As anyone who has ever tried to scrape a website knows, the best way forward is using an API. This is especially true if you need to scrape and collect data from across the web quickly. Using an API is the most effective, and, more importantly, the most anonymous way to collect large amounts of data off the web.
It isn’t quite that simple though. While there are several API scraping tools on the market, the choice can boil down to several factors. These are price, ease of use, features, as well as speed. To help decide what is the best API for you, we’ll compare two web scraping APIs — Scrapestack and ScrapingBee.
If you are interested in learning more, then continue reading for our findings.
Table of Contents
Scrapestack vs. ScrapingBee: An overview
While both web scraping APIs fulfill similar tasks, they are some key differences in the way they do their jobs. Read on to find out what they are.
Who is Scrapestack for?
The Scrapestack API currently handles over 1 billion requests monthly. It is also used by over 2,000 companies. In addition to this, Scrapestack is built for end-users who want to parse data from sites such as TripAdvisor, Booking.com, or Amazon.com for their own purposes. Finally, as a specialized tool, Scrapestack makes web scraping easy for anyone. Furthermore, Scrapestack is built and maintained by Apilayer, the same company that offers a wide variety of APIs such as Eversign and Invoicely, as well as Ipstack, and more.
Who is ScrapingBee for?
ScrapingBee uses the latest version of Google Chrome to manage thousands of headless instances to scrape the data you need. Since it is headless, it won’t bite into all your system resources, like your CPU or RAM. ScrapingBee also uses AngularJS, Vue.js, React, and other libraries to scrape your target websites. In short, ScrapingBee is for organizations that want to scrape websites at scale.
Scrapestack vs. ScrapingBee: Features
What Scrapestack offers
As a scalable REST API, Scrapestack provides both standard (data center) and premium (residential) proxies. This is good. With premium proxies, you are far are less likely to get blocked. In addition, with Scrapestack, any blog or enterprise can convert reviews, rankings, and results to usable data. Other critical features include:
- Uses Millions of proxies and IPs
- Scales well to grow with your business
- 99.9% uptime on average
- Gives Access to a pool of worldwide Internet service providers
- Offers IP rotation and smart retries for data requests
- Sends your API requests to over 1,000 global locations
- Facilitates JavaScript rendering, concurrent SPI requests, brower support, and CAPTCHA solving.
- Is compatible with programming languages such as PHP, jQuery, Node.js, Python, Go, as well as Ruby.
What ScrapingBee offers
ScrapingBEE supports R, C#, PHP, Java, Ruby, Python, and also NodeJS. In addition to this, it offers classic and premium proxies. Finally, ScrapingBee end-users have the option of rendering all pages within Chrome. ScrapingBee also provides these features:
- Geotargeting
- Automatic proxy rotation
- Custom scraping scripts
Results
Scrapestack 
ScrapingBee 
Scrapestack vs. ScrapingBee: Ease of use
What Scrapestack offers
Since Scrapestack is a simple REST API, you don’t have to worry about IP blocks, CAPTCHAs, or programmatically managing geolocations. Getting started is as easy as creating a Scrapestack account, retrieving the unique API access key, and authenticating. All you have to do to get started is send a valid website URL, and Scrapestack will return as-seen-in-the-browser HTML content. The returned information includes JavaScript rendering, within a JSON response. Most importantly, you can also gather all the data you want in seconds.
That said, some of the biggest brands in the world use Scrapestack, including YouTube, eBay, and Amazon.
What ScrapingBee offers
ScrapingBee works well for general web scraping such as pulling real estate listings or contact data for sales leads. In addition, ScrapingBee only charges for successful data requests. ScrapingBee also offers a unique API key. You have to submit an encoded URL, and it returns your results as raw HTML content.
Results
Scrapestack
ScrapingBee
Scrapestack vs. ScrapingBee: Pricing
What Scrapestack offers
Scrapestack pricing includes the following options:
- Free: $0/month; up to 250 monthly requests.
- Basic: $19.99/month; up to 200,000 monthly requests.
- Business: $199.99/month up to 3,000,000 monthly requests.
- Enterprise: Custom pricing.
You can also make payments via credit card in addition to bank transfers for high-volume clients.
What ScrapingBee offers
ScrapingBee pricing includes the following options:
- Startup: $99/month, includes 1,000,000 API credits.
- Business: $249/month, includes 2,500,000 API credits.
- Enterprise: Custom pricing.
Results
Scrapestack
ScrapingBee
Scrapestack vs. ScrapingBee: Integration
What Scrapestack offers
Scrapestack is built as a service on top of Apilayer’s cloud infrastructure. This means Scrapestack integrates with your current systems frictionlessly and quickly.
What ScrapingBee offers
Since ScrapingBee works in Google Chrome, it offers easy integration to end-users with this operating system.
Results
Scrapestack
ScrapingBee
What is the best web spider API?
Ultimately, your web scraping API selection is determined by the complexity of your requirements, your budget, ease of use, and how many requests you need to make each month. Fortunately, Scrapestack offers a plan for every budget, you can switch between plans effortlessly, and, finally, supports up to 3 million monthly requests with the Business plan.
