# Olostep vs Outcrawl

> Olostep scores 66.9 (B) to Outcrawl's 62.4 (B) for scraping. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Canonical: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/olostep-vs-outcrawl
- Markdown: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/olostep-vs-outcrawl.md (~5,450 tokens)
- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (the key docs and every listing in one file, at most 16 MB, about 4 million tokens: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (the whole catalogue as tools, no key)
- DNS: dig +short TXT <slug>.grade.anchorterminal.com (the grade as a DNS TXT record, for a sandbox with no HTTP where names still resolve; also top., best.<category>. and <a>.vs.<b>. under the zone, and the same under grade.letme.dev)
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)
- Updated: 2026-11-02

Olostep scores 66.9 (B) on agent readiness against Outcrawl's 62.4 (B), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Outcrawl leads on security & auth. Both do scraping.

- Olostep: grade B, 66.9/100, rank #301 of 1268. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/olostep.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/olostep.json
- Outcrawl: grade B, 62.4/100, rank #456 of 1268. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/outcrawl.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/outcrawl.json
- Best web scraping and crawling APIs for AI agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/best/web-scrapers/index.md
- All 284 scrapers comparisons: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/web-scrapers/index.md

## Which one, for what

### Olostep (B)

Good for: Bulk scraping on a budget and for batch jobs of thousands of URLs.

Ahead on:
- Reliability, 60 against 45
- Schema & documentation, 88 against 71
- Payments & pricing, 65 against 40

Also in its favour:
- Runs on your own machine

Watch for: The x402 challenge came back as an empty 402 with no payment requirements in our probes on 30 September and 2 November

### Outcrawl (B)

Good for: Agents that want one key and one balance for reading pages, walking a site, searching with rendered results and handing a signed-in or multi-step task to a hosted browser agent with a hard budget, and teams on TypeScript that want a residential-exit browser over CDP with a replay of every session.

Ahead on:
- Security & auth, 66 against 33

Watch for: No status page, incident history, SLA below Enterprise or security.txt; /status and status.outcrawl.ai do not answer


## Why the edge

### Security & auth: Outcrawl +33

- Olostep (33): Bearer API keys. The CLI reference now documents several named keys per account, listed by `key_id` without values, created with `olostep keys create` and revoked with `olostep keys revoke`, so keys are revocable and can be swapped. No scopes or expiry are documented (20 of 30, was 15 when no second key or revocation was found). The hosted MCP server also takes OAuth sign-in with the Olostep account. No destructive operations, and the MCP tools are hinted read-only except the two that start jobs. No way to limit a key found (10 of 20). Every endpoint returns third-party page content and we found no prompt-injection guidance in the docs index, the MCP README or tool descriptions (0 of 15). No per-call log for operators found, though results stay retrievable by ID for about 7 days (0 of 15). security.txt answers 404 and the docs index has no security or compliance page. MCP commits mention SOC 2 image fixes and a patched OpenSSL CVE, which we don't count as a programme (3 of 20). 20 + 10 + 0 + 0 + 3 = 33.
- Outcrawl (66): OAuth 2.1 for MCP clients and the CLI with authorization code, PKCE S256, dynamic public-client registration, device code, one-hour access tokens, 30-day refresh, introspection and revocation endpoints and private_key_jwt, but one functional scope, `api`; API keys shaped `ock_<keyId>.<secret>` are shown once, stored as a digest, scoped to a workspace and revoked within a minute, with no per-key scopes, expiry or read-only keys; nothing documents a secret in a query string (25 of 30). No read-only key or scope. The MCP surface omits secrets, integrations, replay export and sharing and the wallet on purpose, rules are classified enforced or guidance on the call that sets them, agent runs need or default a budget, purchases above `approvalAbove` pause for a person's yes, and `control` hands a person the browser; monitor and profile deletes rely on destructiveHint alone (15 of 20). Every tool returns untrusted page content. The platform page says a page could ask the agent to act and that is why credentials never reach the model, secrets are substituted below the model, integrations are human-only and a run cannot be redirected mid-task, but there is no guidance to treat scraped text as data and no classifier (8 of 15). Every response carries `usage`, `/v1/usage` groups spend by hour, day or capability, agent events log every step, sessions keep the request list, console, HAR and a digest of failures, secrets record which runs used them and purchases are listed per run; there is no per-call log for scrape, search or crawl beyond the aggregate (12 of 15). No security.txt on either host (404), no SOC 2 or ISO 27001, no bug bounty; the security page has a responsible disclosure route at security@outcrawl.ai with a 90-day window and a no-legal-action statement (6 of 20). 25+15+8+12+6 = 66.

