ScraperAPI Alternatives: 5 SERP APIs Tested (2026)

ScraperAPI is a general-purpose proxy scraper: one API key, automatic proxy rotation and retries, and a credit model that charges more for harder targets. It handles anti-bot evasion across many site types, and its structured endpoints for Google and Bing return SERP data on top of that proxy layer. That breadth is the point — it is built to scrape almost anything, not to be a specialist SERP API.

Anyone searching for ScraperAPI alternatives in 2026 (or a ScraperAPI alternative, singular, the same question) is really choosing between another general proxy scraper and a parsed, SERP-specific API. Some teams want cheaper or larger proxy infrastructure. Others never wanted to run a proxy-and-parser stack at all, and would rather have structured Google SERP data (organic, ads, AI Overview, People Also Ask) come back as clean JSON.

The credit model is where the cost gets slippery for SERP work. A credit is a request multiplier rather than a request, and Google’s structured endpoints bill at 25 credits per call, $12.25 per 1,000 on the Hobby plan. We tested five.

The 5 best ScraperAPI alternatives at a glance

Tool	Model	Entry price	Google SERP rate (~1k)	AI Overview
cloro	Parsed AI-native SERP API	$30/mo (free tier: 500 credits/mo)	$1.25 to $2.00 /1k from Hobby (n=10 + AIO, async)	✅ deep, +2 credits
ScraperAPI	Credit-based proxy scraper	$49/mo (7-day trial, 5,000 credits)	25 credits/call ($2.30 to $12.25 /1k Google)	❌ no AIO
ScrapingBee	Headless-browser scraper	$19/mo (1,000 free credits)	15 credits/call ($0.72 to $3.80 /1k Google)	✅ ai_overviews field
Oxylabs	Proxy + SERP Scraper API	$30/mo ($5 free credits)	$0.90 to $1.35 /1k (Google, JS)	⚠️ limited
Bright Data	Proxy + SERP layer	PAYG $1.50 /1k; plans from $499/mo	$1.00 to $1.50 /1k	⚠️ DIY parse
Apify	Actor marketplace	$19/mo + usage ($5 free a month)	$1.80 to $2.50 /1k pages	✅ paid add-on

For a ScraperAPI replacement, two questions do most of the sorting. Do you get parsed SERP JSON or raw access you parse yourself, and is pricing a per-target credit multiplier or a flat per-call rate? ScraperAPI sits at the raw-access, credit-weighted end of both, and every alternative below moves toward one end or the other.

ScraperAPI alternatives: price and parsing compared

Headline scraper pricing misleads. What you pay is the per-1,000 rate plus the engineering that turns raw access into parsed SERP rows. A credit-weighted scraper that needs a parser you build and maintain is not cheaper than a flat per-call API that returns structured JSON if that parser costs you weeks.

Vendor	Model	Google SERP rate (~1k)	You parse?	AI Overview
cloro	Parsed SERP API	$1.25–$2.00 (n=10 + AIO)	No	✅ default
ScraperAPI	Credit proxy scraper	$2.30 to $12.25 (25 cr/call)	Partly (no AIO field)	❌
ScrapingBee	Headless-browser scraper	$0.72 to $3.80 (15 cr/call)	No (Google API)	✅ ai_overviews
Oxylabs	Proxy + SERP Scraper API	$0.90 to $1.35 (Google, JS)	No	⚠️ limited
Bright Data	Proxy + SERP layer	$1.00 to $1.50	Mostly	⚠️ DIY / Web Unlocker
Apify	Actor marketplace	$1.80 to $2.50 /1k pages, +$1.00 to $2.00 AIO	No on Apify’s Google actor	✅ paid add-on

ScraperAPI is the most expensive of these for Google specifically: 25 credits a call make Google $12.25 per 1,000 on the $49 Hobby plan and $2.30 on its largest plan, which is the spend a SERP-only team is overpaying. ScrapingBee is the closest like-for-like, a credit-based scraper with the same JS-rendering strength, but its Google API is a flat 15 credits a call and returns an ai_overviews field. That makes it the lowest list price here for Google with a documented AI Overview field: $1.49 per 1,000 on its $99 Startup plan, against $2.00 on cloro’s $100 Hobby plan. If you want the infrastructure swap instead, that’s Oxylabs (self-serve, parsed SERP) or Bright Data (enterprise proxy scale). cloro adds ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode and Bing AI Mode answers to the Google data through the same API.

