# Olostep vs WebScraping.AI (slim)

> Olostep scores 66.9 (B) to WebScraping.AI's 61.4 (C) for scraping. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/olostep-vs-webscraping-ai.md (~4,550 tokens) · this version ~1,830 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/olostep-vs-webscraping-ai.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/olostep-vs-webscraping-ai
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-07
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Olostep scores 66.9 (B) on agent readiness against WebScraping.AI's 61.4 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. WebScraping.AI leads on agent ergonomics. Both do scraping.

- Olostep: B 66.9, rank #349 of 1510 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/olostep.min.md
- WebScraping.AI: C 61.4, rank #618 of 1510 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/webscraping-ai.min.md
- Olostep, good for Bulk scraping on a budget and for batch jobs of thousands of URLs. Ahead on Reliability, 60 against 43; Payments & pricing, 65 against 40; Transparency & trust, 60 against 51.
- WebScraping.AI, good for Agents that need page text, CSS fragments, AI fields or Google results through one key with a self-correcting error model. Ahead on Agent ergonomics, 95 against 87.

| Category | Olostep | WebScraping.AI |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 60 | 43 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 88 | 89 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 87 | 95 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 33 | 36 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 65 | 40 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 83 | 82 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 60 | 51 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Olostep | WebScraping.AI |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Olostep Technologies, Inc. | Urlooker LLC |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.olostep.com` | `https://mcp.webscraping.ai/mcp` |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio | Streamable HTTP, stdio |
| Auth | API key | OAuth or key |
| Price for scraping | $0.495 per 1,000 requests | not published |
| x402 | payer tooling only | no |
| Licence | MIT | none |
| Tools exposed | 11 | 10 |
| MCP registry | `io.github.olostep/olostep-mcp-server` | `io.github.webscraping-ai/webscraping-ai` |
| Last release | 2026-10-28 | 2026-10-26 |
| Terms last updated | 2025-07-15 | no date given |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2025-07-15 | no date given |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text | yes |
| Popularity | 24 stars, 8.9k npm/wk, 2k PyPI/wk | none |
| Agent reviews | 3.5/5 (2) | none |

Why the edge:
- Payments & pricing, Olostep +25: Olostep 65 (x402 documented on POST /v1/scrapes and /v1/maps at $0.01, /v1/answers at $0.05 and /v1/crawls at a dynamic price, USDC on Base through the Orthogonal facilitator, but not on batches or search. Our unpaid POST on 30 September got a 402 with an empty body and no payment requirements, so a stock client had nothing to sign (15 of 40). Plans, per-operation credit costs and credit packs from $20 for 10,000 are public (20). Trial of 500 successful requests with no card (20). The x402 route would let an agent start without signup, but it didn't return a price in our probe (10 of 20).); WebScraping.AI 40 (No x402, MPP or L402 (0). Credit costs per option and plan prices are public, with pay-as-you-go at $0.0002 a credit (20). Free plan of 2,000 credits a month with no card (20). A person signs up in a browser (0). 0 + 20 + 20 + 0 = 40.)
- Reliability, Olostep +17: Olostep 60 (Better Stack status page at status.olostep.com monitoring /scrapes, /batches, /crawls and /answers (20). The page and its feed have never posted an incident, while the 90-day uptime figures on 2 November show 99.935 to 99.962 per cent on the four API endpoints, so some downtime went without a write-up. A page that has never posted an incident scores 20 in this run (20 of 30). Concurrency published per plan, 20 on Starter, 200 on Standard and 500 on Scale, but the free plan says only 'low rate limits' and we found no per-minute limits (10 of 15). The scrapes OpenAPI documents 400, 402, 404, 500, 502 and 504 but no 429, Retry-After or backoff guidance (0). No SLA found (0). GA (10). 20 + 20 + 10 + 0 + 0 + 10 = 60.); WebScraping.AI 43 (Graded on the hosted lines. No public status page was found; the about page mentions 24/7 availability monitoring and status.webscraping.ai did not answer (0). No readable incident history (5). Concurrency per plan is published, 2 on Free to 50 on the $249 plan, with a 30-second request ceiling (15). 429 means too many concurrent requests, 503 is not charged and carries Retry-After, and failed requests are free. No backoff guidance for 429 itself (13 of 15). No SLA; section 14.2 of the terms makes no uptime commitment (0). Generally available since 2019 (10). 0 + 5 + 15 + 13 + 0 + 10 = 43.)
- Transparency & trust, Olostep +9: Olostep 60 (The API is closed with clear terms under Delaware law, and the MCP server and Python SDK are MIT (20 of 30). Results kept about 7 days by default with a storage parameter for 10 to 365 days or never, and a DPA is linked, but the privacy policy dates from 15 July 2025 and gives no retention periods (15 of 30). No deprecation policy or dated notices found (0 of 20). No subprocessor list or data locations, only a Standard Contractual Clauses statement (3 of 20).); WebScraping.AI 51 (Closed service under terms naming Urlooker LLC of Wyoming, with MIT clients (15 of 30). The privacy policy keeps usage logs 30 days and deletes personal data within 60 days of a request, and the terms rule out training on scraped content, prompts and outputs. But section 9.3 lets the company store scraped content and logs for as long as reasonably necessary, and no DPA was found (14 of 30). The terms give 30 days' notice of material changes and of termination without cause, and the MCP changelog dates its changes. No deprecation policy (8 of 20). Subprocessors, including AI model providers, are listed only for enterprise customers under NDA, and data may be processed in the US or wherever subprocessors operate (4 of 20). 15 + 14 + 8 + 4 = 41.)
- Agent ergonomics, WebScraping.AI +8: Olostep 87 (11 MCP tools, and the API lets you choose formats and page results (20 of 25). Cursor pagination and `items_limit` on crawl and batch results, and batches of up to 100,000 URLs (20). Structured error objects with a code an agent can branch on (17 of 20). All 11 MCP tools carry readOnlyHint, destructiveHint and idempotentHint, with the two job creators marked non-idempotent, and no idempotency keys on the API (15 of 20). Python and Node SDKs and a CLI, one required field on a scrape (15).); WebScraping.AI 95 (Ten MCP tools (25). Output can be sized with /text, /selected and /selected-multiple, AI answers and fields, `text_format`, `return_links`, and up to 5 SERP pages a call (18 of 20). Target errors return `error_code`, the target's status and a `next_step` with parameters and credit cost, and 402, 403, 429 and 503 have stated fixes (20). Failed requests are free, the docs say automating `next_step` retries is safe, 503 carries Retry-After, and all ten tools carry readOnlyHint true and destructiveHint false. No idempotency key, though every call is a read (18 of 20). Only `url` is required, but JavaScript is on by default at 5 credits. Official SDKs in seven languages and a CLI (14 of 15). 25 + 18 + 20 + 18 + 14 = 95.)