Best APIs for Web Scraping and OCR 2026: 8 Compared
The short answer
Pick the scraper by how hard the target sites are and what your model needs, then add OCR only for documents that are images. As of October 21, 2026:
- Firecrawl — best for AI agents and RAG: page or whole site → clean Markdown or JSON.
- Apify — best when a prebuilt scraper (“Actor”) already exists for the site.
- Bright Data Web Unlocker and Zyte API — best for protected, JavaScript-heavy sites; you pay for successful responses.
- ScrapingBee — best simple credit-based scraping API for small teams.
- Crawl4AI — best open-source option to self-host.
- Mistral OCR 4.1 or Docling — the OCR step for scanned PDFs and images.
The comparison
| API | Pricing (list, Oct 21, 2026) | Free start | Output | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Firecrawl | 1 credit per page (scrape/crawl/map); search 2 credits per 10 results; JSON format +4 credits/page. Hobby $19/mo (5,000 credits), Standard $83/mo billed annually (100,000) | 1,000 credits/mo | Markdown, HTML, JSON, screenshots | LLM-ready pages, site crawls |
| Apify | Free $0 ($5 usage) · Starter $19 · Scale $199 · Business $999 per month; compute $0.20 → $0.13 per CU; most Store Actors pay-per-event | $5 usage/mo | Dataset JSON/CSV | Prebuilt scrapers, scheduling |
| Bright Data Web Unlocker | $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests; Scale $499/mo incl. 383K requests | 5,000 requests/mo | Unblocked HTML/JSON | Blocked and CAPTCHA sites |
| Zyte API | HTTP $0.13–$1.27 per 1,000; browser-rendered $1.01–$16.08 per 1,000 (pay-as-you-go, five site tiers) | $5 credit | HTML, screenshots, auto-extraction | Mixed difficulty at volume |
| ScrapingBee | Hobby $19 (75,000 credits) · Freelance $49 (250,000) · Startup $99 (1M) | 1,000 credits | HTML, Markdown, AI extraction | Simple API, MCP and CLI |
| Crawl4AI | Free, Apache-2.0 (v0.9.5, Oct 14, 2026) | Unlimited | Markdown, structured JSON | Self-hosted, full control |
| Mistral OCR 4.1 | $4 per 1,000 pages · $2 batch | Trial credits | Markdown + bounding boxes | OCR of scanned files |
| Docling | Free, MIT (v2.141.0, Oct 20, 2026) | Unlimited | JSON, Markdown, HTML | Local OCR and Office files |
Notes on each
Firecrawl. One credit is one page on a basic scrape, crawl or map; search costs 2 credits per 10 results, and the JSON, Question and Highlight formats add 4 credits per page. A page that returns 403 or 404 still costs 1 credit, while a scrape that returns nothing is free. Pay-as-you-go top-ups in $5 steps are available on paid plans. It is the shortest path from URL to model context.
Apify. A marketplace of thousands of scrapers plus a platform to run your own. Plans include the same dollar amount of usage as their price; compute is billed in compute units (1 CU = 1 GB of RAM for one hour). Its proxy add-ons include residential proxies at $7–$8 per GB and an Unblocker at $1–$1.50 per 1,000 requests. Choose it when someone has already built the scraper for the site you need.
Bright Data Web Unlocker. Proxy management, browser rendering, fingerprinting and CAPTCHA solving behind one endpoint, billed only for successful requests, with unlimited concurrency. Expensive per call compared with plain HTTP, cheap compared with an engineer fighting blocks.
Zyte API. Prices each website in one of five tiers, so easy sites cost cents per thousand and the hardest cost dollars. Monthly commitments cut rates sharply: at a $500 commitment HTTP responses start at $0.06 per 1,000.
ScrapingBee. Credit plans with headless browsers and proxy rotation handled for you, a Markdown scraper, AI data extraction, a CLI and an MCP server for Claude Code, Codex and Cursor.
Crawl4AI. The most popular open-source crawler for LLM use (about 86,000 GitHub stars, Apache-2.0). You run the browsers and handle blocking yourself.
Adding OCR to the pipeline
Scrapers return the text that a page renders. Scanned PDFs, images and screenshots need OCR. Mistral OCR 4.1 costs $4 per 1,000 pages ($2 in batch) and returns Markdown with bounding boxes and confidence scores. Docling runs locally for free and also parses DOCX, PPTX and XLSX. The hyperscalers’ text-only OCR (Google Enterprise Document OCR, Azure Read, AWS Textract Detect Text) is $1.50 per 1,000 pages. See Mistral OCR vs Docling vs Reducto for that choice, and best web search APIs for AI agents if you need search rather than scraping.
How to choose
- Friendly sites, under 100,000 pages a month → Firecrawl or Crawl4AI.
- A scraper already exists for the site → Apify.
- Blocked, login-free but protected sites → Bright Data Web Unlocker or Zyte.
- Need Markdown for an LLM → Firecrawl, ScrapingBee Markdown, or Crawl4AI.
- Files are scans → add Mistral OCR batch or Docling.
Respect each site’s terms and robots rules; the API does not make scraping lawful where it otherwise is not.
Last verified: October 21, 2026. Prices are list USD from each vendor’s pricing page; open-source versions from GitHub releases.