BrowserAct vs Diffbot

BrowserAct 23

Hosted reading. No status page found (0) and no readable incident history (5). The docs say there are no rate limits, and give concurrency by plan (2 free, up to 20 for paid API users) and a 7-hour task cap (8). No 429 or retry guidance, and no idempotency keys on task creation (0). No SLA (0). No beta label on the API or MCP server (10). 0 + 5 + 8 + 0 + 0 + 10 = 23.

Diffbot 55

Graded as a hosted API. status.diffbot.com is a Pingdom public report with 13 checks, among them Analyze API, Article API, Crawlbot and Websearch, with daily uptime for seven days and no incident notes (15 of 20). No 90-day record can be read. In the week to 9 October 2026 Analyze API shows 99.69 per cent, with 2, 11 and 17 minutes down on 4, 5 and 6 October, and Article API 5, 9 and 2 minutes on 5 to 7 October (5 of 30, the line for no readable history). Rate limits are published per plan, 5 calls a minute on Free, 5 a second on Startup and 25 a second on Plus (15). The 429 page says to pause one second and back off. No Retry-After header is documented, though the official client reads one (10 of 15). No SLA was found (0). The Extract APIs are at /v3 with no beta label (10). All per the 9 October check, not re-read on 4 November: Diffbot's terms bar software that scrapes or crawls the Site or Service, so its site and status report weren't fetched. 15 + 5 + 15 + 10 + 0 + 10 = 55.

BrowserAct 44

Closed service with published terms naming the operating company and governing law (15). The privacy policy of 15 May 2025 states retention by category and that crawled data is kept per plan and deletable by the user (15). No deprecation policy or notices found (0). No sub-processors or data locations named (3). 15 + 15 + 0 + 3 = 33.

Diffbot 68

A closed service under undated Terms of Use that cover the Site and the Service, cap liability at $10 and grant Diffbot a perpetual licence to process submitted queries. The clients and skills are MIT (13 of 30). The privacy policy of 29 August 2025 says query history and API calls are stored against the API key and kept no longer than necessary, with no retention period given. The GDPR and data rights page was not read (14 of 30). There is no deprecation policy. The changelog carries dated notices, such as a May 2024 entry announcing a field removal for 30 August 2024, and the terms give 14 days' notice of fee changes (8 of 20). The privacy policy names its service providers one by one, among them AWS, Stripe, Intercom, Salesforce, Slack and Amplitude, and says all are in the United States (14 of 20). All per the 9 October check, not re-read on 4 November. 13 + 14 + 8 + 14 = 49.

BrowserAct 41

One account-wide API key type, revocable and listed with last-used time, but without scopes or expiry (18). Confirmation Required mode holds purchases and asset creation or deletion for approval in the BrowserAct page (14). Scraped pages are untrusted, and no prompt-injection guidance was found (3). Keys show last use and runs keep logs (6). No security page, disclosure policy, certification or bug bounty found (0). 18 + 14 + 3 + 6 + 0 = 41.

Diffbot 21

One token per account, sent in the URL query string as the documented and only scheme in the OpenAPI file. Tokens are revocable in the dashboard per a June 2025 changelog title, and child tokens exist on Plus and above (20 of 30, less 10 for the secret in the URL, so 10). Child tokens have the same rights as the primary one and there is no read-only mode. The skills limit the agent to the db binary through allowed-tools (5 of 20). The API returns untrusted web content and no guidance on prompt injection was found (0 of 15). The token details page shows usage activity and an Account API reports usage. No per-call log was found (6 of 15). No security.txt, security page, certification or bug bounty was found on the pages read, and the privacy policy says some API calls rely on HTTP without encryption (0 of 20). Site pages per the 9 October check, not re-read on 4 November. OSV lists no advisory for diffbot on PyPI or @diffbot/typescript on npm on 4 November. 10 + 5 + 0 + 6 + 0 = 21.

BrowserAct 61

browser-act-cli 1.6.2 on 5 November 2026, read from PyPI's release feed (30). Six CLI releases from 15 October to 5 November (20). A closed service with a support address, but no public changelog or issue tracker found (8). No official SDKs and no entry in the official MCP registry (0). The CLI package carries no licence or repository in its metadata (3). 30 + 20 + 8 + 0 + 3 = 61.

Diffbot 77

Every dated source of the vendor's own was looked for in its GitHub repositories, since its site wasn't re-read. The official Python client, diffbot in the listing's packages, was tagged v3.1.0 on 29 October 2026, adding a Web Search snippet_length option, and the agent skills were tagged v1.2.0 the same day with rewritten skill content, 6 days before this check (30; was 10 on the API changelog's 15 June 2026 entry, which is per the 9 October check, not re-read on 4 November). In the 90 days from 6 August, the skills were tagged v1.1.0 (12 August, five new skills), v1.1.1 (13 August, a plugin marketplace manifest, counted half) and v1.2.0, and the Python client v3.0.0 (28 September) and v3.1.0, counted half as SDK tags, 3.5 in all (20). A public changelog with RSS and a support address exist. GitHub issues were not read (8 of 15 for a closed service). Python and TypeScript clients exist, but the docs named the packages diffbot-python and diffbot-typescript on 9 October while the repositories publish diffbot and @diffbot/typescript, and the TypeScript repository has no tag and no commit since 17 August 2026 (12 of 15). The Python repository tests on Python 3.9 to 3.13. We did not see CI results (7 of 10). 30 + 20 + 8 + 12 + 7 = 77.

BrowserAct 25

No x402, MPP or L402 (0). Plan prices and credit costs per bot build, run and workflow step are public, but there is no direct per-call price (15). A free plan with 200 credits; whether it needs a card isn't stated (10). A person signs up and creates the key in the dashboard (0). 0 + 15 + 10 + 0 = 25.

Diffbot 40

No x402, MPP or L402 was found (0 of 40). Plan prices, the credit cost of each action and overage per credit are public without a login (20). The Free plan has 10,000 credits a month and needs no card (20). A person signs up in a browser at app.diffbot.com to get a token (0). Pricing per the 9 October check, not re-read on 4 November. 0 + 20 + 20 + 0 = 40.

BrowserAct 49

Graded on the API, since the MCP tool list isn't published. Task results come back whole, with no field selection found (10). Lists of bots, templates and tasks are paginated (15). Errors carry numeric codes with documented meanings for a few cases (12). No idempotency key on task creation; webhooks and a status endpoint avoid polling loops (5). No official SDK in two languages; the CLI is Python (7). 10 + 15 + 12 + 5 + 7 = 49.

Diffbot 63

Graded on the REST API, with the skills noted. mode limits extraction to one page type, fields adds optional fields and discussion=false drops comments, but an article response carries both html and text with no way found to drop either. The skills return Markdown by default (14 of 25). A single-URL call has no pagination. Web Search takes size and maxTokens and DQL takes size per the client. Crawl result paging was not read (10 of 20). Errors are JSON with errorCode and error and six docs pages. A failed extraction can arrive in a 200, and the 429 text says the site received too many requests when the cause is the caller's plan limit (12 of 20). Extract calls are GET reads and safe to retry. Whether a failed call uses a credit was not found, and there is no idempotency key for creating crawl jobs or custom APIs (12 of 20). Only url and token are required, with official Python and TypeScript clients and a CLI (15). Docs per the 9 October check, not re-read on 4 November. The Python client 3.1.0 (29 October 2026) adds a snippet_length option that maps to the Web Search API's snippetLength. 14 + 10 + 12 + 12 + 15 = 63.