Bright Data competitors, sorted by why you are leaving
Bright Data is cheap per request and broad in coverage. People leave because the product is the whole web's plumbing, and they only wanted one tap. 4 replacements below, each one matched to a specific reason.
If the job is structured records from a specific site, Apify is the like-for-like among these Bright Data competitors: a marketplace of scrapers, priced per result by each Actor. Of the Bright Data alternatives for fetching pages from many sites, ScrapingBee is cheaper per page on a plan, at about $0.0005 for a default rendered fetch on Startup against $0.0015 per success here. If the pages are going into a model, Firecrawl returns Markdown at 1 credit a page. If what you used was the SERP API, Serper sells Google results in real time for $1.00 per 1,000 at its smallest pack and $0.30 at its largest, against $1.50 here.
Prices and limits for every option below are read off the vendor's own page. These are the Bright Data alternatives that each answer a named problem.
The 3 reasons people actually leave
If none of these is your situation, the honest answer is that you should probably stay, and the Bright Data API review covers what you already have. The 28 providers in the Sourcing APIs listing are where these replacements come from.
1 · Too many products to find the one you need
Bright Data sells proxies, an unblocker, a SERP API (search results as data), a Browser API, more than 1,500 pre-built scrapers and datasets. The three API products a GTM team calls are priced the same way, but getting to them means choosing zones (each product is set up as a zone with its own credentials), products and plans first, and its own llms.txt files disagree on what the free tier covers.
2 · Scale is only cheaper above about 333,000 requests a month
Pay as you go is $1.50 per 1,000 on success. Scale is $499 for about 380,000 requests, which is $570 of pay as you go, so the plan saves money only above roughly 333,000 a month and costs more below it. Teams that bought the plan for safety often pay for an allowance they do not use.
3 · Search is rate limited until the account holds funds
Concurrency is advertised as unlimited across the three APIs, with one exception: since January 2026 an unfunded account is held to 1,000 SERP requests a minute. A free-tier evaluation of a search-heavy pipeline therefore measures a ceiling the paid account will not have.
4 Bright Data alternatives, and what each one fixes
Ordered by how closely each one answers the reasons above, not by price.
| Provider | Entry price | Unit cost | Free tier | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bright Data | $1.50/1K requests | $0.0015 per request | 5,000 credits a month across the SERP, Unlocker and Scraper APIs, no card. A hard stop, not a bill. | Baseline |
| Apify | $19/mo | $0.20 per compute unit | Free plan, $5 of platform usage a month, no card. Blocked rather than billed when it runs out. | Best for a scraper somebody already built |
| ScrapingBee | $19/mo | $0.00025 per credit | 1,000 free API credits to try it, no card. | Best for cheap rendered pages at volume |
| Firecrawl | $16/mo annual | $0.0032 per credit | Free plan, 1,000 credits a month, no card. Keyless scrape and search too. | Best for turning sites into model input |
| Serper | $1/1k queries | $0.001 per query | 2,500 free queries, no credit card required | Cheapest Google results per query, if you use the pack |
Read from each vendor's own pricing page on 24 October 2026.
The case for each one
Each one below is matched to a reason rather than scored, and each one names what you give up by taking it. A replacement with no downside is a replacement nobody has actually run.
Apify
A marketplace of scrapers behind one token, priced per result by each Actor. The closest substitute when you used Bright Data's pre-built scrapers.
Apify is the other marketplace in this directory, selling scrapers that third-party developers build and maintain. Thousands of Actors in Apify Store, from Google Maps to whole-site crawlers, are started, polled and read through one REST API, which makes it the natural replacement for Bright Data's Web Scraper API.
The price of a run is set by the Actor's developer. Google Maps Scraper is listed from $1.50 per 1,000 places, the same headline as Bright Data's records, while pay-per-usage Actors bill compute units at $0.20 each on Starter, $0.16 on Scale and $0.13 on Business. The plan is prepaid usage in dollars: $5 free, then $19, $199 or $999 a month.
Limits are generous: 60 requests a second per resource, 400 a second to start Actor runs, and 250,000 a minute across the account. The MCP server is hosted at mcp.apify.com with OAuth or a token.
What you give up
One rate card. On Bright Data the SERP, Unlocker and Scraper APIs share one price; on Apify every Actor has its own, and unused prepaid usage expires at the end of the month. You also give up the SERP API, which has no single Apify equivalent with the vendor's own price on it.
When it is the wrong answer
A team that wants one predictable per-request price across every source. That is the thing Bright Data does well and Apify, by design, does not.
Read the review · Bright Data vs Apify
ScrapingBee
One endpoint with the browser and proxies handled, from $19 a month. Cheaper per default rendered page than Bright Data's Unlocker on every published plan.
