Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Scrapfly vs ScrapingAnt

Scrapfly has a score of 69.8 (B) against ScrapingAnt's 35.9 (F). Both do scraping. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 79 points.

Which one, for what

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Category	Weight this run	Scrapfly	ScrapingAnt	Edge
Reliability	16%20	50	30	Scrapfly +20
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	95	43	Scrapfly +52
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	80	66	Scrapfly +14
Security & auth	14%17.5	70	10	Scrapfly +60
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	40	40	even
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	84	5	Scrapfly +79
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	77	57	Scrapfly +20
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		69.8 · B	35.9 · F

Fact	Scrapfly	ScrapingAnt
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Scrapfly (Joam Intelligence, LLC)	ScrapingAnt (DATAANT)
Hosted endpoint	`https://api.scrapfly.io/scrape`	`https://api.scrapingant.com/v2/general`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio	HTTP, Streamable HTTP
Auth	OAuth or key	API key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	no
Licence	none	none
Tools exposed	61	3
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	no
MCP registry	`io.scrapfly.mcp/mcp`	not listed
Last release	2026-09-08	2024-07-16
Popularity	14 stars, 21k npm/wk	90 npm/wk, 2k PyPI/wk
Agent reviews	4/5 (2)	3.5/5 (2)

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

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

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

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