About ScrapingBee
ScrapingBee is a French web scraping API founded in 2019 and headquartered in Toulouse. The product has become a go-to choice in the developer community for one reason: it makes scraping JavaScript-heavy websites trivial through a single REST API call that returns clean HTML.
The ScrapingBee API handles the entire scraping pipeline behind the scenes — headless Chrome rendering, IP rotation across residential and datacenter pools, CAPTCHA bypass, and request retries. Customers send a target URL and get back rendered HTML, with optional CSS-selector extraction for structured data.
What makes ScrapingBee stand out is its simplicity-first design. Pricing is transparent and credit-based: starting at $49 per month for 150,000 API credits, with premium proxies costing 25 credits per request and datacenter proxies costing 1 credit. This makes cost modeling far easier than per-GB proxy pricing.
The platform's Google Search API and AI Web Scraping API have become popular adjacencies. The Google Search API returns structured SERP data without dealing with anti-bot challenges, while the AI Scraping API uses LLMs to extract structured data from arbitrary pages — a natural fit for AI agents that need clean data inputs.
Developer experience is excellent, with native libraries for Python, Node.js, Ruby, PHP, Java, and Go, plus clear documentation and a generous free tier (1,000 credits) for evaluation. The dashboard exposes per-domain success rates, latency metrics, and detailed billing breakdowns.
For solo developers, growth teams, and small-to-medium scraping operations that value simplicity and predictable pricing over deep enterprise features, ScrapingBee is one of the most loved scraping APIs in the developer ecosystem — particularly when combined with AI tooling that needs reliable web data.
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Features & Capabilities
General
Performance
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Support
Pros
- Trivial to integrate with a single REST call
- Transparent credit-based pricing
- Handles JavaScript rendering automatically
- Native libraries for six major languages
- Generous free tier of 1,000 credits
- AI Web Scraping API for LLM workflows
Cons
- Credit pricing penalizes premium-proxy use
- Limited enterprise compliance documentation
- Custom routing rules less flexible than Zyte
Frequently Asked Questions
What is ScrapingBee?
ScrapingBee is a managed web scraping API that handles headless browser rendering, IP rotation, CAPTCHA bypass, and retries — all behind a single REST endpoint. Customers send a target URL and get back rendered HTML, with optional CSS-selector data extraction.
How much does ScrapingBee cost?
ScrapingBee starts at $49/month for 150,000 API credits. Premium proxies cost 25 credits per request and datacenter proxies cost 1 credit. There is a free tier of 1,000 credits with no credit card required for evaluation.
Does ScrapingBee render JavaScript?
Yes. ScrapingBee runs headless Chrome on every request by default, so JavaScript-rendered content from React, Vue, Next.js, or any SPA framework is captured automatically. You can disable JS rendering to save credits on simple HTML-only targets.
What is the ScrapingBee AI Web Scraping API?
ScrapingBee offers an AI-powered extraction endpoint that uses LLMs to extract structured data from arbitrary pages without writing CSS selectors. It's particularly useful for AI agents and one-off scraping tasks where schema upfront is impractical.
Which languages does ScrapingBee support?
ScrapingBee provides native libraries for Python, Node.js, Ruby, PHP, Java, and Go, plus standard REST integration for any HTTP client. The Python and Node.js SDKs are the most popular and best-documented.
How does ScrapingBee compare to ScraperAPI and Zyte?
ScrapingBee is the simplest of the three with the cleanest developer experience and transparent credit pricing. ScraperAPI is similar in scope but pricier at higher volumes. Zyte is more enterprise-focused with deeper Scrapy integration. For most solo and SMB scrapers, ScrapingBee wins on ease of use.
Does ScrapingBee offer Google SERP scraping?
Yes. ScrapingBee includes a dedicated Google Search API that returns structured SERP data (organic results, ads, knowledge panels, related searches) without dealing with anti-bot challenges. It's priced separately from the main scraping API.
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