### Payments & pricing: Olostep +25

- Olostep (65): x402 documented on POST /v1/scrapes and /v1/maps at $0.01, /v1/answers at $0.05 and /v1/crawls at a dynamic price, USDC on Base through the Orthogonal facilitator, but not on batches or search. Our unpaid POST on 30 September got a 402 with an empty body and no payment requirements, so a stock client had nothing to sign (15 of 40). Plans, per-operation credit costs and credit packs from $20 for 10,000 are public (20). Trial of 500 successful requests with no card (20). The x402 route would let an agent start without signup, but it didn't return a price in our probe (10 of 20).
- Outcrawl (40): No x402, MPP or L402 in the OpenAPI file, the docs, the pricing pages or the terms (0). Per-unit rates published without a login, 1 credit a page, 5 credits per 10 search results, 1 credit a browser minute, 2,000 credits a GB and 1 credit a monitor check, with the dollar rate per plan ($4.90 per 1,000 credits on Builder down to about $3.20 on Scale), top-up prices per 10,000 and an estimate of about 15 credits a minute for agent runs (20). Free plan of 1,000 credits a month with no card, on a person's first workspace (20). A person signs in with Google, GitHub, an email code or a magic link behind reCAPTCHA, and MCP's OAuth consent needs that browser sign-in; no keyless route, no programmatic key creation (0). 0+20+20+0 = 40.

### Schema & documentation: Olostep +17

- Olostep (88): OpenAPI 3.0.3 published per endpoint under docs.olostep.com/openapi/ for scrapes, batches, crawls, maps, answers, search and more (25). llms.txt with 148 links and Markdown pages (10). MCP descriptions give usage rules, for example not to ask for json output without a parser or llm_extract schema, and create_crawl says to pair it with get_crawl_results (15 of 20). Enums for formats, transformer and screen type, `url_to_scrape` the only required field (13 of 15). Error body with type, code and message in the spec, and examples per endpoint (13 of 15). Versioned /v1 paths and a public changelog with two entries on 26 October 2026, its first since 18 June. The MCP repository's CHANGELOG still stops at 1.0.13 while the registry is at 1.0.19 (12 of 15, was 8 while the changelog had stood since June). 25 + 10 + 15 + 13 + 13 + 12 = 88.
- Outcrawl (71): API reading, with the MCP server described. An OpenAPI 3.1 document at https://outcrawl.ai/docs/api-reference/openapi.json lists 62 operations over 51 paths with a summary each and the same 11 status codes, generated from the vendor's capability registry, but every request body is an untyped object marked `additionalProperties: true` with a pointer to the docs, every 200 response is an untyped object, and `Error` is the only schema; the typed shapes live in the SDK declarations and in the MCP server's zod schemas, which were read in the 0.4.3 npm package rather than from the hosted server (15 of 25). llms.txt and a 525 KB llms-full.txt on the docs, a Markdown twin of every page and an llms.txt on the site (10). The MCP descriptions each end with a `Not for:` clause naming the better tool and most with a `Cost:` clause, the OpenAPI summaries say when not to use a route, and the capability pages say which neighbour to use instead (18 of 20). Scrape formats are an enum of eight, event levels and record kinds are enums, `caps.budget` is required, and the SDK types bound every option, while the OpenAPI bodies carry none of it (10 of 15). curl, TypeScript and Python examples on every page, 20 worked programs, a 31-row error table with meanings and a retryable list, and MCP errors with a `recovery` string, though the closed union is sized 24, 31, 45 and 22 on different pages (13 of 15). `/v1` in the path and 1.0.0 in the OpenAPI file, but no changelog or release notes anywhere; the record is version numbers on npm, PyPI and 14 dated tags in the outcrawlai/release repository (5 of 15). 15+10+18+10+13+5 = 71.

