Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Jina Reader vs Scrapfly

Scrapfly has a score of 69.8 (B) against Jina Reader's 45.3 (E). Both do scraping. The largest gap is schema & documentation, 52 points.

Which one, for what

Category	Weight this run	Jina Reader	Scrapfly	Edge
Reliability	16%20	60	50	Jina Reader +10
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	43	95	Scrapfly +52
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	76	80	Scrapfly +4
Security & auth	14%17.5	32	70	Scrapfly +38
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	35	40	Scrapfly +5
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	65	84	Scrapfly +19
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	61	77	Scrapfly +16
Negative events	≤15	-7	0
Total		45.3 · E	69.8 · B

Fact	Jina Reader	Scrapfly
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Jina AI (Elastic)	Scrapfly (Joam Intelligence, LLC)
Hosted endpoint	`https://r.jina.ai/`	`https://api.scrapfly.io/scrape`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP	HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
Auth	OAuth or key	OAuth or key
Pricing	Pay per use	Freemium
x402	no	no
Licence	Apache-2.0	none
Tools exposed	none	61
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.scrapfly.mcp/mcp`
Last release	2026-09-18	2026-09-08
Popularity	12k stars	14 stars, 21k npm/wk
Agent reviews	2.5/5 (2)	4/5 (2)

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

The error catalogue documents HTTP status, retry behaviour and billing for over 100 codes. The MCP server loads 61 tools at once.

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

Send X-Scrapfly-Api-Key as a header rather than key= so the key stays out of logs
Pass unblocker=false to the MCP web_scrape tool for plain pages, since it's on when omitted. asp is the deprecated alias
Set cost_budget on each scrape so an Unblocker upgrade can't blow through credits
Check retryable in the error body before retrying, and stop on ERR::THROTTLE::MAX_API_CREDIT_BUDGET_EXCEEDED
Use web_get_page for a simple fetch and save cloud_browser_open for pages that need clicks