Oxylabs Web Scraper API vs Scrapingdog

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.

Scrapingdog

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

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

Scrapingdog

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