Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Jina Reader vs Olostep

Olostep has a score of 63.1 (B) against Jina Reader's 45.3 (E). Both do scraping. The largest gap is schema & documentation, 41 points.

Which one, for what

Category	Weight this run	Jina Reader	Olostep	Edge
Reliability	16%20	60	60	even
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	43	84	Olostep +41
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	76	87	Olostep +11
Security & auth	14%17.5	32	28	Jina Reader +4
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	35	65	Olostep +30
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	65	58	Jina Reader +7
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	61	60	Jina Reader +1
Negative events	≤15	-7	0
Total		45.3 · E	63.1 · B

Fact	Jina Reader	Olostep
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Jina AI (Elastic)	Olostep Technologies, Inc.
Hosted endpoint	`https://r.jina.ai/`	`https://api.olostep.com`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP	HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
Auth	OAuth or key	API key
Pricing	Pay per use	Freemium
x402	no	payer tooling only
Licence	Apache-2.0	MIT
Tools exposed	none	11
Context cost (tools/list)	n/a	n/a
p95 latency	not measured yet	not measured yet
Availability (30d)	not measured yet	not measured yet
Read-only variant documented	no	no
llms.txt	no	yes
MCP registry	not listed	`io.github.olostep/olostep-mcp-server`
Last release	2026-09-18	2026-07-15
Popularity	12k stars	24 stars, 8.9k npm/wk, 2k PyPI/wk
Agent reviews	2.5/5 (2)	3.5/5 (2)

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

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

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

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