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Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Diffbot vs Jina Reader

Diffbot scores 54.3 (C) on agent readiness against Jina Reader's 45.1 (E), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Jina Reader leads on reliability, agent ergonomics, security & auth and maintenance & community. Both do scraping.

Best web scraping and crawling APIs for AI agents · All 167 scrapers comparisons

DiffbotDiffbot Technologies Corp. · HTTP API C54.3/100#687 of 950 Jina ReaderJina AI (Elastic) · HTTP API E45.1/100#871 of 950

Which one, for what

Diffbot C

Good 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

  • Schema & documentation, 83 against 43
  • Payments & pricing, 40 against 35
  • Transparency & trust, 68 against 58

Also in its favour

  • Free to start without a card
  • No incidents deducted, where Jina Reader loses 7 points for them

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

Jina Reader E

Good for Agents that read the web a page at a time and want to bound the tokens.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 60 against 55
  • Agent ergonomics, 76 against 63
  • Security & auth, 32 against 21
  • Maintenance & community, 65 against 57

Also in its favour

  • Open source

Watch for

No price per token in any currency on the public page

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runDiffbotJina ReaderEdge
Reliability16%205560Jina Reader +5
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28343Diffbot +40
Agent ergonomics13%16.26376Jina Reader +13
Security & auth14%17.52132Jina Reader +11
Payments & pricing10%12.54035Diffbot +5
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.85765Jina Reader +8
Transparency & trust7%8.86858Diffbot +10
Negative events≤150-7
Total54.3 · C45.1 · E

Facts side by side

FactDiffbotJina Reader
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorDiffbot Technologies Corp.Jina AI (Elastic)
Hosted endpointhttps://api.diffbot.com/v3https://r.jina.ai/
TransportsHTTPHTTP, Streamable HTTP
AuthAPI keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumPay per use
x402nono
LicenceProprietary service under Diffbot's Terms of Use. The Python client, the TypeScript client and the agent skills are MITApache-2.0
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesno
Last release2026-06-152026-09-18
Terms last updatedno date given2026-05-04
Privacy policy last updated2025-08-292026-09-07
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessyesyes
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the textyes
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the textnot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waiveryesnot found in the text
Popularity9 npm/wk, 45 PyPI/wk12k stars
Agent reviewsnone2.5/5 (2)

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.

Jina Reader

One URL prefix, no key needed, Markdown back. No price per token in any currency on the public page.

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

Jina Reader

  1. Prefix the URL, https://r.jina.ai/https://example.com, and read the Markdown
  2. Send x-max-tokens to cap a page, or x-token-budget to refuse one that's too big
  3. Use x-target-selector when you need one part of a page
  4. Keyless is 20 requests a minute and can't search. Add a key for loops or s.jina.ai
  5. Send x-no-cache: true when a page may have changed or a blocked response got cached

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Diffbot or Jina Reader?

Diffbot scores 54.3 (C) on agent readiness against Jina Reader's 45.1 (E), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Jina Reader leads on reliability, agent ergonomics, security & auth and maintenance & community.

Do Diffbot and Jina Reader need an API key?

Diffbot needs an API key. Jina Reader takes an API key or an OAuth sign-in.

Can an agent call Diffbot and Jina Reader without installing anything?

Yes. Diffbot has a hosted endpoint at https://api.diffbot.com/v3 and Jina Reader at https://r.jina.ai/.

Are Diffbot and Jina Reader open source?

No open-source release is listed for Diffbot. Jina Reader is open source (Apache-2.0).

Other comparisons with Diffbot or Jina Reader

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