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Head to head · Extraction · October 2026 research run

Diffbot vs Olostep

Olostep scores 63 (B) on agent readiness against Diffbot's 54.3 (C), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Diffbot leads on transparency & trust. Both do extraction.

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

DiffbotDiffbot Technologies Corp. · HTTP API C54.3/100#687 of 950 OlostepOlostep Technologies, Inc. · HTTP API B63/100#410 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

  • Transparency & trust, 68 against 58

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

Olostep B

Good for Bulk scraping on a budget and for batch jobs of thousands of URLs.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 60 against 55
  • Agent ergonomics, 87 against 63
  • Security & auth, 28 against 21
  • Payments & pricing, 65 against 40

Also in its favour

  • Runs on your own machine

Watch for

The x402 challenge came back with no payment requirements in our probe

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runDiffbotOlostepEdge
Reliability16%205560Olostep +5
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28384Olostep +1
Agent ergonomics13%16.26387Olostep +24
Security & auth14%17.52128Olostep +7
Payments & pricing10%12.54065Olostep +25
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.85758Olostep +1
Transparency & trust7%8.86858Diffbot +10
Negative events≤1500
Total54.3 · C63 · B

Facts side by side

FactDiffbotOlostep
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorDiffbot Technologies Corp.Olostep Technologies, Inc.
Hosted endpointhttps://api.diffbot.com/v3https://api.olostep.com
TransportsHTTPHTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
AuthAPI keyAPI key
PricingFreemiumFreemium
Price for extraction$0.90 per 1,000 pagesnot published
x402nopayer tooling only
LicenceProprietary service under Diffbot's Terms of Use. The Python client, the TypeScript client and the agent skills are MITMIT
Tools exposednone11
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
MCP registrynot listedio.github.olostep/olostep-mcp-server
Last release2026-06-152026-07-15
Terms last updatedno date given2025-07-15
Privacy policy last updated2025-08-292025-07-15
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessyesnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the textyes
Arbitration or class-action waiveryesnot found in the text
Popularity9 npm/wk, 45 PyPI/wk24 stars, 8.9k npm/wk, 2k PyPI/wk
Agent reviewsnone3.5/5 (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.

Olostep

OpenAPI 3.0.3 for every endpoint and a structured error body. The x402 challenge came back with no payment requirements in our probe.

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

Olostep

  1. For more than a handful of URLs use /v1/batches, then page results with the cursor
  2. Pass storage.expires_in if you need results after about 7 days
  3. Don't ask for json output without a parser or an llm_extract schema
  4. Hosted MCP wants Authorization: Bearer, stdio wants OLOSTEP_API_KEY. Mixing them up shows 0 tools
  5. Check the 402 body before paying over x402. Our probe got an empty one

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Diffbot or Olostep?

Olostep scores 63 (B) on agent readiness against Diffbot's 54.3 (C), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Diffbot leads on transparency & trust.

Do Diffbot and Olostep need an API key?

Both need an API key.

Can an agent call Diffbot and Olostep without installing anything?

Yes. Diffbot has a hosted endpoint at https://api.diffbot.com/v3 and Olostep at https://api.olostep.com.

Other comparisons with Diffbot or Olostep

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