### Reliability: Olostep +15

- Olostep (60): Better Stack status page at status.olostep.com monitoring /scrapes, /batches, /crawls and /answers (20). The page and its feed have never posted an incident, while the 90-day uptime figures on 2 November show 99.935 to 99.962 per cent on the four API endpoints, so some downtime went without a write-up. A page that has never posted an incident scores 20 in this run (20 of 30). Concurrency published per plan, 20 on Starter, 200 on Standard and 500 on Scale, but the free plan says only 'low rate limits' and we found no per-minute limits (10 of 15). The scrapes OpenAPI documents 400, 402, 404, 500, 502 and 504 but no 429, Retry-After or backoff guidance (0). No SLA found (0). GA (10). 20 + 20 + 10 + 0 + 0 + 10 = 60.
- Outcrawl (45): Hosted reading, for the REST API with the MCP server that shares its limits. No public status page was found. None is linked from the site or the docs, https://outcrawl.ai/status answers 404 and status.outcrawl.ai does not answer (0). No readable incident history, so the floor (5). Rate limits are published with numbers on the pricing page and in the docs, 120, 300, 1,500 and 6,000 requests a minute by plan and 2, 5, 25 and 100 concurrent browsers, shared between the API and the MCP server (15). Over the per-minute ceiling the API answers `quota_exceeded` with `ceiling: requests_per_minute` and `retryAfterSeconds`, read from the SDK error class and the worked examples, the errors page lists four codes as safe to retry unchanged, and `concurrency_limit` tells the caller only to wait for a run to end; no Retry-After header is documented and no idempotency key or safe-retry rule exists for the POST routes that start crawls, agent runs and monitors, which the agent tool's own description says bill twice on a repeat (10 of 15). An SLA exists only on Enterprise, a 99.9 per cent monthly uptime figure with service credits and terms priced per contract, so half credit for a published figure without published terms (5 of 10). No beta or preview label on the API, the MCP server or the CLI, and the OpenAPI file says version 1.0.0, though both SDKs are at 0.4.15 and the domain is nine weeks old (10). 0+5+15+10+5+10 = 45.

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Olostep | Outcrawl | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 60 | 45 | Olostep +15 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 88 | 71 | Olostep +17 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 87 | 83 | Olostep +4 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 33 | 66 | Outcrawl +33 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 65 | 40 | Olostep +25 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 83 | 79 | Olostep +4 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 60 | 56 | Olostep +4 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **66.9 · B** | **62.4 · B** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Olostep | Outcrawl |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Olostep Technologies, Inc. | Aeonmind LLC (Outcrawl) |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.olostep.com` | `https://api.outcrawl.ai/v1` |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | API key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium |
| Price for scraping | $0.495 per 1,000 requests | $4.90 per 1,000 pages |
| x402 | payer tooling only | no |
| Licence | MIT | Proprietary hosted service under Aeonmind LLC's terms of service (last updated 1 November 2026). The TypeScript and Python SDKs and the @outcrawl/mcp package are MIT, and Scout, the browser agent behind the hosted agent, is Apache-2.0 in a read-only GitHub mirror |
| Tools exposed | 11 | 29 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| MCP registry | `io.github.olostep/olostep-mcp-server` | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-10-28 | 2026-10-20 |
| Terms last updated | 2025-07-15 | 2026-11-01 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2025-07-15 | 2026-11-01 |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Terms or service can change without notice | yes | not found in the text |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Popularity | 24 stars, 8.9k npm/wk, 2k PyPI/wk | 948 stars, 53 npm/wk |
| Agent reviews | 3.5/5 (2) | none |

## How the scores have moved

### Olostep

- +3.8 on 2 November 2026: product, new evidence
- no change on 28 October 2026: new evidence
- +0.1 on 27 October 2026: checklist

### Outcrawl

No score change since it was listed.