If the Web Unlocker was the product you used, ScrapingBee is the like-for-like: send a URL, get the rendered page back, with proxy rotation and JavaScript handled. It prices in credits that depend on how hard the page fights, which is a different shape from Bright Data's flat per-success rate.
A default call is 5 credits because rendering is on by default, a plain fetch is 1, premium proxies 10 or 25, and stealth 75. On Startup at $99 for 1,000,000 credits a default page is about $0.0005; even on Hobby at $19 for 75,000 it is about $0.0013. Bright Data's Unlocker is $0.0015 per success.
The catch is the hard pages. A target that needs stealth costs 75 credits, about $0.0074 on Startup, and that is where Bright Data's flat rate wins. ScrapingBee does not bill a 429, and concurrency runs from 25 on Hobby to 200 on Business.
What you give up
Pay as you go, unlimited concurrency, and the flat rate on hard targets. ScrapingBee is subscription only, its throughput is the plan's concurrency, and a site that needs its stealth tier costs five times Bright Data's per-success price.
When it is the wrong answer
A crawl dominated by heavily protected sites, and any job that needed Bright Data's pre-built scrapers or SERP API rather than its unlocker.
Firecrawl
Pages as clean Markdown at 1 credit each, rendered. The shorter path when the output is model input rather than HTML.
A common reason for buying Bright Data's unlocker in a GTM stack is to read company websites and hand them to a model. Firecrawl does the fetch and the cleanup in one call and returns Markdown, so the step between the unlocked HTML and something a model can read disappears.
The price is flat by page: 1 credit for a basic scrape, crawl or map, 4 more for the JSON, Question or Highlight formats, and 2 credits per 10 search results. That is $0.0032 a page on Hobby and $0.00083 on Standard, which is cheaper than Bright Data's $0.0015 per success once you are on Standard.
The free plan is 1,000 credits a month with no card, and some endpoints work with no key. A scrape that returns nothing costs nothing; a 403 or 404 still costs a credit.
What you give up
Unblocking strength, scale and the pre-built scrapers. Firecrawl says sites that fight scrapers will fight it too, and its throughput is concurrent browsers, 5 on Hobby and 25 on Standard, against Bright Data's advertised unlimited concurrency.
When it is the wrong answer
Large crawls of hostile targets, SERP collection, and structured records from specific platforms.
Serper
Google results in real time from $1.00 per 1,000, falling to $0.30, charged only on success. The cheaper replacement for the SERP API.
If the SERP API was the Bright Data product you used, Serper is the like-for-like: Google results returned in real time, with credits deducted only for successful responses, the same rule Bright Data applies. It sells nothing else, which is the point for a team that only ever wanted the search results.
The price is lower at every step. Serper sells prepaid packs: $50 for 50,000 queries at $1.00 per 1,000, $375 for 500,000 at $0.75, $1,250 for 2.5 million at $0.50 and $3,750 for 12.5 million at $0.30. Bright Data is $1.50 per 1,000 on pay as you go and about $1.31 on its $499 Scale plan.
Throughput comes with the pack: 50 queries a second on Starter, 100 on Standard, 200 on Scale and 300 on Ultimate, which Serper puts at roughly 15,000 to 18,000 searches a minute. There are 2,500 free queries with no card to test against your own keywords.
What you give up
Breadth and the rest of the toolkit. Serper is Google only, with no unlocker, no pre-built scrapers and no MCP server, and its documentation is not public. Credits expire six months after purchase, so the cheap rate on a large pack only holds if you use the pack in time.
When it is the wrong answer
Anyone who used Bright Data for more than search, or who needs engines beyond Google. SerpApi covers more than 100 search APIs on one key, at a much higher price per search.
What you would actually pay, on each one
Every provider on this page publishes a rate card, so the real numbers can sit next to each other rather than behind a summary. The plan you want is the one whose included volume covers a normal month for you, not the cheapest one on the page.
Bright Data
Bright Data publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and pay as you go with no minimum above the free allowance.
Free tier
- No credit card
- Shared across SERP, Unlocker and Scraper APIs
- Renews on the 1st, never rolls over
- Stops hard when spent, no surprise bill
Pay as you go
- Charged on success only
- Monthly spend limits you set
- Unlimited concurrency
- A prepaid wallet, so only deposited funds are spent
Scale
- $1.30 per 1,000 above the allowance
- 383,000 on the Unlocker plan, 384,000 records on Scraper
- About $1.31 per 1,000 when the allowance is used
- Cancel anytime
Enterprise
- Volume discounts
- Account manager and premium SLA
- SSO
- Priority support
Apify
Apify publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $19 to $999.