For the price-only view see Cheapest SERP API 2026; for the full managed-API roundup see Best SERP APIs in 2026.

ScraperAPI pricing in 2026: plans, credits and Google cost

ScraperAPI sells monthly plans of API credits, and each request uses credits by target. A plain page is 1 credit, Amazon, Walmart and eBay are 5, Google and Bing are 25, and LinkedIn is 30. Options add more: JavaScript rendering is 10 credits, and Ultra Premium with rendering is 75. ScraperAPI charges only for successful requests, which it defines as 200 and 404 responses (ScraperAPI credits and request costs, read on 2026-10-22).

ScraperAPI plan	Price a month	API credits	Google calls at 25 credits	Google per 1,000
Hobby	$49	100,000	4,000	$12.25
Startup	$149	1,000,000	40,000	$3.73
Business	$299	3,000,000	120,000	$2.49
Scaling	$475	5,000,000	200,000	$2.38
Professional	$975	10,500,000	420,000	$2.32
Advanced	$1,975	21,500,000	860,000	$2.30

Annual billing takes 10% off. When we read the page, Professional and Advanced also carried 250,000 and 500,000 bonus credits as a limited offer, which the table leaves out. Enterprise starts at 22,000,000 credits on a custom price (ScraperAPI pricing, read on 2026-10-22).

The ScraperAPI free trial

New accounts get a 7-day trial with 5,000 API credits and no credit card. At 25 credits a Google call, that is 200 Google searches. cloro’s Free plan gives 500 credits every month, refreshed monthly: about 166 Google searches at 3 credits each, or 100 with the AI Overview.

What a ScraperAPI credit buys for search and AI engines

The Google SERP API returns parsed JSON with organic_results, related_questions and related_searches (Google SERP API docs). Its documented response has no AI Overview field. ScraperAPI also has AI Results endpoints for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Mode. A ChatGPT or Perplexity call is 25 credits, and a ChatGPT call that must return its sources is 75 (ChatGPT endpoint docs).

ScraperAPI vs cloro on price per Google search

A cloro Google search is 3 credits on the async API, and the AI Overview adds 2. On cloro’s $100 Hobby plan that is $1.20 per 1,000 searches, or $2.00 with the AI Overview. On ScraperAPI it is $12.25 on the $49 Hobby plan and $3.73 on the $149 Startup plan. At $1,000 a month, cloro’s Business plan is $1.07 ($1.79 with the AI Overview), and ScraperAPI’s $975 Professional plan is $2.32. A cloro ChatGPT web search call is 5 credits, $2.00 per 1,000 on Hobby. On ScraperAPI’s Startup plan it is $3.73, or $11.18 with sources required. A sync cloro request adds 2 credits. The takeaway: ScraperAPI’s credits are priced for many kinds of targets. For Google results and AI engine answers, a per-call API costs less.

The 5 real ScraperAPI alternatives, tested

The best ScraperAPI alternatives are cloro for parsed, AI-native SERP data, ScrapingBee as a headless-browser scraper for JS-heavy targets, Oxylabs as the closest like-for-like proxy and SERP infrastructure, Bright Data for proxy scale on high-volume, mixed scraping, and Apify as an actor marketplace for custom scrapers.

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1. cloro: best for parsed, AI-native SERP data

cloro’s SERP API is the inverse of ScraperAPI: there is no proxy product to meter in credits and no parser to build. One endpoint family returns parsed JSON for Google Search and News, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, plus ChatGPT, Gemini and Bing AI Mode, with the actual cited source URLs each AI surface used. Where a proxy scraper hands you HTML, cloro returns organic results, ads, AI Overview (with citations), People Also Ask, and related searches in a single response.