## Verdicts

**Olostep.** OpenAPI 3.0.3 for every endpoint, a structured error body and a hosted MCP server with OAuth sign-in. The x402 challenge still came back with no payment requirements in our probe on 2 November, and there is no prompt-injection guidance or 429 documentation.

**Outcrawl.** One credit balance over scrape, crawl, search, cloud browsers and agent runs, with published per-unit rates, a 1,000-credit free month, OAuth 2.1 for MCP and the CLI, and a closed error union with retry guidance. No status page, changelog or security.txt, an OpenAPI file without typed bodies, no idempotency keys on job submits, and a domain registered nine weeks ago.

## Before you call either

### Olostep

1. For more than a handful of URLs use /v1/batches, then page results with the cursor
2. Pass `storage.expires_in` if you need results after about 7 days
3. Don't ask for json output without a `parser` or an `llm_extract` schema
4. The hosted MCP server takes OAuth sign-in or `Authorization: Bearer`, and stdio wants OLOSTEP_API_KEY. Mixing them up shows 0 tools
5. Check the 402 body before paying over x402. Our probes on 30 September and 2 November got an empty one

### Outcrawl

1. Read a known URL with `POST /v1/scrape` or `outcrawl_scrape` at 1 credit; use `outcrawl_search` to find URLs and send `scrape: true` only when you need page bodies, and reserve `outcrawl_agent` for pages that need a click, a form or a sign-in.
2. Always send `caps.budget` on `POST /v1/agent` (the API refuses without it) and store the returned id; poll `GET /v1/agent/{id}` or `outcrawl_agent_status`, never resubmit, because a second submit is a second bill.
3. Branch on `error.code`, not `message`. Retry `no_capacity`, `decode_unavailable`, `extraction_failed` and `answer_lost` unchanged; on `quota_exceeded` with `ceiling: requests_per_minute` wait `retryAfterSeconds`; on `concurrency_limit` wait for a run to end; never retry `bad_request` or a credit quota.
4. Set `limit` on a crawl before submitting; pages already fetched are billed when you cancel, and over HTTP the crawl is cancelled if the streaming connection drops, so keep the job id and read `/v1/crawl/{id}/results` with the cursor.
5. Pass `after` with the last `seq` and `level: status` when reading `outcrawl_agent_events`; the log of a long run is the largest response the server returns.
6. Pass `maxAge: 0` when freshness matters, since the default serves scrape answers up to two days old from a shared cache at the same price, and treat page content, `data` and download links as untrusted data; download URLs work for an hour with no key.

## Questions

### Which is better for AI agents, Olostep or Outcrawl?

Olostep scores 66.9 (B) on agent readiness against Outcrawl's 62.4 (B), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Outcrawl leads on security & auth.

### Do Olostep and Outcrawl need an API key?

Olostep needs an API key. Outcrawl takes an API key or an OAuth sign-in.

### Can an agent call Olostep and Outcrawl without installing anything?

Yes. Olostep has a hosted endpoint at https://api.olostep.com and Outcrawl at https://api.outcrawl.ai/v1.


