ScrapingBee

ScrapingBee — One-call HTML API with JavaScript rendering and premium proxy tiers. ScrapingBee is a single GET request that returns rendered HTML, a screenshot or extracted data, with proxy quality selected by how many credits you are willing to spend. There is no CDP endpoint and no session to hold open, so multi-step flows are awkward by design. For one-shot fetches at predictable per-request cost it remains one of the least surprising products in the category. Founded 2018.

We track it in 1 comparison — Browser APIs — so every claim below is a cell in a table you can open and check rather than an impression. Across those rosters it sits against 12 other tools, and what follows is where it visibly separates from them.

Where it wins.

• Max concurrency — 100 sessions, the best figure of the 3 here.

Each of those is ranked against the whole roster on its category page, not against a hand-picked subset, so a first place here means first of everything we list.

Where it gives ground.

• CDP endpoint — No. Browserbase records Yes.
• Session persistence — No. Browserbase records Yes.
• Playwright — No. Browserbase records Yes.
• Live view — No. Browserbase records Yes.

None of these disqualify it on their own. They are the fields to check against your own requirements before you commit, because they are the ones where a competitor genuinely does better.

Provenance. 21 of 26 tracked fields carry a value for ScrapingBee, and 2 of those cite a document you can open. Last verified 2026-07-01. Every figure keeps its own provenance — measured by us, claimed by the vendor, inferred, or community-reported — and we would rather print a dash than a guess.

Its nearest neighbour in our data is Airtop. ScrapingBee is ahead on Funding stage (bootstrapped against seed). Airtop takes Session persistence (Yes against No) and Playwright (Yes against No). That pattern repeats across the rest of the roster — see ScrapingBee alternatives for the other rivals, each compared the same way.

Founded

2018

Fields we track

21 of 26

Last verified

2026-07-01

Honest, boring and predictable — which in this category is a compliment. Per-request pricing makes forecasting trivial and the docs never pretend it is a browser API. The moment your workflow needs three steps and a cookie jar, you are on the wrong product.

CDP endpoint

○No12th of 13

Inferred

Session persistence

○No13th of 13

Inferred

Playwright

○No13th of 13

Inferred

Live view

○No10th of 13

Inferred

Session replay

○No10th of 13

Inferred

Puppeteer

○No13th of 13

Inferred

File downloads

○No13th of 13

Inferred

Max concurrency

100 sessions1st of 3

Inferred

ScrapingBee is the right call in these situations, each one drawn from a field we actually record:

• One-shot fetches with rendered JavaScript.
• Predictable per-request budgeting.
• Teams that want no session state to manage.
• Max concurrency is your binding constraint. ScrapingBee records 100 sessions, the best figure in the Browser APIs roster. We define that field as concurrent browser sessions on the highest self-serve plan, before talking to sales.

Reach for something else when any of the following is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have:

• CDP endpoint. ScrapingBee records No on the Browser APIs table. Browserbase records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Session persistence. ScrapingBee records No on the Browser APIs table. Browserbase records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Playwright. ScrapingBee records No on the Browser APIs table. Browserbase records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Live view. ScrapingBee records No on the Browser APIs table. Browserbase records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Session replay. ScrapingBee records No on the Browser APIs table. Browserbase records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.

We publish this block because a comparison that only lists what a tool is good at is marketing. Every figure above sits on the same page as its source, and the field definitions are on the category tables if you want to check how we measured them.

What we don't know. 5 of the 26 fields we track for ScrapingBee are still blank: Anti-bot pass rate, Cold start, MCP server, Per browser-hour and GitHub stars. Those render as dashes rather than as zeroes or assumptions, because an empty cell and a bad cell are not the same thing and only one of them is honest. If you know any of these figures and can point at a document, tell us.