# BrowserAct vs Spider (slim)

> Spider scores 74.6 (BB) to BrowserAct's 44.4 (E) for scraping. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/browseract-vs-spider-cloud.md (~5,450 tokens) · this version ~2,780 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/browseract-vs-spider-cloud.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/browseract-vs-spider-cloud
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-07
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)

Spider scores 74.6 (BB) on agent readiness against BrowserAct's 44.4 (E), and leads in every scored category. Both do scraping. Spider accepts x402. BrowserAct doesn't.

- BrowserAct: E 44.4, rank #1204 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/browseract.min.md
- Spider: BB 74.6, rank #78 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/spider-cloud.min.md
- BrowserAct, good for Teams that want no-code, prompt-built scrapers an agent can rerun on a schedule.
- Spider, good for An agent that has to start without a human, pay per call, or crawl many small pages cheaply. Ahead on Reliability, 85 against 23; Schema & documentation, 87 against 76; Agent ergonomics, 70 against 49; Payments & pricing, 96 against 25; Maintenance & community, 75 against 61; Transparency & trust, 70 against 44. Also Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better; An agent can pay per call over x402, with no account; Runs on your own machine; Open source.

| Category | BrowserAct | Spider |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 23 | 85 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 76 | 87 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 49 | 70 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 41 | 42 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 25 | 96 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 61 | 75 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 44 | 70 |

| Fact (where they differ) | BrowserAct | Spider |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Hongkong Ziniao Technology Co., Limited | Spider (BAGELMEN LLC) |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://mcp.browseract.com/mcp/` | `https://api.spider.cloud` |
| Transports | Streamable HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio |
| Auth | API key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Pay per use |
| Price for scraping | not published | $0.50 per 1,000 requests |
| x402 | no | yes, from $0.0005/call |
| Licence | none | MIT |
| Tools exposed | none | 21 |
| MCP registry | not listed | `cloud.spider/mcp` |
| Last release | 2026-11-05 | 2026-09-05 |
| Terms last updated | 2025-05-15 | 2026-09-01 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2025-05-15 | 2026-10-01 |
| Terms restrict automated access | yes | not found in the text |
| Terms or service can change without notice | yes | not found in the text |
| Popularity | none | 2.7k stars, 2.7k npm/wk |
| Agent reviews | none | 3.3/5 (8) |

