Best Web Scraping APIs 2026: Oxylabs vs Bright Data vs Decodo

The best web scraping APIs in 2026, by my reading of the documented pricing, are Oxylabs Web Scraper API (per-result pricing from $0.25 per 1K results), Bright Data Web Unlocker (from $1.50 per 1K requests, 5,000-request free tier), and Decodo Web Scraping API (2,000 free requests monthly, paid plans from $19). All three bill by outcome rather than bandwidth.

What a managed scraping API actually does

A scraping API sits one layer above raw proxies. Instead of renting IP addresses by the gigabyte and building your own rotation, retry, and unblocking logic, you send the API a target URL and get back the page — or, increasingly, parsed structured data. The provider absorbs the hard parts: proxy selection, browser fingerprinting, CAPTCHA handling, and JavaScript rendering.

That trade-off is the core decision. Raw proxy access is cheaper per unit of traffic and more flexible; a managed API is faster to ship and shifts the anti-bot arms race onto the vendor. We break that decision down in detail in our scraping API vs proxy comparison, and our full web scraping guide covers where APIs fit in a complete data-collection stack.

This roundup compares the three managed offerings we track most closely: Oxylabs Web Scraper API, Bright Data Web Unlocker (plus its Scraping Browser sibling), and Decodo Web Scraping API.

How we evaluate scraping APIs

ProxyFacts has not yet run its own head-to-head benchmarks of these products. Until we do, this comparison is built strictly on documented evidence: vendor pricing pages, product documentation, and compliance policies, all fetched and re-verified on July 17, 2026, plus independent industry research where available. Performance figures such as success rates and response times are labeled as vendor claims throughout. Where a vendor does not publish a number, we say so rather than estimate. ProxyFacts is monetized through disclosed affiliate partnerships; those partnerships never change which numbers we report.

Best web scraping APIs compared

Engineer’s take (Hinata): The number I would model first is not the entry price but the share of my target list that genuinely needs the expensive tier. A pipeline where 90 percent of URLs are soft targets and 10 percent are hostile can route the bulk through a cheap per-request rate and reserve something like Web Unlocker for the stubborn remainder — that split will usually beat committing everything to one vendor. The quiet trap in this table is JavaScript rendering: it triples Decodo's per-request price and pushes Oxylabs users toward a separate product, so estimate your render ratio before trusting any per-1K figure. And remember the managed premium is really a payroll trade — it pays for itself the month your team stops babysitting retries and CAPTCHAs, and not before.

1. Oxylabs Web Scraper API — best overall value per result

Oxylabs consolidates its scraping products into a single Web Scraper API with per-result billing. According to its product page (fetched July 17, 2026), pricing starts from $0.25 per 1K results, and you pay only for successful results — failed requests do not consume budget. The free trial includes up to 2,000 results with no credit card required.

Two things stand out in the documentation. First, parsing: many target endpoints advertise structured output through Oxy Parser, delivering parsed JSON rather than raw HTML — the Amazon endpoint, for example, lists 129 data points. If your goal is e-commerce price monitoring or SERP tracking, skipping the HTML-parsing step is a genuine cost saving in engineering time — custom parsers are typically the first component to rot in any production pipeline, so I weight built-in parsing more heavily than a few cents of per-result difference. Second, browser automation is packaged separately: the product page points JavaScript-heavy, agent-style workloads to a distinct Headless Browser product, while the Web Scraper API itself focuses on request-and-result data delivery.

On compliance, Oxylabs is explicit. Its KYC and safety policy states that every customer completes a KYC form at signup covering business details and use case, with risk-based escalation to ID verification and compliance calls, and ongoing usage monitoring afterward. Oxylabs is also a member of the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative.

2. Bright Data Web Unlocker and Scraping Browser — best for hard targets

Bright Data splits the managed-scraping problem into two products. Web Unlocker is the request-based unblocking layer: you send a URL, it returns the page, and its pricing page (fetched July 17, 2026) lists full browser rendering and CAPTCHA solving among included capabilities, with a "pay only for success" model on the pay-as-you-go tier.

The published pricing ladder: a free tier of 5,000 requests per month with no credit card, pay-as-you-go at $1.50 per 1K requests, a $499/mo Scale plan with 383,000 requests included and $1.30 per 1K beyond that, and custom Enterprise terms. Bright Data also advertises a first-deposit matching bonus of up to $500.

The Scraping Browser (also branded Browser API) targets teams that want to keep writing Puppeteer, Playwright, or Selenium code but outsource the unblocking. Unlike Web Unlocker, it bills per gigabyte of traffic with no per-request fees: $8/GB pay-as-you-go, falling to $5/GB on the $1,999/mo plan, according to the product page fetched the same day. That makes it the right shape for long, interactive sessions where a per-request meter would be punishing. Before choosing it, though, I would profile a few real sessions for gigabytes consumed — per-GB estimates made on gut feel tend to be wrong by an order of magnitude.

Bright Data runs the strictest vetting of any provider we track. Per its KYC FAQ, residential network access is limited to verified companies that pass a human-reviewed KYC: registered-company signup, corporate email domain verification, a use-case description, and potentially an introductory video call plus government-issued ID. For an ad-verification or market-research team with a legal department, that friction is a feature; for a solo developer, it is a real barrier.

Independent context: Proxyway's Proxy Market Research 2026 (data collected March-April 2026) cites Bright Data at roughly $300M annualized revenue, growing about 50 percent year over year on AI-driven demand — a useful signal of scale, though it is Proxyway's figure, not an audited one.

