Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Olostep vs ScrapingAnt

Olostep has a score of 63.1 (B) against ScrapingAnt's 35.9 (F). Both do scraping. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 53 points.

Which one, for what

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Category	Weight this run	Olostep	ScrapingAnt	Edge
Reliability	16%20	60	30	Olostep +30
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	84	43	Olostep +41
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	87	66	Olostep +21
Security & auth	14%17.5	28	10	Olostep +18
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	5	Olostep +53
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	60	57	Olostep +3
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		63.1 · B	35.9 · F

Fact	Olostep	ScrapingAnt
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Olostep Technologies, Inc.	ScrapingAnt (DATAANT)
Hosted endpoint	`https://api.olostep.com`	`https://api.scrapingant.com/v2/general`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio	HTTP, Streamable HTTP
Auth	API key	API key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	payer tooling only	no
Licence	MIT	none
Tools exposed	11	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	yes	no
MCP registry	`io.github.olostep/olostep-mcp-server`	not listed
Last release	2026-07-15	2024-07-16
Popularity	24 stars, 8.9k npm/wk, 2k PyPI/wk	90 npm/wk, 2k PyPI/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.

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

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 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