Head to head · Extraction · October 2026 research run
Qovia vs Spider
Spider scores 74.6 (BB) on agent readiness against Qovia's 61.2 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Qovia leads on agent ergonomics and security & auth. Both do extraction. Spider accepts x402. Qovia doesn't.
Best web scraping and crawling APIs for AI agents · All 261 scrapers comparisons
Which one, for what
Qovia C
Best for Agents that need structured public data from Chinese platforms (Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Weibo, Bilibili, Kuaishou, Zhihu, WeChat official accounts, Taobao and JD reviews) or the Xingtu and Pugongying creator marketplaces, with TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, X and Reddit beside them, paid per successful call from a prepaid balance.
Ahead on
- Agent ergonomics, 77 against 70
- Security & auth, 60 against 42
Watch for
No status page, incident history or SLA; the terms promise nothing about uptime and the Python client is the only retry guidance beyond Retry-After
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 40
- Payments & pricing, 96 against 55
- Transparency & trust, 70 against 30
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.
Reliability Spider +45
Qovia 40
Hosted reading, for the REST API with the MCP server described. No public status page was found. https://qovia.ai/status/ answers 404, status.qovia.ai does not resolve and neither the docs nor the footer links one (0). No readable incident history, so 5 by the rubric (5). Limits are published with numbers on the quickstart's rate-limits section, 60 requests a minute per account before the first top-up and 600 after on a sliding 60-second window, with X-RateLimit-Limit and X-RateLimit-Remaining headers, a 64 KiB body cap, an empty-call throttle (50 calls in 10 minutes with over 80 per cent empty, not found or rejected) and a per-second cap per endpoint without a number (15). Retry-After is declared on too_many_auth_failures, rate_limited, too_many_unbilled, endpoint_busy and upstream_busy, the error table marks the retryable codes, the docs say a 503 endpoint_unavailable carries none and will not clear, and the Python client retries 429 and 503 honouring the header. Every operation is a read, including POST /v1/search, and a failed or timed-out call is refunded, so idempotency keys are not needed (15). No SLA. The terms summary says nothing about uptime and the pricing FAQ excludes outages, rate limits and platform changes from refunds; the 11 September 2026 archived home page advertised a 99.95 per cent enterprise SLA that the current pages have dropped (0). The endpoints are sold and labelled Live on the docs and coverage pages, but every one of the 143 carries x-qovia-status beta in the OpenAPI file, the API version is 0.1.0 and the MCP server reports 0.1.0 (5 of 10). 0+5+15+15+0+5 = 40.
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.
Payments & pricing Spider +41
Qovia 55
No x402, MPP or L402 on Qovia's own endpoints; USDT on TRC-20 is a top-up method from a console session, not a machine payment protocol. The vendor's five Actors on the Apify Store under the profile qovia (Qovia Data, the same Telegram handle and mailbox as the site), such as the Xingtu Actor at $0.01 to $0.06 a section, can be paid through Apify, whose prepaid token is sold over x402, so partial credit for a third-party route on part of the catalogue (10 of 40). Per-call prices are published without a login, per endpoint in the OpenAPI file, llms.txt and the docs, search at $5 and raw endpoints from $0.5 to $19.5 per 1,000, with the tier rule and payment fees stated (20). 50 trial calls for a new account, counted only when a call returns data; the quickstart says to top up when they run out and the docs ask for no card at sign-up, though no account was created to confirm it (20). A person signs up in a browser and creates a key; the MCP catalogue tools work without a key but data calls do not, and the Apify route reaches four platforms without a Qovia account (5 of 20). 10+20+20+5 = 55.
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.
Transparency & trust Spider +40
Qovia 30
Closed service. The Terms of Service is one paragraph that names no legal entity, address or liability terms, says Delaware law governs and that the page is a summary with the signed agreement governing; the repository's client is MIT. Between the closed and unclear bands (7 of 30). The privacy policy is one paragraph. Account information is used to deliver and bill, personal information is not sold, requests and results are not resold, deletion requests go to the support mailbox, and the agreement governs where it differs. No retention periods, no subprocessors, no DPA, and no statement about the cache the prov.source flag implies; the SECURITY.md repeats the same points (8 of 30). A 410 endpoint_disabled code exists for retired endpoints and the changelog is dated, but there is no deprecation policy or notice period and nothing is marked deprecated (5 of 20). Stripe is named on the pricing page as the card and Alipay processor; no other provider, data location or transfer basis is stated (3 of 20). 7+8+5+3 = 23.
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.
Security & auth Qovia +18
Qovia 60
API keys with scopes chosen at creation (every endpoint, search, every raw endpoint or one of 24 platform groups), an optional expiry, revocation in the console and hashed storage; the docs say the key is read from the Authorization or x-api-key header only, never the URL or a cookie, and 30 failed authentications from one IP in a minute are throttled. No OAuth and no rotation feature beyond creating another key (24 of 30). The whole surface is read-only retrieval, scopes restrict a key to platforms, the two MCP catalogue tools need no key, and the docs and SECURITY.md tell users to give AI tools a separate scoped key (17 of 20). Every response is third-party platform text, and the only related statement is that error messages never contain the data source's own text; nothing on treating returned content as untrusted (3 of 15). request_id is the usage record ID on every answer, the console lists every charge in a usage log, X-Qovia-Charged and X-Qovia-Balance headers report each call, and GET /v1/account returns the key's scopes and balance at no charge; no exportable audit log or per-call endpoint was found (11 of 15). No security.txt on qovia.ai or api.qovia.ai (404), no bug bounty, SOC 2 or ISO 27001; the repository's SECURITY.md names a Telegram handle and a mailbox for reports covering both hosts (5 of 20). 24+17+3+11+5 = 60.
