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

CategoryWeight this runDiffbotjevcrawlEdge
Reliability16%205568jevcrawl +13
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28381Diffbot +2
Agent ergonomics13%16.26380jevcrawl +17
Security & auth14%17.52159jevcrawl +38
Payments & pricing10%12.54030Diffbot +10
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.85768jevcrawl +11
Transparency & trust7%8.86845Diffbot +23
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 54.3/100B 63.7/100

Facts side by side

FactDiffbotjevcrawl
KindHTTP APIMCP server
VendorDiffbot Technologies Corp.Rayen Mlayeh
Hosted endpointhttps://api.diffbot.com/v3no (local only)
TransportsHTTPstdio
AuthAPI keyAPI key
PricingFreemiumPay per use
Price for extraction$0.90 per 1,000 pagesnot published
x402nono
LicenceProprietary service under Diffbot's Terms of Use. The Python client, the TypeScript client and the agent skills are MITApache-2.0
Tools exposednone3
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-06-152026-10-15
Terms last updatedno date givenno document linked
Privacy policy last updated2025-08-29no document linked
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessyes
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waiveryes
Popularity9 npm/wk, 45 PyPI/wk60 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

  1. Call GET https://api.diffbot.com/v3/analyze?url=<encoded URL>&token=<token> when the page type is unknown. Use /v3/article or /v3/product to force one schema
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. Check a 200 response for errorCode. The official client raises ExtractionError when a 200 reports a failed extraction
  5. Set useProxy=default only when a site blocks the fetch. A proxied page costs 2 credits against 1
  6. Install diffbot from PyPI, not diffbot-python, which stopped at 0.3.0

jevcrawl

  1. Phrase goal as one specific question and start with max_pages between 10 and 30
  2. Check stats.stopped_because and stats.degraded, and read uncertain before reporting that something is missing
  3. Use scrape without a goal when you need a whole page, since it makes no paid Jev call and needs no key
  4. Handle {"error": code, "message": ...} results, for example auth_error means TYPESAFE_API_KEY is missing or rejected
  5. Pages in stats.needs_js_urls were 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

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