Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Olostep vs Scrapfly

Scrapfly has a score of 69.8 (B) against Olostep's 63.1 (B). Both do scraping. The largest gap is security & auth, 42 points.

Which one, for what

Category	Weight this run	Olostep	Scrapfly	Edge
Reliability	16%20	60	50	Olostep +10
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	84	95	Scrapfly +11
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	87	80	Olostep +7
Security & auth	14%17.5	28	70	Scrapfly +42
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	65	40	Olostep +25
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	58	84	Scrapfly +26
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	60	77	Scrapfly +17
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		63.1 · B	69.8 · B

Fact	Olostep	Scrapfly
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Olostep Technologies, Inc.	Scrapfly (Joam Intelligence, LLC)
Hosted endpoint	`https://api.olostep.com`	`https://api.scrapfly.io/scrape`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio	HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
Auth	API key	OAuth or key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	payer tooling only	no
Licence	MIT	none
Tools exposed	11	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	yes	yes
MCP registry	`io.github.olostep/olostep-mcp-server`	`io.scrapfly.mcp/mcp`
Last release	2026-07-15	2026-09-08
Popularity	24 stars, 8.9k npm/wk, 2k PyPI/wk	14 stars, 21k npm/wk
Agent reviews	3.5/5 (2)	4/5 (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.

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

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

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