Tracking classic rank without tracking AI citations now misses half the SERP, which is why the cross-surface coverage matters in 2026. cloro also fits existing pipelines through n8n, Zapier, LangChain, and MCP, so you can plug it into AI-visibility monitoring, SEO tooling, or an AI agent you’re already running rather than building a new integration. Synchronous calls cover single lookups; async/batch with webhook delivery handles large query sets without polling.

cloro’s reliability is checkable. Elmo, a brand-visibility product that runs cloro as one of its providers, queries each provider every six hours and publishes the measured success rate and latency in Elmo’s provider comparison. It does not cover ScraperAPI, so read it as evidence for cloro’s own reliability, not a head-to-head. It scores success rate and latency only, not the parsing differences below.

Pricing: Credit-based from $30/month (Lite, 37,500 credits at $0.80 per 1,000 credits), with Hobby at $100/month for 250,000 credits at $0.40 per 1,000 and rates scaling down to $0.31 per 1,000 on the largest self-serve tier and $0.25 on a custom Enterprise contract. A Google call is 3 credits at n=10, +2 with AI Overview — about $1.25–$2.00 per 1,000 at n=10 with AIO. See the pricing page for full tiers.

Pros

• +AI Overview parsed on request for 2 more credits (block text plus cited source URLs).
• +One API across Google and every major AI surface.
• +Self-serve signup with a free 500-credit trial.
• +Flat page-driven pricing — no per-target credit multiplier to reconcile.
• +No proxy or parser to maintain.

Cons

• −Focused on search intelligence — it doesn't sell a raw proxy pool or scrape arbitrary non-SERP sites the way ScraperAPI does.
• −Newer than the longest-running scraper vendors.

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2. ScrapingBee: headless-browser scraper for JS-heavy targets

ScrapingBee is the closest like-for-like to ScraperAPI: a developer-first, credit-based scraper whose specialty is headless-browser JavaScript rendering. It handles the same “give me a URL, I’ll handle proxies and rendering” job, and like ScraperAPI its general scraping API charges more credits for rendering and premium proxies. Its Google API is different: a flat 15 credits a call, or 10 for a light request, and the response carries an ai_overviews field with the cited references (ScrapingBee Google API docs, read on 2026-10-22).

Pricing: Hobby $19/month (75,000 credits), Freelance $49 (250,000), Startup $99 (1,000,000), Business $249 (3,000,000), up to Enterprise 120 at $5,799 (120,000,000). At 15 credits a Google call, that is $3.80 to $0.72 per 1,000. New accounts get 1,000 free credits (ScrapingBee pricing, read on 2026-10-22).

Pros

• +Strong at JS-rendered pages and single-page apps.
• +Self-serve, developer-friendly, with 1,000 free credits.
• +Clean API surface.

Cons

• −Credit multipliers make hard targets expensive on its general scraping API.
• −AI Overviews need a regular request (15 credits); light requests leave them out.

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3. Oxylabs: closest like-for-like proxy + SERP infrastructure

If what you actually want is a larger proxy pool with a parsed SERP layer, Oxylabs is the nearest match: a 100M+ IP residential and datacenter network with a dedicated SERP Scraper API on top. Oxylabs is self-serve from $30/month ($1.35 per 1,000 JS-rendered Google results at the entry tier), and it parses the SERP for you.

Pricing: One subscription covers every Oxylabs product: Starter $30/month, Basic $100, Flexible $500, Enterprise from $2,500. Google results with JS rendering cost $1.35 to $0.90 per 1,000, and $1.00 to $0.50 without it. New accounts get $5 of free credits (Oxylabs Web Scraper API pricing, read on 2026-10-22).

Pros

• +Proxy scale well beyond ScraperAPI.
• +Parses SERP results rather than returning raw HTML.
• +Self-serve entry tier.

Cons

• −Still fundamentally proxy-first; AI Overview parsing is limited versus purpose-built SERP APIs.
• −Higher tiers move back toward enterprise pricing and contact-sales.

