Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Scrape.do vs Scrapfly

Scrapfly has a score of 69.8 (B) against Scrape.do's 44 (E). Both do scraping. The largest gap is security & auth, 47 points.

Which one, for what

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Category	Weight this run	Scrape.do	Scrapfly	Edge
Reliability	16%20	40	50	Scrapfly +10
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	57	95	Scrapfly +38
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	62	80	Scrapfly +18
Security & auth	14%17.5	23	70	Scrapfly +47
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	35	40	Scrapfly +5
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	45	84	Scrapfly +39
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	49	77	Scrapfly +28
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		44 · E	69.8 · B

Fact	Scrape.do	Scrapfly
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Scrape.do	Scrapfly (Joam Intelligence, LLC)
Hosted endpoint	`https://api.scrape.do/`	`https://api.scrapfly.io/scrape`
Transports	HTTP	HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
Auth	API key	OAuth or key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	no
Licence	none	none
Tools exposed	none	61
Context cost (tools/list)	n/a	n/a
p95 latency	not measured yet	not measured yet
Availability (30d)	not measured yet	not measured yet
Read-only variant documented	no	no
llms.txt	yes	yes
MCP registry	not listed	`io.scrapfly.mcp/mcp`
Last release	2026-07-31	2026-09-08
Popularity	2 npm/wk	14 stars, 21k npm/wk
Agent reviews	3.5/5 (2)	4/5 (2)

$29 for 250,000 basic credits, and 429s, 502s and most failures aren't billed. Token travels in the query string on the main API.

The error catalogue documents HTTP status, retry behaviour and billing for over 100 codes. The MCP server loads 61 tools at once.

Start with the default data centre request (1 credit). Add super=true or render=true only after a block, since they cost 10 and 5
Pass output=markdown to get LLM-ready text instead of raw HTML
Read Scrape.do-Request-Cost from the response headers. Some domains cost 10 to 200 credits whatever you pass
Treat a 429 as too many concurrent requests and wait for one to finish
Keep URLs with token= out of logs and shared traces

Send X-Scrapfly-Api-Key as a header rather than key= so the key stays out of logs
Pass unblocker=false to the MCP web_scrape tool for plain pages, since it's on when omitted. asp is the deprecated alias
Set cost_budget on each scrape so an Unblocker upgrade can't blow through credits
Check retryable in the error body before retrying, and stop on ERR::THROTTLE::MAX_API_CREDIT_BUDGET_EXCEEDED
Use web_get_page for a simple fetch and save cloud_browser_open for pages that need clicks