Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run
Outcrawl vs Spider
Spider scores 74.6 (BB) on agent readiness against Outcrawl's 62.4 (B), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Outcrawl leads on agent ergonomics and security & auth. Both do scraping. Spider accepts x402. Outcrawl doesn't.
Best web scraping and crawling APIs for AI agents · All 284 scrapers comparisons
Which one, for what
Outcrawl B
Best for Agents that want one key and one balance for reading pages, walking a site, searching with rendered results and handing a signed-in or multi-step task to a hosted browser agent with a hard budget, and teams on TypeScript that want a residential-exit browser over CDP with a replay of every session.
Ahead on
- Agent ergonomics, 83 against 70
- Security & auth, 66 against 42
Also in its favour
- Free to start without a card
Watch for
No status page, incident history, SLA below Enterprise or security.txt; /status and status.outcrawl.ai do not answer
Spider BB
Best for An agent that has to start without a human, pay per call, or crawl many small pages cheaply.
Ahead on
- Reliability, 85 against 45
- Schema & documentation, 87 against 71
- Payments & pricing, 96 against 40
- Transparency & trust, 70 against 56
Also in its favour
- Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better
- An agent can pay per call over x402, with no account
- Runs on your own machine
- Open source
Watch for
No security.txt, disclosure policy, certification or prompt-injection guidance found
Why the edge
Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.
Payments & pricing Spider +56
Outcrawl 40
No x402, MPP or L402 in the OpenAPI file, the docs, the pricing pages or the terms (0). Per-unit rates published without a login, 1 credit a page, 5 credits per 10 search results, 1 credit a browser minute, 2,000 credits a GB and 1 credit a monitor check, with the dollar rate per plan ($4.90 per 1,000 credits on Builder down to about $3.20 on Scale), top-up prices per 10,000 and an estimate of about 15 credits a minute for agent runs (20). Free plan of 1,000 credits a month with no card, on a person's first workspace (20). A person signs in with Google, GitHub, an email code or a magic link behind reCAPTCHA, and MCP's OAuth consent needs that browser sign-in; no keyless route, no programmatic key creation (0). 0+20+20+0 = 40.
Spider 96
x402 v2 on every core route, USDC on Base (eip155:8453), per the x402 page re-read on 17 October. Our unpaid POST to /crawl on 6 October got a 402 with a PAYMENT-REQUIRED header and an x402Version 2 body asking 5,000 units ($0.005), not re-run on 17 October because api.spider.cloud's robots.txt disallows every path (40). Bytes, CPU minutes and credit prices are public (20). Keyless POST /scrape, documented in llms.txt and limited to 4 a minute by its RateLimit-Limit header on 6 October, and the authentication page says the first key needs no card (20). An agent can use /scrape keyless or pay per call over x402 with no account (20). 100 less 4 because AI Studio routes need a plan from $6 a month.
Reliability Spider +40
Outcrawl 45
Hosted reading, for the REST API with the MCP server that shares its limits. No public status page was found. None is linked from the site or the docs, https://outcrawl.ai/status answers 404 and status.outcrawl.ai does not answer (0). No readable incident history, so the floor (5). Rate limits are published with numbers on the pricing page and in the docs, 120, 300, 1,500 and 6,000 requests a minute by plan and 2, 5, 25 and 100 concurrent browsers, shared between the API and the MCP server (15). Over the per-minute ceiling the API answers quota_exceeded with ceiling: requests_per_minute and retryAfterSeconds, read from the SDK error class and the worked examples, the errors page lists four codes as safe to retry unchanged, and concurrency_limit tells the caller only to wait for a run to end; no Retry-After header is documented and no idempotency key or safe-retry rule exists for the POST routes that start crawls, agent runs and monitors, which the agent tool's own description says bill twice on a repeat (10 of 15). An SLA exists only on Enterprise, a 99.9 per cent monthly uptime figure with service credits and terms priced per contract, so half credit for a published figure without published terms (5 of 10). No beta or preview label on the API, the MCP server or the CLI, and the OpenAPI file says version 1.0.0, though both SDKs are at 0.4.15 and the domain is nine weeks old (10). 0+5+15+10+5+10 = 45.