Free
- No credit card
- Compute at $0.20 a CU, 16 GB of RAM
- 5 concurrent runs
- Blocked, not billed, when the $5 runs out
Starter
- $19 of prepaid usage a month
- Compute at $0.20 a CU, 64 GB of RAM
- 32 concurrent runs
- Bronze discount on Store Actors
Scale
- $199 of prepaid usage a month
- Compute at $0.16 a CU, 256 GB of RAM
- 128 concurrent runs
- Silver discount on Store Actors
Business
- $999 of prepaid usage a month
- Compute at $0.13 a CU, 512 GB of RAM
- 256 concurrent runs
- Gold discount and an account manager
ScrapingBee
ScrapingBee publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $19 to $249.
Hobby
- 25 concurrent requests
- 15,000 default rendered calls
- $0.000253 a credit
Freelance
- 50 concurrent requests
- 50,000 default rendered calls
- $0.000196 a credit
Startup
- 100 concurrent requests
- 200,000 default rendered calls
- $0.000099 a credit
Business
- 200 concurrent requests
- 600,000 default rendered calls
- Business + is $599 for 8,000,000
Firecrawl
Firecrawl publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $16 to $333.
Free
- No cost, no card
- 1,000 pages or 500 searches
- 2 concurrent browsers
- Plus the keyless endpoints, which need no account
Hobby
- $19 a month paying month to month
- 2,500 searches or 5,000 pages scraped
- 5 concurrent requests
- $0.0032 a credit
- 1,000 extra credits per $5
Standard
- $99 a month paying month to month
- 50,000 searches or 100,000 pages scraped
- 25 concurrent requests
- $0.00083 a credit, four times better than Hobby
- 2,000 extra credits per $5
Growth
- 50 concurrent requests
- Scale is $599 a month for 1,000,000 credits
- Enterprise above that
Serper
Serper publishes 5 tiers, one of them free.
Free
- No credit card required
- The same API as the paid packs
Starter
- $1.00 per 1,000 queries
- 50 queries a second
- Credits valid for 6 months
Standard
- $0.75 per 1,000 queries
- 100 queries a second
- Credits valid for 6 months
Scale
- $0.50 per 1,000 queries
- 200 queries a second
- Credits valid for 6 months
Ultimate
- $0.30 per 1,000 queries
- 300 queries a second
- Credits valid for 6 months
Read the included volume before the headline price. A plan that costs twice as much and carries five times the credits is the cheaper plan, and on this page that is the usual case rather than the exception.
What each one costs at your volume
Bright Data first, then every replacement. The model picks the cheapest published plan that covers your volume on each one, which is the comparison a row of entry prices cannot make.
Bright Data
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
Apify
Its plans are not metered in records, so the figure below is the entry plan rather than a forecast.
ScrapingBee
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
Firecrawl
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
Serper
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
Plans are read from each vendor's own pricing page and the model picks the cheapest one that covers you, so these are list prices on the billing term each vendor publishes, annual where that is how it prices, before any discount you negotiate. Apify publishes plans that are not metered in records, so the figure shown is the entry plan rather than your bill.
What a year costs at three volumes
The same plan-fit arithmetic as the model above, run out to a year, because an annual number is what a budget actually asks for.
Apify, ScrapingBee and Serper publish only an entry price, so those columns are the floor for a year, not a forecast.
| A year at | Bright Data | Apify | ScrapingBee | Firecrawl | Serper |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $0 Free tier | $228 | $228 Hobby | $0 Free | $600 Starter |
| 10,000 a month | $180 Pay as you go | $228 | $228 Hobby | $996 Standard | $600 Starter |
| 50,000 a month | $900 Pay as you go | $228 | $228 Hobby | $996 Standard | $600 Starter |
These are list prices on the published plan that covers each volume, on the billing term each vendor publishes, so they are the number before you negotiate.
Where the data comes from, and what you may do with it
The question that arrives late and expensively is who is allowed to hold the data. A migration is the moment to check it, because you are signing a new contract anyway.
| Provider | Fields returned | Coverage | Compliance | Redistribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bright Data | Firmographics, Job postings, LinkedIn profile, Search results, Web pages | Global | ISO 27001 SOC 2 Type II GDPR CCPA | Not stated |
| Apify | Firmographics, Web pages | Global | SOC 2 GDPR | Not stated |
| ScrapingBee | Firmographics, Intent and news, Web pages, Search results | Global | GDPR DPA | Not stated |
| Firecrawl | Firmographics, Technographics, Intent and news, Web pages | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II | Not stated |
| Serper | Intent and news, Search results | Global | None published | Not stated |
None of these states a redistribution position on its pricing or docs pages. Internally that never matters. Put the rows in something your customers can see and it becomes the question your legal team asks first.
