Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Jina Reader vs Scrapingdog

Jina Reader has a score of 45.3 (E) against Scrapingdog's 39.3 (E). Both do scraping. The largest gap is agent ergonomics, 32 points.

Which one, for what

Category	Weight this run	Jina Reader	Scrapingdog	Edge
Reliability	16%20	60	62	Scrapingdog +2
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	43	43	even
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	76	44	Jina Reader +32
Security & auth	14%17.5	32	5	Jina Reader +27
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	35	40	Scrapingdog +5
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	65	45	Jina Reader +20
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	61	57	Jina Reader +4
Negative events	≤15	-7	-2
Total		45.3 · E	39.3 · E

Fact	Jina Reader	Scrapingdog
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Jina AI (Elastic)	Scrapingdog (OpenData Labs)
Hosted endpoint	`https://r.jina.ai/`	`https://api.scrapingdog.com/scrape`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP	HTTP, stdio
Auth	OAuth or key	API key
Pricing	Pay per use	Freemium
x402	no	no
Licence	Apache-2.0	none
Tools exposed	none	35
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.Darshan972/scrapingdog-mcp`
Last release	2026-09-18	2026-07-31
Popularity	12k stars	0 stars, 41 npm/wk, 12 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.

A plain request is 1 credit, about $0.20 per 1,000 on Lite. API key only travels in the URL query string.

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

Add dynamic=false unless the page needs JavaScript. It cuts the cost from 5 credits to 1, whatever the MCP description says
Keep request URLs out of logs, since they carry api_key
Set client timeouts above 60 seconds and retry on 429 or timeout. Failures aren't billed
Prefer the parsed endpoints (Google, Amazon) over scraping the raw page when one exists