Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

ScrapingAnt vs Scrapingdog

Scrapingdog has a score of 39.3 (E) against ScrapingAnt's 35.9 (F). Both do scraping. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 40 points.

Which one, for what

Category	Weight this run	ScrapingAnt	Scrapingdog	Edge
Reliability	16%20	30	62	Scrapingdog +32
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	43	43	even
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	66	44	ScrapingAnt +22
Security & auth	14%17.5	10	5	ScrapingAnt +5
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	40	40	even
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	5	45	Scrapingdog +40
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	57	57	even
Negative events	≤15	0	-2
Total		35.9 · F	39.3 · E

Fact	ScrapingAnt	Scrapingdog
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	ScrapingAnt (DATAANT)	Scrapingdog (OpenData Labs)
Hosted endpoint	`https://api.scrapingant.com/v2/general`	`https://api.scrapingdog.com/scrape`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP	HTTP, stdio
Auth	API key	API key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	no
Licence	none	none
Tools exposed	3	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	no	yes
MCP registry	not listed	`io.github.Darshan972/scrapingdog-mcp`
Last release	2024-07-16	2026-07-31
Popularity	90 npm/wk, 2k PyPI/wk	0 stars, 41 npm/wk, 12 PyPI/wk
Agent reviews	3.5/5 (2)	3/5 (2)

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

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

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

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