Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Jina Reader vs ScrapingAnt

Jina Reader has a score of 45.3 (E) against ScrapingAnt's 35.9 (F). Both do scraping. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 60 points.

Which one, for what

Category	Weight this run	Jina Reader	ScrapingAnt	Edge
Reliability	16%20	60	30	Jina Reader +30
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	43	43	even
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	76	66	Jina Reader +10
Security & auth	14%17.5	32	10	Jina Reader +22
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	35	40	ScrapingAnt +5
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	65	5	Jina Reader +60
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	61	57	Jina Reader +4
Negative events	≤15	-7	0
Total		45.3 · E	35.9 · F

Fact	Jina Reader	ScrapingAnt
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Jina AI (Elastic)	ScrapingAnt (DATAANT)
Hosted endpoint	`https://r.jina.ai/`	`https://api.scrapingant.com/v2/general`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP	HTTP, Streamable HTTP
Auth	OAuth or key	API key
Pricing	Pay per use	Freemium
x402	no	no
Licence	Apache-2.0	none
Tools exposed	none	3
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	no
MCP registry	not listed	not listed
Last release	2026-09-18	2024-07-16
Popularity	12k stars	90 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.

10,000 free credits a month with no card. API Basics puts the key in the query string, so it lands in logs.

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 the key in the x-api-key header rather than the query string
Use /v2/markdown for LLM input, and set browser=false on static pages to pay 1 credit instead of 10
Switch to proxy_type=residential only after a 423 (anti-bot) response. It raises a browser request from 10 to 125 credits
On the free plan a second concurrent request gets 409. Wait for the first to finish
Google, Bing and Yandex result pages come back as raw HTML through /v2/general, so you parse them yourself