Head to head · Extraction · October 2026 research run
Diffbot vs jevcrawl
jevcrawl scores 63.7 (B) on agent readiness against Diffbot's 54.3 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Diffbot leads on payments & pricing and transparency & trust. Both do extraction.
Best web scraping and crawling APIs for AI agents · All 204 scrapers comparisons
Which one, for what
Diffbot C
Best for Agents that want typed article, product or discussion data from arbitrary pages without writing selectors, and teams that also want the Knowledge Graph.
Ahead on
- Payments & pricing, 40 against 30
- Transparency & trust, 68 against 45
Also in its favour
- A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install
- Free to start without a card
Watch for
The token is sent as the token query parameter on Extract and Knowledge Graph calls. It is the only scheme in the OpenAPI file
jevcrawl B
Best for An agent that must find one answer several clicks deep on a documentation or help site and wants a few thousand tokens back instead of whole pages.
Ahead on
- Reliability, 68 against 55
- Agent ergonomics, 80 against 63
- Security & auth, 59 against 21
- Maintenance & community, 68 against 57
Also in its favour
- Runs on your own machine
- Open source
Watch for
First released on 13 October 2026, version 0.2.0 and marked alpha, with one maintainer
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Diffbot | jevcrawl | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 55 | 68 | jevcrawl +13 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 83 | 81 | Diffbot +2 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 63 | 80 | jevcrawl +17 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 21 | 59 | jevcrawl +38 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 40 | 30 | Diffbot +10 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 57 | 68 | jevcrawl +11 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 68 | 45 | Diffbot +23 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | C 54.3/100 | B 63.7/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Diffbot | jevcrawl |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | HTTP API | MCP server |
| Vendor | Diffbot Technologies Corp. | Rayen Mlayeh |
| Hosted endpoint | https://api.diffbot.com/v3 | no (local only) |
| Transports | HTTP | stdio |
| Auth | API key | API key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Pay per use |
| Price for extraction | $0.90 per 1,000 pages | not published |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Proprietary service under Diffbot's Terms of Use. The Python client, the TypeScript client and the agent skills are MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Tools exposed | none | 3 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | no |
| Last release | 2026-06-15 | 2026-10-15 |
| Terms last updated | no date given | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2025-08-29 | no document linked |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text | |
| Terms restrict automated access | yes | |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text | |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text | |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | yes | |
| Popularity | 9 npm/wk, 45 PyPI/wk | 60 stars, 204 PyPI/wk |
Verdicts
Diffbot
Extract returns typed JSON for articles, products, discussions and other page types with no selectors to write, under a public OpenAPI 3.1 contract and a free plan that needs no card. The API token travels in the URL query string, tokens carry no scopes, and no security page, certification or security.txt was found.
jevcrawl
Three compact, typed MCP tools return verbatim passages with source URLs, cost and stop reasons, and errors arrive as codes with instructions. The project is three days old and alpha, it depends on TypeSafe's paid Jev API, which is in early access with no free tier found, and it does not block crawls of private or local addresses.
Before you call either
Diffbot
- Call
GET https://api.diffbot.com/v3/analyze?url=<encoded URL>&token=<token>when the page type is unknown. Use/v3/articleor/v3/productto force one schema - Keep the token out of logs and shared URLs. It sits in the query string, so any proxy or log that records the request URL records the token
- Stay under 5 calls a minute on Free, 5 a second on Startup and 25 a second on Plus. On 429 wait at least one second and back off
- Check a 200 response for
errorCode. The official client raisesExtractionErrorwhen a 200 reports a failed extraction - Set
useProxy=defaultonly when a site blocks the fetch. A proxied page costs 2 credits against 1 - Install
diffbotfrom PyPI, notdiffbot-python, which stopped at 0.3.0
jevcrawl
- Phrase
goalas one specific question and start withmax_pagesbetween 10 and 30 - Check
stats.stopped_becauseandstats.degraded, and readuncertainbefore reporting that something is missing - Use
scrapewithout a goal when you need a whole page, since it makes no paid Jev call and needs no key - Handle
{"error": code, "message": ...}results, for exampleauth_errormeansTYPESAFE_API_KEYis missing or rejected - Pages in
stats.needs_js_urlswere not read. Tell the user rather than guessing their content
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Diffbot or jevcrawl?
jevcrawl scores 63.7 (B) on agent readiness against Diffbot's 54.3 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Diffbot leads on payments & pricing and transparency & trust.
Do Diffbot and jevcrawl need an API key?
Both need an API key.
Can an agent call Diffbot and jevcrawl without installing anything?
Diffbot has a hosted endpoint at https://api.diffbot.com/v3. jevcrawl runs on your own machine, with no hosted endpoint listed.
Are Diffbot and jevcrawl open source?
No open-source release is listed for Diffbot. jevcrawl is open source (Apache-2.0).
Other comparisons with Diffbot or jevcrawl
- Bright Data vs Diffbot
- Bright Data vs jevcrawl
- Context.dev vs Diffbot
- Context.dev vs jevcrawl
- Diffbot vs Jina Reader
- Diffbot vs Scrape.do
- Diffbot vs Scrapeless
- jevcrawl vs Jina Reader
- jevcrawl vs Oxylabs Web Scraper API
- jevcrawl vs Scrape.do
- jevcrawl vs ScrapingAnt
- jevcrawl vs ScrapingBee
- jevcrawl vs Scrapingdog
- jevcrawl vs ZenRows
- jevcrawl vs Zyte API
- Apify MCP Server vs Diffbot
- Apify MCP Server vs jevcrawl
- Firecrawl MCP vs jevcrawl
- jevcrawl vs Olostep
- jevcrawl vs ScrapeGraphAI
- jevcrawl vs Scrapeless
- jevcrawl vs ScraperAPI
- jevcrawl vs Scrapfly
- jevcrawl vs Spider
- Diffbot vs Firecrawl MCP
- Diffbot vs Olostep
- Diffbot vs Oxylabs Web Scraper API
- Diffbot vs ScrapeGraphAI
- Diffbot vs ScraperAPI
- Diffbot vs Scrapfly
- Diffbot vs ScrapingAnt
- Diffbot vs ScrapingBee
- Diffbot vs Scrapingdog
- Diffbot vs Spider
- Diffbot vs ZenRows
- Diffbot vs Zyte API
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/diffbot-vs-jevcrawl.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/diffbot.json·/api/v1/tools/jevcrawl.json - From a terminal
anchor compare diffbot jevcrawl(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "diffbot", "b": "jevcrawl"}at/mcp, no key