ScrapingBee Pricing, Features, Reviews and Alternatives

I'm not even using the full features of ScrapingBee, but with their API Builder, Code Exporter, and Dashboarding, it was easy to get started.I see the features of ScrapingBee being huge for me in the near future, but I know that as I scale, they're pricing is competitive and their service is reliable. I haven't had this success rate, and this isn't my first webscraping vendor. I'm never going anywhere else.

I would love a bit more documentation in the errors. I know that with scraping, it can be obscure, but I lost a bit of time on fine tuning the parameters of my request before it worked, but that it panned out faster than any other service I've worked with because of their built in Request Builder

We've used ScrapingBee for almost two months now and the speed and success rate of their proxies have been great, we scrape a variety of Ecommerce stores, including ASOS, Nike and Zalando that do heavy bot throttling and prevention, and with the premium proxies we se great success rate, and the standard proxies are decent and fast for the sitres that don't require very stealthy proxies. I really like that you can use this service with "proxy mode", instead of having to integrate the hTTP api, this made it really easy to "drop in" to our existing application with minimal configuration. The support is quite responsive and they fixed a simple Dashboard UI fix a few minutes after being made aware of it.

The concurrency limit is 10 for the lowest paid plan, and 40 for the "business" plan, this might be a bit low for our use case, and limits throughput a bit, but I hear from the grapevines that there will be higher or more customisable plans in the future, however, if you need very high concurrency, this might not fit the bill for you.

ScrapingBee is really easy to setup and to start with. They have good documentation available. We are using the product already for years, and there has been almost no down-time in those years. Also there request builders are really easy to use, and you can each language you prefer. In general they have a lot of options, to build the perfect request you need to get the data from any service you want, without getting blocked. Overall I would say the best and most easy scraping service you will find.

The request costs of some endpoint with specific parameters are pretty high, which makes that you need a bigger plan earlier. Pricing plans is also high for us, but not compared to other services who are offering the same.

The API is easy to use and documented in detail. It also proved to be very similar to other tools in the market which I consider an advantage as it reduces vendor lock-in. It comes with a shallow learning curve and all the tools you need to monitor your progress, especially if you are familiar with how APIs work. It also offers a lot of useful & flexible options that allow you to customize how you used the tool and the burn rate of your credits. Also responses proved to be very quick from websites. The pricing is absolutely competitive after comparing it with other similar options. Before using ScrapingBee I didn't think it would be possible to scale our web crawling operations in such an easy way.

The only disadvantage I could find is that a few websites still manage to block crawling attempts or recognize ScrapingBee's default US servers as Canadian IP addresses which can complicate our web crawling attempts. I have also found that you need some trial and error to decode the error codes returned by the tool and understand the root cause of any issues we come across.

It just works: and its parsing meta-language is wonderfully powerful. Most importantly, the support I've received has been superlative: in my first attempt to implement a parser (using the meta-language) I failed, and a support engineer wrote the whole parser for me. Then I realised the scraping API was missing a really useful parameter: the support engineer updated the API to add the missing parameter (and generically so it supports all available parameters) within about 48 hours. It almost feels like Scraping Bee's support engineers are on my own team!

Nothing missing for me. I can't think of any downsides.