Head to head · Crawling · October 2026 research run

jevcrawl vs ScraperAPI

jevcrawl scores 63.7 (B) on agent readiness against ScraperAPI's 52.1 (D), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. ScraperAPI leads on payments & pricing and transparency & trust. Both do crawling.

Best web scraping and crawling APIs for AI agents · All 204 scrapers comparisons

Which one, for what

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 45
  • Schema & documentation, 81 against 67
  • Agent ergonomics, 80 against 74
  • Security & auth, 59 against 29
  • Maintenance & community, 68 against 61

Also in its favour

  • Open source

Watch for

First released on 13 October 2026, version 0.2.0 and marked alpha, with one maintainer

ScraperAPI D

Best for Agents that want a single GET to fetch pages through proxies, with parsed JSON for Amazon, Google, Walmart, eBay and Redfin and a batch API of up to 50,000 URLs.

Ahead on

  • Payments & pricing, 40 against 30
  • Transparency & trust, 54 against 45

Also in its favour

  • A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install
  • Free to start without a card

Watch for

No status page is linked from the home, pricing, support or docs pages, although the pricing page lists a 99.9% uptime guarantee

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runjevcrawlScraperAPIEdge
Reliability16%206845jevcrawl +23
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28167jevcrawl +14
Agent ergonomics13%16.28074jevcrawl +6
Security & auth14%17.55929jevcrawl +30
Payments & pricing10%12.53040ScraperAPI +10
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.86861jevcrawl +7
Transparency & trust7%8.84554ScraperAPI +9
Negative events≤1500
TotalB 63.7/100D 52.1/100

Facts side by side

FactjevcrawlScraperAPI
KindMCP serverHTTP API
VendorRayen MlayehScraperAPI (saas.group)
Hosted endpointno (local only)https://api.scraperapi.com
TransportsstdioHTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
AuthAPI keyAPI key
PricingPay per useFreemium
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0none
Tools exposed328
Read-only variant documentednoyes
llms.txtnoyes
Last release2026-10-152026-08-07
Terms last updatedno document linkedcouldn't be read
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno date given
Customer content may train modelscouldn't be read
Terms restrict automated accesscouldn't be read
Terms restrict benchmarkingcouldn't be read
Terms or service can change without noticecouldn't be read
Arbitration or class-action waivercouldn't be read
Popularity60 stars, 204 PyPI/wk5 stars

Verdicts

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.

ScraperAPI

One GET request with a key and a URL returns a page, and the MCP server's 28 tools carry read-only and destructive hints. No status page, OpenAPI file, security.txt or certification was found, and the documented default puts the API key in the URL query string.

Before you call either

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

ScraperAPI

  1. Set the client timeout to 70 seconds. The API retries for that long before it returns 500, and a request cancelled earlier is still charged
  2. Send the key as the x-sapi-api_key header to keep it out of URLs and logs
  3. Pass max_cost on each request, or call /account/urlcost first, because domain and anti-bot surcharges vary from 1 to 75 credits
  4. Use output_format=markdown or text to cut response size, and autoparse=true only on supported domains
  5. On 429 reduce concurrency to the plan limit (5 on Free, 20 on Hobby). The request is rejected, not queued

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, jevcrawl or ScraperAPI?

jevcrawl scores 63.7 (B) on agent readiness against ScraperAPI's 52.1 (D), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. ScraperAPI leads on payments & pricing and transparency & trust.

Do jevcrawl and ScraperAPI need an API key?

Both need an API key.

Can an agent call jevcrawl and ScraperAPI without installing anything?

jevcrawl runs on your own machine, with no hosted endpoint listed. ScraperAPI has a hosted endpoint at https://api.scraperapi.com.

Are jevcrawl and ScraperAPI open source?

jevcrawl is open source (Apache-2.0). No open-source release is listed for ScraperAPI.

Other comparisons with jevcrawl or ScraperAPI

Machine-readable

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