The 6 Best Browserless Alternatives in 2026

Apify's bet is that you should rarely write a scraper at all: its store holds thousands of maintained Actors for the sites people actually scrape, and you pay for compute units rather than per request. Paid tiers are prepaid platform credit — $19 on Starter buys $19 of usage — so the monthly figure is a floor, not a cap. It is also the home of Crawlee, the open-source scraping library.

• Thousands of prebuilt, maintained scrapers
• You can deploy your own code too
• Crawlee is free and open source

Firecrawl became the default scraping layer for AI apps by solving the part that actually hurts: it renders JavaScript, rotates proxies, follows sitemaps and hands back clean markdown instead of raw HTML. Pricing is credit-based on top of a flat monthly tier — Hobby at $19 covers 5,000 credits. It is also open source under AGPL, so the whole thing can be self-hosted if you would rather run the proxies yourself.

• Markdown output is genuinely LLM-ready
• Open source and self-hostable (AGPL)
• Handles JS rendering and proxies for you

Oxylabs sits at the heavier end: a very large proxy pool, per-site parsers for the big commerce targets, and a scheduler for recurring jobs. You pay for results rather than requests, so blocked attempts are free. The Micro tier at $49 is the entry point; pay-as-you-go rates fall from $0.50 to $0.25 per 1,000 results as commitment rises.

• You only pay for successful results
• Very large residential proxy pool
• Prebuilt parsers for major commerce sites

Bright Data is the volume player — ready-made scrapers for hundreds of major sites, a very large proxy estate behind them, and pay-per-success billing at around $1.50 per 1,000 records on pay-as-you-go, falling to roughly $0.70 with commitment. The free tier gives 5,000 records a month. Subscription tiers exist at the top end (Scale is $499/month for 384,000 records) but the entry path is metered, which is how it is priced here.

• Pay only for records actually delivered
• Prebuilt scrapers for most major sites
• Enormous proxy network

ScrapingBee is the least ceremonious option in the category: one GET request with your target URL and it returns the rendered page, having dealt with the browser, the proxy and the anti-bot check. Pricing is straight API credits against a flat monthly tier, with JS rendering and premium proxies costing more credits per call. No open-source version, which is the trade for not operating anything.

• Simplest API in the category
• Proxy rotation and CAPTCHAs included
• Predictable credit pricing

Zyte built Scrapy, and Zyte API is the commercial answer to the part Scrapy never solved — getting past anti-bot systems. Its pricing is unusual and deliberately so: every request is priced by the resources it actually took, across five tiers for HTTP and five for browser requests, starting from $2 per 10,000 requests. There is no flat plan; you set a monthly spending limit instead, capped at $100 unless you commit to half of a higher limit up front.

• Only successful responses are billed
• Priced by actual resource use per request
• Made by the Scrapy team