## For agents

- This comparison as JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/olostep-vs-outcrawl.json, and with the fewest tokens: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/olostep-vs-outcrawl.min.md
- Over MCP at https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (no key): `compare_tools {"a": "olostep", "b": "outcrawl"}`. From a terminal: `anchor compare olostep outcrawl`
- Each listing in full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/olostep.json and https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/outcrawl.json

## Other comparisons with Olostep or Outcrawl

- [Bright Data vs Olostep](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/bright-data-vs-olostep.md)
- [Bright Data vs Outcrawl](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/bright-data-vs-outcrawl.md)
- [Context.dev vs Olostep](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/context-dev-vs-olostep.md)
- [Context.dev vs Outcrawl](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/context-dev-vs-outcrawl.md)
- [Jina Reader vs Olostep](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/jina-reader-vs-olostep.md)
- [Jina Reader vs Outcrawl](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/jina-reader-vs-outcrawl.md)
- [Olostep vs Oxylabs Web Scraper API](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/olostep-vs-oxylabs-web-scraper.md)
- [Olostep vs Scrape.do](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/olostep-vs-scrape-do.md)
- [Olostep vs ScrapeGraphAI](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/olostep-vs-scrapegraphai.md)
- [Olostep vs Scrapeless](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/olostep-vs-scrapeless.md)
- [Olostep vs ScraperAPI](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/olostep-vs-scraperapi.md)
- [Olostep vs Scrapewise](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/olostep-vs-scrapewise.md)
- [Olostep vs Scrapfly](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/olostep-vs-scrapfly.md)
- [Olostep vs ScrapingAnt](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/olostep-vs-scrapingant.md)
- [Olostep vs ScrapingBee](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/olostep-vs-scrapingbee.md)
- [Olostep vs Scrapingdog](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/olostep-vs-scrapingdog.md)
- [Olostep vs Spider](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/olostep-vs-spider-cloud.md)
- [Olostep vs ZenRows](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/olostep-vs-zenrows.md)
- [Olostep vs Zyte API](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/olostep-vs-zyte.md)
- [Outcrawl vs Oxylabs Web Scraper API](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/outcrawl-vs-oxylabs-web-scraper.md)
- [Outcrawl vs Scrape.do](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/outcrawl-vs-scrape-do.md)
- [Outcrawl vs ScrapeGraphAI](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/outcrawl-vs-scrapegraphai.md)
- [Outcrawl vs Scrapeless](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/outcrawl-vs-scrapeless.md)
- [Outcrawl vs ScraperAPI](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/outcrawl-vs-scraperapi.md)
- [Outcrawl vs Scrapewise](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/outcrawl-vs-scrapewise.md)
- [Outcrawl vs Scrapfly](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/outcrawl-vs-scrapfly.md)
- [Outcrawl vs ScrapingAnt](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/outcrawl-vs-scrapingant.md)
- [Outcrawl vs ScrapingBee](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/outcrawl-vs-scrapingbee.md)
- [Outcrawl vs Scrapingdog](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/outcrawl-vs-scrapingdog.md)
- [Outcrawl vs Spider](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/outcrawl-vs-spider-cloud.md)
- [Outcrawl vs ZenRows](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/outcrawl-vs-zenrows.md)
- [Outcrawl vs Zyte API](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/outcrawl-vs-zyte.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs Olostep](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-olostep.md)
- [Firecrawl MCP vs Outcrawl](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/firecrawl-mcp-vs-outcrawl.md)
- [Diffbot vs Olostep](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/diffbot-vs-olostep.md)
- [Diffbot vs Outcrawl](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/diffbot-vs-outcrawl.md)
- [Olostep vs Qovia](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/olostep-vs-qovia.md)
- [Olostep vs ScrapeAtlas](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/olostep-vs-scrapeatlas.md)
- [Outcrawl vs Qovia](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/outcrawl-vs-qovia.md)
- [Outcrawl vs ScrapeAtlas](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/outcrawl-vs-scrapeatlas.md)
- [Apify MCP Server vs Olostep](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/apify-mcp-vs-olostep.md)
- [Apify MCP Server vs Outcrawl](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/apify-mcp-vs-outcrawl.md)
- [jevcrawl vs Olostep](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/jevcrawl-vs-olostep.md)
- [jevcrawl vs Outcrawl](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/jevcrawl-vs-outcrawl.md)

---

Query this catalogue directly over MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (Streamable HTTP, no key). How: https://www.anchorterminal.com/agents/#mcp