
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	no
MCP registry	`io.github.brightdata/brightdata-mcp`	not listed
Last release	2026-09-15	2024-07-16
Popularity	2.6k stars	90 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.

10,000 free credits a month with no card. API Basics puts the key in the query string, so it lands in logs.

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 the key in the x-api-key header rather than the query string
Use /v2/markdown for LLM input, and set browser=false on static pages to pay 1 credit instead of 10
Switch to proxy_type=residential only after a 423 (anti-bot) response. It raises a browser request from 10 to 125 credits
On the free plan a second concurrent request gets 409. Wait for the first to finish
Google, Bing and Yandex result pages come back as raw HTML through /v2/general, so you parse them yourself