Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Olostep vs Scrapingdog

Olostep has a score of 63.1 (B) against Scrapingdog's 39.3 (E). Both do scraping. The largest gap is agent ergonomics, 43 points.

Which one, for what

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Category	Weight this run	Olostep	Scrapingdog	Edge
Reliability	16%20	60	62	Scrapingdog +2
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	44	Olostep +43
Security & auth	14%17.5	28	5	Olostep +23
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	45	Olostep +13
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	60	57	Olostep +3
Negative events	≤15	0	-2
Total		63.1 · B	39.3 · E

Fact	Olostep	Scrapingdog
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Olostep Technologies, Inc.	Scrapingdog (OpenData Labs)
Hosted endpoint	`https://api.olostep.com`	`https://api.scrapingdog.com/scrape`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio	HTTP, stdio
Auth	API key	API key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	payer tooling only	no
Licence	MIT	none
Tools exposed	11	35
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.github.Darshan972/scrapingdog-mcp`
Last release	2026-07-15	2026-07-31
Popularity	24 stars, 8.9k npm/wk, 2k PyPI/wk	0 stars, 41 npm/wk, 12 PyPI/wk
Agent reviews	3.5/5 (2)	3/5 (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.

A plain request is 1 credit, about $0.20 per 1,000 on Lite. API key only travels in the URL query string.

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

Add dynamic=false unless the page needs JavaScript. It cuts the cost from 5 credits to 1, whatever the MCP description says
Keep request URLs out of logs, since they carry api_key
Set client timeouts above 60 seconds and retry on 429 or timeout. Failures aren't billed
Prefer the parsed endpoints (Google, Amazon) over scraping the raw page when one exists