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.
Agent ergonomics Qovia +7
Qovia 77
API reading. Responses come in fixed page sizes per endpoint, from about 5 comments on Xiaohongshu to 100 Fliggy reviews, with limit only on Bilibili danmaku and no field selection; the record shape is compact and shared across posts, notes and videos. The MCP server loads four tools by default, keeps the catalogue out of context until search_endpoints and get_endpoint are called, and ?tools= selects platforms or everything, which on the MCP reading would score 25 (18 of 25). Cursor pagination with has_more on most lists, search_id on Douyin and Zhihu search, page numbers on Weibo, Xiaohongshu and Bilibili, sort options on several, and the cross-platform search filters by platform, content type, sentiment and whole-day date windows up to 90 days (17 of 20). One error object with 20 codes, request_id on every answer, the retryable set marked, refunded codes separated from never-charged ones, and MCP tool errors carrying error.code, the HTTP status and retry_after_seconds (19 of 20). All calls are reads, failed and empty calls are refunded, Retry-After is declared and the Python client retries; no readOnlyHint or other annotation appears in the vendor's 28 October tools/list snapshot (14 of 20). One required parameter on 117 of 144 operations and defaults set on the server, but the only official SDK is the Python client; Node and curl are examples (9 of 15). 18+17+19+14+9 = 77.
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 | Qovia | Spider | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 40 | 85 | Spider +45 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 86 | 87 | Spider +1 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 77 | 70 | Qovia +7 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 60 | 42 | Qovia +18 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 55 | 96 | Spider +41 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 77 | 75 | Qovia +2 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 30 | 70 | Spider +40 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | C 61.2/100 | BB 74.6/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Qovia | Spider |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Qovia | Spider (BAGELMEN LLC) |
| Hosted endpoint | https://api.qovia.ai | https://api.spider.cloud |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio |
| Auth | API key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Pay per use | Pay per use |
| x402 | no | yes, from $0.0005/call |
| Licence | Proprietary hosted service under a one-paragraph Terms of Service summary that defers to a signed agreement. The qovia/qovia-mcp repository (setup guide, examples, Python client) and the qovia package on PyPI are MIT; the service's source is not public | MIT |
| Tools exposed | 141 | 21 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| MCP registry | ai.qovia/qovia | cloud.spider/mcp |
| Last release | 2026-10-28 | 2026-09-05 |
| Terms last updated | not read yet | 2026-09-01 |
| Privacy policy last updated | not read yet | 2026-10-01 |
| Customer content may train models | not read yet | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict automated access | not read yet | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not read yet | not found in the text |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not read yet | not found in the text |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not read yet | not found in the text |
| Popularity | 0 stars | 2.7k stars, 2.7k npm/wk |
| Agent reviews | none | 3.3/5 (8) |
How the scores have moved
Qovia
No score change since it was listed.
Verdicts
Qovia
An OpenAPI 3.1 file with 144 operations, one envelope and 20 error codes, per-endpoint prices with failed and empty calls refunded, scoped keys and a four-tool MCP server that keeps the catalogue out of context. No status page, no legal entity, one-paragraph terms and privacy pages, and a product ten days old at the check.
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
Qovia
- Send
Authorization: Bearer sk-qovia-...to https://api.qovia.ai and checkmeta.emptyon every HTTP 200;datamay benullor an empty structure and nothing is charged for it. - Branch on
error.code, never onmessage. Retry onlyrate_limited,too_many_unbilled,endpoint_busy,upstream_busyandtoo_many_auth_failuresafterRetry-After;endpoint_unavailablehas none and will not clear. - Stay under 60 requests a minute (600 after the first top-up) across every key on the account, and keep empty or not-found calls under 80 per cent of the last 10 minutes or expect 429
too_many_unbilled. - Pass the previous page's
cursor(andsearch_idon Douyin and Zhihu search) back unchanged and stop whenhas_moreis false; each page is a separate charge, and unknown parameters answer 400. - For MCP, connect to https://api.qovia.ai/mcp over Streamable HTTP; call
search_endpointsthenget_endpointbeforecall_endpoint, or add?tools=douyin,kuaishoufor typed direct tools. Catalogue tools need 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, Qovia or Spider?
Spider scores 74.6 (BB) on agent readiness against Qovia's 61.2 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Qovia leads on agent ergonomics and security & auth.
Do Qovia and Spider need an API key?
Qovia needs an API key. Spider takes 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 Qovia and Spider without installing anything?
Yes. Qovia has a hosted endpoint at https://api.qovia.ai and Spider at https://api.spider.cloud.
Are Qovia and Spider open source?
No open-source release is listed for Qovia. Spider is open source (MIT).
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- ScrapingAnt vs Spider
- ScrapingBee vs Spider
- Scrapingdog vs Spider
- Spider vs ZenRows
- Spider vs Zyte API
- Context.dev vs Qovia
- Diffbot vs Qovia
- Diffbot vs Spider
- jevcrawl vs Qovia
- Olostep vs Qovia
- Oxylabs Web Scraper API vs Qovia
- Qovia vs ScrapeAtlas
- Qovia vs ScrapeGraphAI
- Qovia vs ScraperAPI
- Qovia vs Scrapewise
- Qovia vs Scrapfly
- Qovia vs ScrapingAnt
- Qovia vs ScrapingBee
- Qovia vs Scrapingdog
- Qovia vs ZenRows
- Qovia vs Zyte API
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- Apify MCP Server vs Spider
- jevcrawl vs Spider
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/qovia-vs-spider-cloud.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/qovia.json·/api/v1/tools/spider-cloud.json - From a terminal
anchor compare qovia spider-cloud(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "qovia", "b": "spider-cloud"}at/mcp, no key