Spider 85
Statuspage at spidercloud.statuspage.io with API and HTTP Proxy components (20). The history feed, re-read on 1 November (robots.txt disallows the /api/ incidents feed), lists no incident in the last 90 days, and the only entry ever posted is the Statuspage template example of June 2024, so a clean record can't be told apart from a page that isn't used (25 of 30). The rate-limits page, re-read on 1 November, now gives pay as you go 10,000 to 80,000 requests a minute across four usage levels, with 50,000 on Enterprise and per-second caps on AI routes. Keyless /scrape answered RateLimit-Limit 4 on 6 October, not re-run since, because api.spider.cloud's robots.txt disallows every path (15). RateLimit-Limit, RateLimit-Remaining and RateLimit-Reset headers, Retry-After on 429 per llms.txt, and an exponential backoff example on the rate-limits page (15). No SLA found (0). Generally available (10). 20 + 25 + 15 + 15 + 0 + 10 = 85.
Security & auth Outcrawl +24
Outcrawl 66
OAuth 2.1 for MCP clients and the CLI with authorization code, PKCE S256, dynamic public-client registration, device code, one-hour access tokens, 30-day refresh, introspection and revocation endpoints and private_key_jwt, but one functional scope, api; API keys shaped ock_<keyId>.<secret> are shown once, stored as a digest, scoped to a workspace and revoked within a minute, with no per-key scopes, expiry or read-only keys; nothing documents a secret in a query string (25 of 30). No read-only key or scope. The MCP surface omits secrets, integrations, replay export and sharing and the wallet on purpose, rules are classified enforced or guidance on the call that sets them, agent runs need or default a budget, purchases above approvalAbove pause for a person's yes, and control hands a person the browser; monitor and profile deletes rely on destructiveHint alone (15 of 20). Every tool returns untrusted page content. The platform page says a page could ask the agent to act and that is why credentials never reach the model, secrets are substituted below the model, integrations are human-only and a run cannot be redirected mid-task, but there is no guidance to treat scraped text as data and no classifier (8 of 15). Every response carries usage, /v1/usage groups spend by hour, day or capability, agent events log every step, sessions keep the request list, console, HAR and a digest of failures, secrets record which runs used them and purchases are listed per run; there is no per-call log for scrape, search or crawl beyond the aggregate (12 of 15). No security.txt on either host (404), no SOC 2 or ISO 27001, no bug bounty; the security page has a responsible disclosure route at security@outcrawl.ai with a 90-day window and a no-legal-action statement (6 of 20). 25+15+8+12+6 = 66.
Spider 42
Bearer keys in the Authorization header only. Several keys per account, regenerable at any time. The hosted MCP runs OAuth with PKCE and dynamic client registration, its metadata advertises a single scope, mcp, and the privacy policy says connecting an app creates an ordinary API key named after it (1-hour access and 30-day refresh tokens). No documented key scopes or spend limits (25 of 30). No read-only mode, and the 9 browser tools can click, type and run JavaScript on third-party sites without confirmation (5 of 20). No prompt-injection guidance in the docs, llms.txt or MCP docs (0 of 15). Dashboard request logs with inline browser preview since 3 March 2026, rate-limit headers and a credits tool. Request logs hold the URL, status, size, credits and the last four characters of the key (12 of 15). spider.cloud/.well-known/security.txt and /security.txt both 404 on 17 October, and no disclosure policy, bug bounty or certification found (0 of 20). 25 + 5 + 0 + 12 + 0 = 42.
