Scraping APIs and platforms

A scraping API does the fetching for your code. You send a URL and some options, and the service returns the page as HTML, a screenshot or extracted fields. Behind the endpoint it runs browsers when a page needs JavaScript, retries failed requests and routes traffic through its own network, so your team does not run that infrastructure.

Hosted scraping platforms go a step further. They run your whole scraper on their servers, store the results, handle schedules and let you start runs through an API. Some include a store of ready-made scrapers for common sites that you can configure instead of writing your own.

Engineers choose these services when they want to write the parsing and business logic but not maintain browsers, queues and retry code. They are also handy for one-off research, since a single HTTP call can return a rendered page.

To compare them, send the same list of your real target URLs to each and look at three things: how many come back complete, how long they take, and what the response looks like. Check how each counts usage, since rendering a page with a browser often costs more than a plain fetch. Look at concurrency limits, geographic options, SDKs for your language and how errors are reported.

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6 AI web scraping tools in scraping apis and platforms

Apify

Cloud platform for running scrapers and browser automations, called Actors, with a store of ready-made ones, scheduling, storage and an API.

  • Developer API
  • Free plan or free tier

ScrapingBee

Web scraping API that fetches a URL with a headless browser and proxies, returning HTML, screenshots or extracted fields.

  • Developer API

ScraperAPI

Scraping API that handles proxies, retries and rendering for each request, with structured endpoints for some large sites.

  • Developer API

Zyte API

by Zyte

Scraping API from the company behind Scrapy, with browser rendering and AI extraction of products, articles and job posts.

  • Developer API

Scrapfly

Scraping API with browser rendering, screenshots and an extraction endpoint, plus SDKs for Python and TypeScript.

  • Developer API

Crawlbase

Crawling and scraping API with a queued crawler for large URL lists and storage for the results.

  • Developer API

AI features in this group mostly sit on top of the fetch. You describe the fields you want, or pick a page type such as product or article, and get JSON back instead of raw HTML. Test those outputs on your own pages, and keep the raw HTML when you can, so you can re-parse later if the extraction was wrong.

A scraping API does not decide what you are allowed to collect. Read the target site terms and robots.txt, prefer an official API where one exists, and set rate limits in your own code even when the provider can go faster. If you collect anything about people, privacy law applies to you as the collector, whatever service fetched the page.

Think about how results reach the rest of your stack. Some services return each page in the same HTTP response, which suits small jobs. Others accept a batch of URLs and send results to a webhook or cloud bucket when done, which suits large lists and long-running crawls. Check retention too: if the provider stores responses, find out for how long and where.

Questions about scraping apis and platforms

What is the difference between a scraping API and a hosted scraping platform?

A scraping API fetches single pages for your code, which still does the crawling and parsing. A hosted platform runs the whole scraper for you, with schedules, storage and sometimes ready-made scrapers for common sites.

Do I still need to write parsing code?

Usually yes, unless you use an extraction endpoint. Many APIs return raw or rendered HTML, and your code picks out the fields. Extraction features can return JSON directly, which is worth testing on your own pages.

Why is rendered browser output priced differently?

Loading a page in a real browser uses far more computing power than a plain HTTP request. Most providers count those requests separately or at a higher rate, so render only the pages that need it.

Does using an API make my scraping compliant?

No. The provider only fetches pages. Site terms, robots.txt, copyright and privacy law still apply to what you collect and how you use it.

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