Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Olostep vs Scrape.do

Olostep has a score of 63.1 (B) against Scrape.do's 44 (E). Both do scraping. The largest gap is payments & pricing, 30 points.

Which one, for what

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Category	Weight this run	Olostep	Scrape.do	Edge
Reliability	16%20	60	40	Olostep +20
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	84	57	Olostep +27
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	87	62	Olostep +25
Security & auth	14%17.5	28	23	Olostep +5
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	65	35	Olostep +30
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	58	45	Olostep +13
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	60	49	Olostep +11
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		63.1 · B	44 · E

Fact	Olostep	Scrape.do
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Olostep Technologies, Inc.	Scrape.do
Hosted endpoint	`https://api.olostep.com`	`https://api.scrape.do/`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio	HTTP
Auth	API key	API key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	payer tooling only	no
Licence	MIT	none
Tools exposed	11	none
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	yes	yes
MCP registry	`io.github.olostep/olostep-mcp-server`	not listed
Last release	2026-07-15	2026-07-31
Popularity	24 stars, 8.9k npm/wk, 2k PyPI/wk	2 npm/wk
Agent reviews	3.5/5 (2)	3.5/5 (2)

OpenAPI 3.0.3 for every endpoint and a structured error body. The x402 challenge came back with no payment requirements in our probe.

$29 for 250,000 basic credits, and 429s, 502s and most failures aren't billed. Token travels in the query string on the main API.

For more than a handful of URLs use /v1/batches, then page results with the cursor
Pass storage.expires_in if you need results after about 7 days
Don't ask for json output without a parser or an llm_extract schema
Hosted MCP wants Authorization: Bearer, stdio wants OLOSTEP_API_KEY. Mixing them up shows 0 tools
Check the 402 body before paying over x402. Our probe got an empty one

Start with the default data centre request (1 credit). Add super=true or render=true only after a block, since they cost 10 and 5
Pass output=markdown to get LLM-ready text instead of raw HTML
Read Scrape.do-Request-Cost from the response headers. Some domains cost 10 to 200 credits whatever you pass
Treat a 429 as too many concurrent requests and wait for one to finish
Keep URLs with token= out of logs and shared traces