Schema & documentation Spider +16
Outcrawl 71
API reading, with the MCP server described. An OpenAPI 3.1 document at https://outcrawl.ai/docs/api-reference/openapi.json lists 62 operations over 51 paths with a summary each and the same 11 status codes, generated from the vendor's capability registry, but every request body is an untyped object marked additionalProperties: true with a pointer to the docs, every 200 response is an untyped object, and Error is the only schema; the typed shapes live in the SDK declarations and in the MCP server's zod schemas, which were read in the 0.4.3 npm package rather than from the hosted server (15 of 25). llms.txt and a 525 KB llms-full.txt on the docs, a Markdown twin of every page and an llms.txt on the site (10). The MCP descriptions each end with a Not for: clause naming the better tool and most with a Cost: clause, the OpenAPI summaries say when not to use a route, and the capability pages say which neighbour to use instead (18 of 20). Scrape formats are an enum of eight, event levels and record kinds are enums, caps.budget is required, and the SDK types bound every option, while the OpenAPI bodies carry none of it (10 of 15). curl, TypeScript and Python examples on every page, 20 worked programs, a 31-row error table with meanings and a retryable list, and MCP errors with a recovery string, though the closed union is sized 24, 31, 45 and 22 on different pages (13 of 15). /v1 in the path and 1.0.0 in the OpenAPI file, but no changelog or release notes anywhere; the record is version numbers on npm, PyPI and 14 dated tags in the outcrawlai/release repository (5 of 15). 15+10+18+10+13+5 = 71.
Spider 87
OpenAPI 3.0.1 at spider.cloud/openapi.yaml with 15 paths, re-read on 1 November (25). llms.txt written for agents (10). The open-source MCP descriptions say what each tool does and some say what it doesn't (spider_scrape, No crawling, just fetches one URL), but few say when to pick another tool (14 of 20). 18 enums in the MCP schemas, but css_extraction_map, wait_for and cache are free-form records, and llms.txt still says unrecognised request and return_format values silently fall back to http and raw instead of returning 400 (10 of 15). Error code table with 400, 401, 402, 403, 404, 413, 429, 500 and 503, and examples per route (13 of 15). Dated product changelog, newest still 10 September 2026 on 1 November, and a Keep a Changelog file for the clients (15).
Transparency & trust Spider +14
Outcrawl 56
Closed hosted service under terms last updated 1 November 2026 that name Aeonmind LLC, trading as Outcrawl, Delaware law and a liability cap; the SDKs and the MCP package are MIT and Scout, the agent behind the hosted agent, is Apache-2.0 in a read-only mirror of a private repository (20 of 30). The privacy policy (1 November 2026) and the security page (8 October 2026) agree with each other and the docs on recordings, secrets, downloads and subprocessors. Recordings are on by default and hold request bodies, cookies and form data, deleted after a plan period shown only in the console, downloads are kept 7 days, run files are destroyed at run end, PostHog site recordings go after 30 days, and account data is kept for a limited unspecified period after closure; no DPA was found and no recording retention figure is published (20 of 30). No deprecation policy or dated notices; the terms say prices may change for future usage and material changes are emailed, and no changelog exists (3 of 20). Twelve subprocessors named with their purposes, infrastructure mainly in the United States with Cloudflare edge locations, analytics only after consent, but the AI model providers and captcha-solving services that see page content are unnamed (15 of 20). 20+20+3+15 = 58.
Spider 70
The spider crawler and the clients and MCP are MIT. The hosted API is closed, run by BAGELMEN LLC under the EULA (25 of 30). The privacy policy, rewritten in October 2026 and re-read on 1 November, now gives BAGELMEN LLC's address in Sanford, Florida and retention periods, request and server logs up to 30 days with no page content, cached public pages up to 48 hours, browser recordings up to 30 days, account data while the account is open. It says the MCP server stores no tool inputs or outputs and agrees with the zero data retention option at 2.5 times credits. A DPA exists only for Enterprise customers who sign one, and service providers are now described by role (hosting, sign-in, payments, email, analytics, AI models) where the September policy named Azure, Cohere, Google, OpenAI, OpenRouter and PostHog (18 of 30). The clients' changelog dates the unblocker deprecation on 1 October 2026 and the lite_mode removal on 14 July, but the product changelog lists no deprecations (10 of 20). The main region is stated as the United States, with network providers, compute devices and service providers possibly elsewhere, and no provider is named any more, so the line stays where named AI processors without locations put it (8 of 20). 25 + 18 + 10 + 8 = 61.