3. Decodo Web Scraping API — best budget entry and free plan

Decodo is the provider formerly known as Smartproxy; the rebrand went live on April 22, 2025 with accounts, pricing, and endpoints carried over unchanged, per Decodo's own announcement. Its Web Scraping API is the most accessible of the three on price.

The published structure (July 2026, prices plus VAT): a permanent free plan at $0/mo with 2,000 requests per month on standard proxies (an effective $0.50 per 1K, capped at 10 requests per second, no credit card), and a Core plan at $19/mo covering 38,000 standard requests at the same $0.50 per 1K rate. Requests that use premium proxies and JavaScript rendering are billed at a higher rate — $1.50 per 1K on entry-level plans. Paid plans carry a 14-day money-back option.

Feature-wise, the product page advertises more than 100 pre-built templates for popular targets, output in HTML, JSON, CSV, PNG, XHR, or Markdown (the last pitched as LLM-ready — and if the downstream consumer is a language model, Markdown is the format I would prototype with, since it sheds the token-expensive markup for you). Decodo's headline vendor claims are a 99.92 percent success rate and 99.99 percent uptime. Treat those figures as marketing until independently measured.

Decodo's security and compliance page describes automated fraud checks, KYC verification, and third-party screening for every customer at registration, with third-party ID verification triggered by suspicious activity. Notably, Decodo actively blocks high-risk target categories — banking, government portals, streaming, app stores, and ticketing — which is exactly the posture we want to see from a provider courting compliant use cases.

Per-result vs per-request vs per-GB: how the pricing models differ

The billing unit matters more than the headline number. Three models are in play here:

1. Per successful result (Oxylabs). You pay for delivered data. At the published starting rate of $0.25 per 1K, one million results costs $250. Failed attempts are the vendor's problem, which aligns incentives well.
2. Per request (Bright Data Web Unlocker, Decodo). Pay-as-you-go Web Unlocker at $1.50 per 1K means one million requests costs $1,500 — six times the Oxylabs starting rate, though the products are tuned for different jobs and per-result rates vary by target. Decodo's standard rate works out to $0.50 per 1K, tripling to $1.50 per 1K when premium proxies and JavaScript rendering are switched on.
3. Per gigabyte (Bright Data Scraping Browser, and all raw proxy networks). Billing scales with traffic, not outcomes. Heavy pages, retries, and media inflate cost; efficient scrapers on lightweight targets can come out ahead.

Rule of thumb from the documented numbers: per-result and per-request APIs win when targets are hostile and failure rates on your own infrastructure would be high; per-GB proxy access wins when targets are simple and pages are light. Our proxy pricing comparison puts the per-GB side of that equation under the microscope, and Proxyway's 2026 market research notes that residential per-GB pricing has now stabilized after falling by as much as 75 percent between 2023 and 2025 — meaning API-vs-proxy math you did two years ago is stale.

Success-rate claims are vendor claims — read them that way

Decodo advertises a 99.92 percent success rate; Oxylabs and Bright Data both anchor on "pay only for success" billing rather than a headline percentage for these specific products. None of these figures is a contractual SLA unless it appears in your signed agreement, and none has been independently verified by ProxyFacts.

Success-based billing partially defuses the issue: if a request fails, you do not pay, so an inflated marketing number costs you retries and latency rather than money. Still, the honest position is that block rates depend overwhelmingly on your specific targets. Before committing to a volume plan, burn through the free tiers — 2,000 results at Oxylabs, 5,000 requests at Bright Data, 2,000 monthly requests at Decodo — against your actual target list. I would start with the single ugliest target on that list, because it, not the average, is what decides feasibility. For the techniques that keep failure rates down regardless of vendor, see our guide on how to scrape without getting blocked.

Compliance: what these APIs should — and should not — be used for

All three vendors now gate access behind identity checks: Oxylabs requires a KYC form from every customer, Bright Data restricts its network to human-verified companies, and Decodo screens every registration with automated fraud checks and KYC. That industry-wide shift is good news for legitimate users, because it prices abusers out of reputable infrastructure.

ProxyFacts's own stance matches theirs. Scraping APIs are appropriate for publicly available data in use cases like price monitoring, SEO rank tracking, ad verification, market research, and assembling AI training corpora. They are not appropriate for bypassing logins or paywalls, sneaker or ticket bots, account farming, or harvesting personal data — activities every provider here prohibits and, in Decodo's case, actively blocks at the target level. The legal picture around scraping public data is genuinely nuanced, and we walk through it in is web scraping legal?

Worth watching: IPRoyal

IPRoyal, a value-focused proxy provider, lists a Web Scraping API in early access at $1.00 per 1K requests including rendering, rotation, and CAPTCHA solving, as displayed on July 17, 2026. It is too new to rank against the established three, but if the pricing holds at general availability it would undercut both per-request incumbents. We will fold it into this comparison once the product exits early access.

Which scraping API should you choose?

• Choose Oxylabs Web Scraper API if you want the lowest documented cost per delivered result and built-in parsing for e-commerce and SERP data.
• Choose Bright Data if your targets are heavily defended, you need built-in browser rendering at the unlocking layer or a Puppeteer/Playwright-compatible Scraping Browser, and you operate as a registered company that can clear its KYC.
• Choose Decodo if you are validating a project on a budget: the permanent free plan and $19/mo entry tier are the cheapest documented way into managed scraping, with a 14-day money-back safety net.