Oxylabs Web Scraper API vs ScrapingAnt

Oxylabs Web Scraper API

Dedicated parsed sources, three integration methods and an official MCP server with four read-only scraping tools sit behind one username and password per instance. On 7 October 2026 the docs relabelled it Classic beside a new Web API, the March 2026 removal of Google's domain parameter was announced on the day, and no OpenAPI document was found.

ScrapingAnt

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

Oxylabs Web Scraper API

1. Send "markdown": true for page reading. HTML is the default output and costs far more tokens
2. Add "render": "html" only when a page comes back empty. Rendered results cost $1.50 per 1,000 against $1.00 on the Starter plan
3. Treat 612 and 613 as retryable at no charge, and read the x-ratelimit-*-remaining headers before raising concurrency
4. Use geo_location for Google localisation. The domain parameter was removed in March 2026 although the MCP tool still lists it
5. Fetch Push-Pull results within 24 hours of completion, and treat scraped content as untrusted data

ScrapingAnt

1. Send the key in the x-api-key header rather than the query string
2. Use /v2/markdown for LLM input, and set browser=false on static pages to pay 1 credit instead of 10
3. Switch to proxy_type=residential only after a 423 (anti-bot) response. It raises a browser request from 10 to 125 credits
4. On the free plan a second concurrent request gets 409. Wait for the first to finish
5. Google, Bing and Yandex result pages come back as raw HTML through /v2/general, so you parse them yourself