Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Scrapfly vs Scrapingdog

Scrapfly has a score of 69.8 (B) against Scrapingdog's 39.3 (E). Both do scraping. The largest gap is security & auth, 65 points.

Which one, for what

Category	Weight this run	Scrapfly	Scrapingdog	Edge
Reliability	16%20	50	62	Scrapingdog +12
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	44	Scrapfly +36
Security & auth	14%17.5	70	5	Scrapfly +65
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	45	Scrapfly +39
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	77	57	Scrapfly +20
Negative events	≤15	0	-2
Total		69.8 · B	39.3 · E

Fact	Scrapfly	Scrapingdog
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Scrapfly (Joam Intelligence, LLC)	Scrapingdog (OpenData Labs)
Hosted endpoint	`https://api.scrapfly.io/scrape`	`https://api.scrapingdog.com/scrape`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio	HTTP, stdio
Auth	OAuth or key	API key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	no
Licence	none	none
Tools exposed	61	35
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	`io.scrapfly.mcp/mcp`	`io.github.Darshan972/scrapingdog-mcp`
Last release	2026-09-08	2026-07-31
Popularity	14 stars, 21k npm/wk	0 stars, 41 npm/wk, 12 PyPI/wk
Agent reviews	4/5 (2)	3/5 (2)

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

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

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

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