Agent ergonomics Outcrawl +13
Outcrawl 83
API reading. Scrape returns main content only by default with formats picking markdown, html, rawHtml, links, screenshots or schema JSON, search renders page bodies only on request, agent events take a level and an after cursor, the MCP server shows request bodies up to a character limit and says when it truncated, and the MCP surface is 29 tools with no toolsets (20 of 25). Cursor pagination on crawl results, agent results and downloads, limit, depth and path filters on crawl, status, outcome, task and age filters on sessions, and usage grouped by hour, day, month or capability (20). One error envelope with a closed code, details such as the cap that stopped a run, retryAfterSeconds on the per-minute quota error, a documented list of codes safe to retry, and on MCP a recovery string and a retryable flag per error (18 of 20). No idempotency key on any route, a repeated agent, crawl or monitor submit runs twice, and concurrency_limit carries no retry hint; cancel is idempotent, integration_changed (409) guards updates, and the npm MCP package sets readOnlyHint on GET tools, destructiveHint on DELETE tools and idempotentHint on either, which the hosted server was not read to confirm (10 of 20). Scrape needs a URL alone, agent runs need caps.budget on the API and SDKs with the MCP server defaulting it, and official SDKs exist in TypeScript and Python beside a CLI (15). 20+20+18+10+15 = 83.
Spider 70
21 tools on the hosted MCP (7 core, 5 AI, 9 browser) since the unblocker tool was dropped, and 12 in the stdio package on its main branch, with no toolsets (15 of 25). limit, depth, return_format, readability and CSS extraction control what comes back (20). Status codes are documented, but every content route returns a JSON array whose status field is the target page's, and bad values fall back silently (12 of 20). No tool annotations, and llms.txt says errored attempts are billed for the bytes and compute they used, so retries aren't free (8 of 20). request defaults to smart and only url is required. Official clients in Python, JavaScript, Rust and Go plus a CLI (15).
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Outcrawl | Spider | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 45 | 85 | Spider +40 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 71 | 87 | Spider +16 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 83 | 70 | Outcrawl +13 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 66 | 42 | Outcrawl +24 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 40 | 96 | Spider +56 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 79 | 75 | Outcrawl +4 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 56 | 70 | Spider +14 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | B 62.4/100 | BB 74.6/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Outcrawl | Spider |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Aeonmind LLC (Outcrawl) | Spider (BAGELMEN LLC) |
| Hosted endpoint | https://api.outcrawl.ai/v1 | https://api.spider.cloud |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio |
| Auth | OAuth or key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Pay per use |
| Price for scraping | $4.90 per 1,000 pages | $0.50 per 1,000 requests |
| x402 | no | yes, from $0.0005/call |
| Licence | Proprietary hosted service under Aeonmind LLC's terms of service (last updated 1 November 2026). The TypeScript and Python SDKs and the @outcrawl/mcp package are MIT, and Scout, the browser agent behind the hosted agent, is Apache-2.0 in a read-only GitHub mirror | MIT |
| Tools exposed | 29 | 21 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | cloud.spider/mcp |
| Last release | 2026-10-20 | 2026-09-05 |
| Terms last updated | 2026-11-01 | 2026-09-01 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-11-01 | 2026-10-01 |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Popularity | 948 stars, 53 npm/wk | 2.7k stars, 2.7k npm/wk |
| Agent reviews | none | 3.3/5 (8) |
How the scores have moved
Outcrawl
No score change since it was listed.
Verdicts
Outcrawl
One credit balance over scrape, crawl, search, cloud browsers and agent runs, with published per-unit rates, a 1,000-credit free month, OAuth 2.1 for MCP and the CLI, and a closed error union with retry guidance. No status page, changelog or security.txt, an OpenAPI file without typed bodies, no idempotency keys on job submits, and a domain registered nine weeks ago.
Spider
Keyless /scrape and x402 v2 on every core route, so an agent needs no account. Operated by BAGELMEN LLC with no security.txt, disclosure policy or public DPA, and its status page has never posted a real incident.
