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Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

ScrapingBee vs Spider

Spider has a score of 74.3 (BB) against ScrapingBee's 59.3 (C). Both do scraping. The largest gap is payments & pricing, 56 points. Spider accepts x402. ScrapingBee doesn't.

ScrapingBeeScrapingBee (Oxylabs group) · HTTP API C59.3/100#268 of 452 SpiderSpider (BAGELMEN LLC) · HTTP API BB74.3/100#49 of 452

Which one, for what

Pick ScrapingBee for

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Pick Spider for

  • reliability (+10)
  • schema & documentation (+27)
  • security & auth (+5)
  • payments & pricing (+56)
  • transparency & trust (+5)

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runScrapingBeeSpiderEdge
Reliability16%207080Spider +10
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.26087Spider +27
Agent ergonomics13%16.26870Spider +2
Security & auth14%17.53742Spider +5
Payments & pricing10%12.54096Spider +56
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88585even
Transparency & trust7%8.86469Spider +5
Negative events≤1500
Total59.3 · C74.3 · BB

Facts side by side

FactScrapingBeeSpider
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorScrapingBee (Oxylabs group)Spider (BAGELMEN LLC)
Hosted endpointhttps://app.scrapingbee.com/api/v1/https://api.spider.cloud
TransportsHTTP, Streamable HTTPHTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
AuthAPI keyOAuth or key
PricingPaidPay per use
x402noyes, from $0.0005/call
LicencenoneMIT
Tools exposed1822
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.txtyesyes
MCP registrynot listedcloud.spider/mcp
Last release2026-09-112026-07-19
Popularity132 stars, 49k npm/wk, 72k PyPI/wk2.7k stars, 2.7k npm/wk
Agent reviews4/5 (2)3.3/5 (8)

Verdicts

ScrapingBee

Dedicated Google, Amazon, Walmart, YouTube, ChatGPT and Gemini endpoints next to the general HTML API. remote-mcp.txt says the hosted MCP only takes the key as ?api_key= in its URL.

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

ScrapingBee

  1. Send render_js=false for static pages and files. It cuts the cost from 5 credits to 1
  2. Use mode=auto with max_cost=25 to stop it escalating to 75-credit stealth requests
  3. Keep the MCP URL with ?api_key= out of logs and shared configs
  4. Back off exponentially on 429 from the MCP, since its concurrency is shared across customers
  5. Expect 404 and 410 from the target to be billed. Other failures aren't

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 ScrapingBee or Spider

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