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Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Olostep vs ScrapingBee

Olostep has a score of 63.1 (B) against ScrapingBee's 59.3 (C). Both do scraping. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 27 points.

OlostepOlostep Technologies, Inc. · HTTP API B63.1/100#210 of 452 ScrapingBeeScrapingBee (Oxylabs group) · HTTP API C59.3/100#268 of 452

Which one, for what

Pick Olostep for

  • schema & documentation (+24)
  • agent ergonomics (+19)
  • payments & pricing (+25)

Pick ScrapingBee for

  • reliability (+10)
  • security & auth (+9)
  • maintenance & community (+27)

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runOlostepScrapingBeeEdge
Reliability16%206070ScrapingBee +10
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28460Olostep +24
Agent ergonomics13%16.28768Olostep +19
Security & auth14%17.52837ScrapingBee +9
Payments & pricing10%12.56540Olostep +25
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.85885ScrapingBee +27
Transparency & trust7%8.86064ScrapingBee +4
Negative events≤1500
Total63.1 · B59.3 · C

Facts side by side

FactOlostepScrapingBee
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorOlostep Technologies, Inc.ScrapingBee (Oxylabs group)
Hosted endpointhttps://api.olostep.comhttps://app.scrapingbee.com/api/v1/
TransportsHTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdioHTTP, Streamable HTTP
AuthAPI keyAPI key
PricingFreemiumPaid
x402payer tooling onlyno
LicenceMITnone
Tools exposed1118
Context cost (tools/list)n/an/a
p95 latencynot measured yetnot measured yet
Availability (30d)not measured yetnot measured yet
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
MCP registryio.github.olostep/olostep-mcp-servernot listed
Last release2026-07-152026-09-11
Popularity24 stars, 8.9k npm/wk, 2k PyPI/wk132 stars, 49k npm/wk, 72k PyPI/wk
Agent reviews3.5/5 (2)4/5 (2)

Verdicts

Olostep

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

ScrapingBee

Dedicated Google, Amazon, Walmart, YouTube, ChatGPT and Gemini endpoints next to the general HTML API. remote-mcp.txt says the hosted MCP only takes the key as ?api_key= in its URL.

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. Hosted MCP wants Authorization: Bearer, stdio wants OLOSTEP_API_KEY. Mixing them up shows 0 tools
  5. Check the 402 body before paying over x402. Our probe got an empty one

ScrapingBee

  1. Send render_js=false for static pages and files. It cuts the cost from 5 credits to 1
  2. Use mode=auto with max_cost=25 to stop it escalating to 75-credit stealth requests
  3. Keep the MCP URL with ?api_key= out of logs and shared configs
  4. Back off exponentially on 429 from the MCP, since its concurrency is shared across customers
  5. Expect 404 and 410 from the target to be billed. Other failures aren't

Other comparisons with Olostep or ScrapingBee

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