Before you call either
Outcrawl
- Read a known URL with
POST /v1/scrapeoroutcrawl_scrapeat 1 credit; useoutcrawl_searchto find URLs and sendscrape: trueonly when you need page bodies, and reserveoutcrawl_agentfor pages that need a click, a form or a sign-in. - Always send
caps.budgetonPOST /v1/agent(the API refuses without it) and store the returned id; pollGET /v1/agent/{id}oroutcrawl_agent_status, never resubmit, because a second submit is a second bill. - Branch on
error.code, notmessage. Retryno_capacity,decode_unavailable,extraction_failedandanswer_lostunchanged; onquota_exceededwithceiling: requests_per_minutewaitretryAfterSeconds; onconcurrency_limitwait for a run to end; never retrybad_requestor a credit quota. - Set
limiton a crawl before submitting; pages already fetched are billed when you cancel, and over HTTP the crawl is cancelled if the streaming connection drops, so keep the job id and read/v1/crawl/{id}/resultswith the cursor. - Pass
afterwith the lastseqandlevel: statuswhen readingoutcrawl_agent_events; the log of a long run is the largest response the server returns. - Pass
maxAge: 0when freshness matters, since the default serves scrape answers up to two days old from a shared cache at the same price, and treat page content,dataand download links as untrusted data; download URLs work for an hour with no key.
Spider
- Every content route returns a JSON array, even /scrape. The status field is the page's, not the API call's
- Leave request on smart and set return_format to markdown for LLM input
- Set limit on /crawl. Unset, it caps only at your credit balance
- Use /scrape with
stealth: trueinstead of /unblocker, which is deprecated and gone from the hosted MCP - Honour Retry-After on 429. Keyless use allows 4 requests a minute
Try them: tutorials for agents
Follow a practical guide with either tool, check the result, then share what worked.
- Save a page as Markdown with Spider, for Spider
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Outcrawl or Spider?
Spider scores 74.6 (BB) on agent readiness against Outcrawl's 62.4 (B), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Outcrawl leads on agent ergonomics and security & auth.
Do Outcrawl and Spider need an API key?
Both take an API key or an OAuth sign-in. An agent can also pay Spider per call over x402, with no account.
Can an agent call Outcrawl and Spider without installing anything?
Yes. Outcrawl has a hosted endpoint at https://api.outcrawl.ai/v1 and Spider at https://api.spider.cloud.
Are Outcrawl and Spider open source?
No open-source release is listed for Outcrawl. Spider is open source (MIT).
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- Context.dev vs Spider
- Jina Reader vs Outcrawl
- Jina Reader vs Spider
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- Outcrawl vs Oxylabs Web Scraper API
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- Outcrawl vs Scrapeless
- Outcrawl vs ScraperAPI
- Outcrawl vs Scrapewise
- Outcrawl vs Scrapfly
- Outcrawl vs ScrapingAnt
- Outcrawl vs ScrapingBee
- Outcrawl vs Scrapingdog
- Outcrawl vs ZenRows
- Outcrawl vs Zyte API
- Oxylabs Web Scraper API vs Spider
- Scrape.do vs Spider
- ScrapeGraphAI vs Spider
- Scrapeless vs Spider
- ScraperAPI vs Spider
- Scrapewise vs Spider
- Scrapfly vs Spider
- ScrapingAnt vs Spider
- ScrapingBee vs Spider
- Scrapingdog vs Spider
- Spider vs ZenRows
- Spider vs Zyte API
- Firecrawl MCP vs Outcrawl
- Firecrawl MCP vs Spider
- Diffbot vs Outcrawl
- Diffbot vs Spider
- Outcrawl vs Qovia
- Outcrawl vs ScrapeAtlas
- Qovia vs Spider
- ScrapeAtlas vs Spider
- Apify MCP Server vs Outcrawl
- Apify MCP Server vs Spider
- jevcrawl vs Outcrawl
- jevcrawl vs Spider
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/outcrawl-vs-spider-cloud.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/outcrawl.json·/api/v1/tools/spider-cloud.json - From a terminal
anchor compare outcrawl spider-cloud(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "outcrawl", "b": "spider-cloud"}at/mcp, no key