Why the edge:
- Payments & pricing, Spider +71: 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.); Spider 96 (x402 v2 on every core route, USDC on Base (eip155:8453), per the x402 page re-read on 17 October. Our unpaid POST to /crawl on 6 October got a 402 with a PAYMENT-REQUIRED header and an x402Version 2 body asking 5,000 units ($0.005), not re-run on 17 October because api.spider.cloud's robots.txt disallows every path (40). Bytes, CPU minutes and credit prices are public (20). Keyless POST /scrape, documented in llms.txt and limited to 4 a minute by its RateLimit-Limit header on 6 October, and the authentication page says the first key needs no card (20). An agent can use /scrape keyless or pay per call over x402 with no account (20). 100 less 4 because AI Studio routes need a plan from $6 a month.)
- Reliability, Spider +62: 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.); Spider 85 (Statuspage at spidercloud.statuspage.io with API and HTTP Proxy components (20). The history feed, re-read on 1 November (robots.txt disallows the /api/ incidents feed), lists no incident in the last 90 days, and the only entry ever posted is the Statuspage template example of June 2024, so a clean record can't be told apart from a page that isn't used (25 of 30). The rate-limits page, re-read on 1 November, now gives pay as you go 10,000 to 80,000 requests a minute across four usage levels, with 50,000 on Enterprise and per-second caps on AI routes. Keyless /scrape answered RateLimit-Limit 4 on 6 October, not re-run since, because api.spider.cloud's robots.txt disallows every path (15). RateLimit-Limit, RateLimit-Remaining and RateLimit-Reset headers, Retry-After on 429 per llms.txt, and an exponential backoff example on the rate-limits page (15). No SLA found (0). Generally available (10). 20 + 25 + 15 + 15 + 0 + 10 = 85.)
- Transparency & trust, Spider +26: 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.); Spider 70 (The spider crawler and the clients and MCP are MIT. The hosted API is closed, run by BAGELMEN LLC under the EULA (25 of 30). The privacy policy, rewritten in October 2026 and re-read on 1 November, now gives BAGELMEN LLC's address in Sanford, Florida and retention periods, request and server logs up to 30 days with no page content, cached public pages up to 48 hours, browser recordings up to 30 days, account data while the account is open. It says the MCP server stores no tool inputs or outputs and agrees with the zero data retention option at 2.5 times credits. A DPA exists only for Enterprise customers who sign one, and service providers are now described by role (hosting, sign-in, payments, email, analytics, AI models) where the September policy named Azure, Cohere, Google, OpenAI, OpenRouter and PostHog (18 of 30). The clients' changelog dates the unblocker deprecation on 1 October 2026 and the lite_mode removal on 14 July, but the product changelog lists no deprecations (10 of 20). The main region is stated as the United States, with network providers, compute devices and service providers possibly elsewhere, and no provider is named any more, so the line stays where named AI processors without locations put it (8 of 20). 25 + 18 + 10 + 8 = 61.)
- Agent ergonomics, Spider +21: 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.); Spider 70 (21 tools on the hosted MCP (7 core, 5 AI, 9 browser) since the unblocker tool was dropped, and 12 in the stdio package on its main branch, with no toolsets (15 of 25). limit, depth, return_format, readability and CSS extraction control what comes back (20). Status codes are documented, but every content route returns a JSON array whose status field is the target page's, and bad values fall back silently (12 of 20). No tool annotations, and llms.txt says errored attempts are billed for the bytes and compute they used, so retries aren't free (8 of 20). request defaults to smart and only url is required. Official clients in Python, JavaScript, Rust and Go plus a CLI (15).)
- Maintenance & community, Spider +14: 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.); Spider 75 (The newest dated change is the unblocker's removal from the hosted MCP and the client sources on 1 October 2026, 31 days before 1 November, and the product changelog's newest entry is still 10 September (provider router), so within 90 days but not 30 (20, cause time, 30 on 17 October). In the 90 days from 3 August we count five releases of Spider's own Rust spider crate on crates.io (2.53.5 on 17 August, 2.53.6 on 18 August, 2.53.7 on 1 September, 2.53.8 on 3 September and 2.53.9 on 5 September, the crate the hosted API runs on, with a spider_cloud feature for this API), the 10 September changelog entry and the dated 1 October client changelog entry. The @spider-cloud/spider-client 0.2.5 release of 19 July has left the window, no client tag is newer than 18 July, and the client changelog's 1 October versions (JavaScript 0.3.0, Python 0.2.0) have no release tags in the repository on 1 November. The count stays at three or more until 5 September leaves the window on 4 December (20). We couldn't read GitHub issues. Dated changelog and support by email (12 of 25). In the official MCP registry as cloud.spider/mcp under the vendor's domain (entry of 24 June 2026), and clients exist in four languages (15). The clients repo runs CI for Node, Python and Rust. The MCP repo has no CI (8 of 10). 20 + 20 + 12 + 15 + 8 = 75.)
- Schema & documentation, Spider +11: BrowserAct 76 (An OpenAPI 3.0.3 document behind the API reference (25). llms.txt on both the site and the docs, with Markdown pages (10). Endpoint descriptions explain the run flow (find a bot, read its input_schema, then run) and when to use the lighter status endpoint (14). Inputs are typed, but a run's input is an object shaped by each bot's own schema (10). Examples per endpoint and named error codes such as 10879 and 10127; no full error table found (10). The path carries v3, but no changelog was found (7). 25 + 10 + 14 + 10 + 10 + 7 = 76.); Spider 87 (OpenAPI 3.0.1 at spider.cloud/openapi.yaml with 15 paths, re-read on 1 November (25). llms.txt written for agents (10). The open-source MCP descriptions say what each tool does and some say what it doesn't (spider_scrape, No crawling, just fetches one URL), but few say when to pick another tool (14 of 20). 18 enums in the MCP schemas, but css_extraction_map, wait_for and cache are free-form records, and llms.txt still says unrecognised request and return_format values silently fall back to http and raw instead of returning 400 (10 of 15). Error code table with 400, 401, 402, 403, 404, 413, 429, 500 and 503, and examples per route (13 of 15). Dated product changelog, newest still 10 September 2026 on 1 November, and a Keep a Changelog file for the clients (15).)