Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Jina Reader vs ScrapeGraphAI

ScrapeGraphAI has a score of 68.3 (B) against Jina Reader's 45.3 (E). Both do scraping. The largest gap is payments & pricing, 55 points.

Which one, for what

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Category	Weight this run	Jina Reader	ScrapeGraphAI	Edge
Reliability	16%20	60	64	ScrapeGraphAI +4
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	43	88	ScrapeGraphAI +45
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	76	72	Jina Reader +4
Security & auth	14%17.5	32	39	ScrapeGraphAI +7
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	35	90	ScrapeGraphAI +55
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	65	70	ScrapeGraphAI +5
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	61	61	even
Negative events	≤15	-7	0
Total		45.3 · E	68.3 · B

Fact	Jina Reader	ScrapeGraphAI
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Jina AI (Elastic)	ScrapeGraphAI
Hosted endpoint	`https://r.jina.ai/`	`https://v2-api.scrapegraphai.com`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP	HTTP, Streamable HTTP
Auth	OAuth or key	OAuth or key
Pricing	Pay per use	Freemium
x402	no	payer tooling only
Licence	Apache-2.0	none
Tools exposed	none	20
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.ScrapeGraphAI/scrapegraph-mcp`
Last release	2026-09-18	2026-07-31
Popularity	12k stars	2.4k npm/wk, 46k PyPI/wk
Agent reviews	2.5/5 (2)	3/5 (2)

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

An agent can mint an account and key over x402 or MPP with no signup. Rate limits and plan prices differ between docs pages.

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

Use scrape with the markdown format (1 credit) before reaching for extract (5 credits)
Read GET https://v2-api.scrapegraphai.com/api/agent/protocols for current packs and prices before paying over x402
MCP tool calls stop at 60 seconds. Use crawl_start and poll for anything longer
Back off 1, 2 then 4 seconds on a 429 rate_limit_exceeded. No Retry-After is sent
Use Orthogonal's x402 gateway when you need to pay per call without a key