ScrapingBee
A beginner-friendly scraping API that runs headless Chrome and rotating proxies behind one REST call.
About
ScrapingBee is a web scraping API that manages headless browsers and proxy rotation so you do not have to. You send a URL with an API key and parameters, and it returns the page HTML or extracted data. Thousands of headless Chrome instances sit behind rotating proxies; JavaScript rendering handles single-page apps built with React, Angular, or Vue, and you can run custom JavaScript scenarios to click buttons or fill forms before extraction. Extras include screenshots, custom header forwarding, IP geotargeting, a Google Search API for SERPs, and an AI extraction mode that turns a plain-English description into structured JSON or CSV without writing selectors.
Pricing starts at $49 per month for 250,000 credits with 10 concurrent requests, and there is a free trial of 1,000 API calls with no credit card required. Watch the credit math: JavaScript rendering is on by default and costs 5 credits per request, while premium proxies cost 10 to 25 and stealth proxies 75, so protected targets burn through small plans fast. Credit figures are provider-stated and were last seen on third-party pricing roundups in 2026.
What it can do
- Headless Chrome rendering for JavaScript-heavy pages
- Rotating proxy pool with geotargeting
- Custom JavaScript execution for interactions before extraction
- AI-powered plain-English data extraction to JSON or CSV
- Screenshot API for full or partial page captures
- Google Search API for SERP data
- Make (no-code) integration and official Python SDK
Setup
Sign up for an API key, then call the REST endpoint with your target URL; official Python SDK and community wrappers for other languages.
Prerequisites
A ScrapingBee API key; familiarity with REST calls is enough, no browser or proxy setup needed.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 7/10
Scored 7/10 (metrics tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: scrapingbee.com documents the headless-browser API, credit pricing, and the 1,000-call free trial; third-party 2026 roundups corroborate the feature set and the $49 entry price. Strengths: clean docs and developer experience, sensible free trial, used by companies like SAP and Zapier per third-party reviews. Docked for: (1) credit multipliers make protected-site costs hard to predict and burn small plans fast; (2) proxy network smaller than enterprise competitors; (3) no official SDKs beyond Python, community libraries only. License: proprietary.
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 7.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 7.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 2.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 7.0/10
- · Headless Chrome API with rotating proxies and geotargeting
- · JavaScript rendering on by default (5 credits/request); stealth proxies cost 75 credits
- · AI plain-English extraction to JSON/CSV, screenshots, Google Search API
- · Used by companies like SAP and Zapier per third-party reviews
- · Official SDK only for Python; community libraries for the rest
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.