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4. Bright Data: proxy scale for high-volume, mixed scraping

Bright Data is the enterprise end of the proxy world: 72M+ residential IPs across 195+ countries with a SERP API layered on top. On raw Google SERP rate it’s competitive ($1.50 per 1,000 pay-as-you-go, down to $1.00 on its $1,999 plan), but residential proxy access goes through a KYC review, and committed plans from $499/month are where the effective rate drops. AI Overview isn’t a clean parsed field; you bring the parser or use Web Unlocker.

Pricing: 5,000 free requests a month, then $1.50 per 1,000 pay-as-you-go. Plans are $499/month (380,000 requests), $999 (900,000) and $1,999 (2,000,000), which is $1.30 to $1.00 per 1,000 (Bright Data pricing, read on 2026-10-22).

Pros

• +Massive, diverse proxy network (residential, datacenter, mobile, ISP).
• +Competitive raw Google rate at scale.
• +Rigorous compliance posture for regulated buyers.

Cons

• −Sales-led onboarding (KYC, MSA) can take days.
• −Multi-axis billing.
• −No clean AI Overview parsing — DIY.

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5. Apify: actor marketplace for custom scrapers

Apify is a different shape again: a marketplace of pre-built “actors” (scrapers) plus the compute to run them. Apify’s own Google Search Results Scraper covers Google results and sells the AI Overview as an add-on, so you can assemble a pipeline without writing everything from scratch. Anything beyond Apify’s own actors means picking, configuring and maintaining third-party actors.

Pricing: Plans are $0 ($5 of usage a month), $19, $199 and $999 a month, and actors bill against that balance (Apify pricing). Apify’s own Google actor costs $2.50 to $1.80 per 1,000 results pages on the paid plans, plus $2.00 to $1.00 for the AI Overview (actor pricing, read on 2026-10-22).

Pros

• +Huge library covers far more than SERPs (any site with an actor).
• +Flexible, and economical for mixed, occasional scraping.

Cons

• −You inherit third-party actor maintenance — actors break when sites change.
• −Cost is composed from platform subscription, compute, proxy, and per-actor fees.
• −AI Overview is a paid add-on: $1.00 to $3.00 per 1,000 on Apify's own Google actor.

Migration playbook: ScraperAPI → cloro

If you’re moving off ScraperAPI specifically to stop paying the 25-credit Google weighting and maintaining a SERP parser, the switch is small:

1. Credit multipliers → flat per-call rate. Stop reconciling a credit ledger against a constant call count. cloro’s Google call is a fixed 3 credits (+2 for AI Overview) at n=10 — the cost is the cost on day one.
2. Partial JSON → one parsed envelope. Delete the AI Overview handling and any SERP parsing you built on top of ScraperAPI’s response. cloro returns those as structured fields.
3. No structured AI Overview → AI Overview on the same call. Set include.aioverview and the call that returns organic results also returns the AI Overview block with cited sources, for 2 more credits. No separate scraper, no DIY extraction.
4. Add AI-surface coverage for free. The same integration that reads Google also reads AI Mode, Bing AI Mode, ChatGPT, and Gemini, so AI-citation tracking is one API, not a second vendor. Start against the free 500-credit trial to baseline your own keywords first.

The field-level version of this is in the migration guide, the closest mapping of the six: organic_results[] becomes result.organicResults[] and the keys inside it already match.

What you can’t migrate to cloro: arbitrary non-SERP scraping and a raw proxy pool are out of scope. If you use ScraperAPI to scrape many site types beyond search, keep it for that — or move that workload to ScrapingBee, Oxylabs, or Apify. cloro is a SERP API, not a general scraper.

