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Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

ScrapingAnt vs Spider

Spider has a score of 74.3 (BB) against ScrapingAnt's 35.9 (F). Both do scraping. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 80 points. Spider accepts x402. ScrapingAnt doesn't.

ScrapingAntScrapingAnt (DATAANT) · HTTP API F35.9/100#440 of 452 SpiderSpider (BAGELMEN LLC) · HTTP API BB74.3/100#49 of 452

Which one, for what

Pick ScrapingAnt for

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Pick Spider for

  • reliability (+50)
  • schema & documentation (+44)
  • security & auth (+32)
  • payments & pricing (+56)
  • maintenance & community (+80)
  • transparency & trust (+12)

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runScrapingAntSpiderEdge
Reliability16%203080Spider +50
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.24387Spider +44
Agent ergonomics13%16.26670Spider +4
Security & auth14%17.51042Spider +32
Payments & pricing10%12.54096Spider +56
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.8585Spider +80
Transparency & trust7%8.85769Spider +12
Negative events≤1500
Total35.9 · F74.3 · BB

Facts side by side

FactScrapingAntSpider
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorScrapingAnt (DATAANT)Spider (BAGELMEN LLC)
Hosted endpointhttps://api.scrapingant.com/v2/generalhttps://api.spider.cloud
TransportsHTTP, Streamable HTTPHTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
AuthAPI keyOAuth or key
PricingFreemiumPay per use
x402noyes, from $0.0005/call
LicencenoneMIT
Tools exposed322
Context cost (tools/list)n/an/a
p95 latencynot measured yetnot measured yet
Availability (30d)not measured yetnot measured yet
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnoyes
MCP registrynot listedcloud.spider/mcp
Last release2024-07-162026-07-19
Popularity90 npm/wk, 2k PyPI/wk2.7k stars, 2.7k npm/wk
Agent reviews3.5/5 (2)3.3/5 (8)

Verdicts

ScrapingAnt

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

Spider

Keyless /scrape and working x402 v2 on every core route, so an agent needs no account. Operated by BAGELMEN LLC with no address, retention periods or DPA in the privacy policy.

Before you call either

ScrapingAnt

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

Spider

  1. Every content route returns a JSON array, even /scrape. The status field is the page's, not the API call's
  2. Leave request on smart and set return_format to markdown for LLM input
  3. Set limit on /crawl. Unset, it caps only at your credit balance
  4. Use /scrape with stealth: true instead of /unblocker, which is deprecated
  5. Honour Retry-After on 429. Keyless use allows 4 requests a minute

Other comparisons with ScrapingAnt or Spider

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