Two practical notes that apply to every provider on this page. A compliance badge describes the vendor rather than your use of it, so a GDPR DPA does not give you a lawful basis for the outreach you send. And every one of these vendors runs its own opt-out, which means a person who asks you to delete their record has to be removed from your copy as well as from theirs.
Moving off Bright Data
Written against Apify, the first pick above, because the steps are the same whichever one you take and the specifics are what make them useful. Swap the name and the order still holds.
Measure the thing you are about to lose
Replay 100 of the queries, URLs or lookups you really send through Bright Data and record the usable results, the failures and what each one cost. Without that baseline every provider looks cheaper per call than the one you are paying for today.
Check which fields change
Apify does not return job postings, LinkedIn profile and search results, which Bright Data does. If anything downstream reads those fields, the switch changes your pipeline as well as your vendor.
Rewrite the auth and the limits, in that order
Bright Data authenticates with a bearer API key, plus a zone for the SERP, Unlocker or Browser API. Apify uses a bearer API token, or OAuth through the hosted MCP server.
The limits are the part that bites later. Bright Data's limits: SERP API 1,000 a minute on an unfunded account, raised by adding funds. Concurrency unlimited.
Apify's limits: 60 requests a second per resource, 400 to run an Actor, 250,000 a minute per account. A loop tuned to the first will either crawl or get throttled on the second.
Run both for one billing cycle
Keep the old key live and route a slice of real traffic to the new one. A month is the shortest honest test, because the limits and the overage rate only show up under a real month's load, and those are where the surprises live.
Cancel on the renewal date
Annual seats and prepaid usage rarely refund mid-term. Check what the contract says about the time you have already paid for, and time the switch to the renewal date.
The step people skip is the first one, and it is the only one that cannot be done after the fact. Once the old key is off you have nothing to compare the new one against, so a provider that is quietly worse on your workload looks like a provider that is fine.
What practitioners say about Firecrawl
Transcribed as written and linked to the thread. A Reddit claim is a signal rather than a fact, so nothing here is the only source for any figure on this page.
A credit is a page until you turn on the features you came for
The credit inflation thing is crazy. From "1 credit = 1 page" to burning 5-9 per page the second you enable anything actually useful is not an accident, that's a deliberate design choice if you ask me. [...] Product is good, no question. Just know what you're getting into before you start building on it
r/ProxyEngineering · May 2026 · 3 points
The mechanism is confirmed by Firecrawl's own documentation, which states that operations cost different amounts of credits and names JSON extraction and Interact as the dear ones, so heavier usage reaches the credit cap sooner. That is the thing to model before sizing a plan: the rate card above quotes 1 credit a page, and the page you actually want is usually not a basic scrape.
The 5 to 9 multiplier is this commenter's own and nothing here verifies it, and the rest of their comment is about GitHub stars and the self-hosting license rather than about the API. Take the shape of the warning, read the operations table against your own pipeline, and treat the baseline rate as the cheap case rather than the typical one.
14 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page.
Should you actually switch?
The short answer is at the top of this page. Before you act on it, run the test below, because it is the cheapest way to find out whether that answer holds for you.
Scrapers differ on the pages that fight back. Take fifty URLs you actually fetch, the hardest ones included, and run them through their free tiers. Count the pages that came back usable and what each cost in credits. The easy pages look the same everywhere; the hard ones decide the bill.
Head to head, and in a stack
Apify vs Bright Data
CompareTwo platforms selling scrapers, an unblocker and proxies, and pricing the unblocker identically on the entry tier. Search is where they part.
Compare them →All alternatives
57Every provider in the directory that teams regularly try to replace, with the reasons and the replacements for each.
Browse the hub →Before you switch, try the waterfall in Clay.
Clay runs a waterfall across 150+ data providers from one table, without a separate contract with each. A lookup that finds nothing costs no data credit, and the free plan includes 500 actions a month.
Frontal is a Clay Elite Studio Partner.
Switching from Bright Data, answered
What is the best Bright Data alternative?
It depends on why you are leaving, which is how this page is organized rather than ranked. The first pick here is Apify, which this directory lists as the best for a scraper somebody already built, at $19/mo. The case for it, and what you give up, is in the section above.
Is there a free alternative to Bright Data?
Yes, 4 of the replacements here do. Apify: Free plan, $5 of platform usage a month, no card. Blocked rather than billed when it runs out. ScrapingBee: 1,000 free API credits to try it, no card. Firecrawl: Free plan, 1,000 credits a month, no card. Keyless scrape and search too. Serper: 2,500 free queries, no credit card required.
How were these competitors chosen?
By the reason teams leave, not by a score. The page opens with the reasons teams leave and matches a replacement to each one.