Decision tree: which ScraperAPI alternative to pick

Background

What ScraperAPI is actually built for

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ScraperAPI is a proxy scraper first, with structured endpoints layered on top. You send it a URL (or a Google/Bing query), it rotates proxies, renders JavaScript when asked, retries on failure, and hands back the response. Pricing is denominated in credits, and a credit’s cash value depends entirely on what the request needed: a basic HTML fetch costs 1 credit, JavaScript rendering and premium residential proxies cost far more. On the Hobby plan (100,000 credits for $49/month) that’s fine for a mixed workload, but a Google structured-endpoint call bills at 25 credits, so the same plan yields 4,000 Google SERP calls, or $12.25 per 1,000 for Google specifically.

Where the credit model earns its keep

For general-purpose scraping where target diversity is the workload, the credit model is fair — you pay in proportion to difficulty:

• Aggregator pipelines that hit many site types (price comparison, listings normalization).
• E-commerce monitoring with a mix of easy and hard targets.
• Workloads that genuinely benefit from “you only pay more for the harder calls.”
• Cases where built-in proxy rotation across diverse IPs is part of the value.

For that shape of work the credit weighting reflects actual cost-of-service, and ScraperAPI is an easy pick for a developer, with a 7-day, 5,000-credit trial to evaluate it.

Where the credit weighting becomes overhead

For a SERP-only buyer the per-call complexity is essentially constant. Every Google SERP call hits the same target with the same anti-bot profile, so the credit weighting collapses to a fixed 25× multiplier and the credit math turns into bookkeeping rather than signal.

That shows up first in the rate. At 25 credits per call the Google SERP price is $12.25 per 1,000 on Hobby and $2.30 on the largest plan, against $1.20 to $0.75 for a cloro Google search. Credit cost still varies with target difficulty as well (JS render and premium proxy cost more), so forecasting spend means forecasting your target mix.

It shows up again in the parser. ScraperAPI’s Google SERP API returns organic results, related questions and related searches as JSON, but its documented response has no AI Overview field. AI Overview citations are code you write and then maintain as Google’s layout shifts.

The alternatives above close that gap, either by being a different flavor of proxy scraper or by taking the proxy-and-parser problem off your plate.

How we tested, and what these numbers rest on

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Comparison pages are easy to write and hard to trust, so here is the basis for every claim above.

The cloro rows are measured. On 2026-08-19 we ran 15 AI-Overview-prone commercial and informational queries through cloro’s Google endpoint. 14 of the 15 returned a fully parsed AI Overview object, carrying the answer text, a markdown rendering, sources, citationPills, relatedLinks and videos, at a mean of 8.5 sources per overview. That run is the evidence behind cloro’s AI Overview column. One implementation detail if you benchmark us yourself: the field populates only when include.aioverview is sent, and without that flag it is absent whether or not Google rendered an overview, which produces a convincing-looking zero.

The ScraperAPI and other vendor rows come from each vendor’s own documentation and pricing pages, linked inline throughout. We did not run those APIs under our own keys for this comparison. So read a ❌ or ⚠️ as “not documented as a first-class parsed field” rather than as a test we ran and they failed. Where a vendor has shipped something since we last checked, their documentation is the authority and this page is not.

Pricing moves and none of these figures are quotes. List prices change without notice and promotional rates are common, so treat the per-1,000 rates as the shape of the market rather than a number to budget against, and open the linked pricing page before you commit.

We make one of the products in this table. cloro is listed first because this is our site, not because a neutral panel ranked it there. The measurements above are reproducible and the competitor links go to primary sources; use both to discount our framing.

The bottom line

ScraperAPI is a general-purpose proxy scraper with credit-weighted billing tuned to mixed-target workloads, and the best ScraperAPI alternative depends on which half of that you actually need. If you scrape many site types, ScrapingBee is the like-for-like swap and Apify covers the long tail; if you need proxy scale, Oxylabs and Bright Data are the infrastructure picks.

If you’re leaving because you’re paying the 25-credit Google weighting and maintaining a SERP parser for a workload that is really SERP-only, another scraper won’t fix that. A parsed SERP API will. cloro returns organic results, ads, AI Overview with citations, and People Also Ask in one flat-priced call, across Google and every major AI surface, with a free 500-credit trial you can run against your own keywords first.