Compare the best free web scraping APIs: ScraperAPI, Apify, Bright Data, Crawlbase. Plus Screenshot API for visual capture. Code examples included.
Web scraping is essential for competitive analysis, price monitoring, lead generation, content aggregation, and market research. But building a reliable scraper from scratch means dealing with proxies, CAPTCHAs, JavaScript rendering, rate limiting, and anti-bot measures. Web scraping APIs handle all of this for you behind a simple REST interface. This guide reviews the best free and freemium web scraping APIs available to developers in 2026.
A web scraping API is a cloud service that fetches web pages on your behalf, handles anti-bot protections, rotates IP addresses, renders JavaScript, and returns the page HTML (or structured data) via a REST endpoint. Instead of managing a fleet of proxies and headless browsers yourself, you make a single API call and get clean results.
Even experienced developers hit walls when scraping at scale. Here is what scraping APIs solve:
| API | Free Tier | JS Rendering | Proxy Rotation | CAPTCHA Solving | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ScraperAPI | 5,000 credits free | Yes | Yes (40M+ IPs) | Yes | General-purpose scraping |
| Apify | $5 free credit/month | Yes | Yes | Yes | Pre-built scrapers, actor marketplace |
| Bright Data | Free trial | Yes | Yes (72M+ IPs) | Yes | Enterprise-scale scraping |
| Crawlbase | 1,000 free requests | Yes | Yes | Yes | Simple API, good for beginners |
| DevProToolkit Screenshot | 100 screenshots/day | Yes (Chromium) | N/A | N/A | Visual capture, thumbnails, previews |
ScraperAPI is one of the most popular web scraping APIs. It handles proxy rotation, CAPTCHA solving, and headless browser rendering in a single API call. Send any URL and get back the rendered HTML.
Apify is a full web scraping platform with a marketplace of pre-built "Actors" — ready-to-use scrapers for specific websites like Amazon, Google, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The free tier gives you $5 of platform credit per month.
Bright Data (formerly Luminati) is the largest proxy network in the world with 72 million IPs. Their Web Scraper API provides pre-built data collection for major platforms with automatic parsing into structured JSON.
Crawlbase (formerly ProxyCrawl) offers one of the simplest scraping APIs: send a URL, get back HTML. It provides 1,000 free requests to get started and scales easily from there.
While not a traditional scraping API, our Screenshot API is a valuable companion tool for web scraping projects. It captures full-page screenshots of any URL using headless Chromium, producing pixel-perfect renders of JavaScript-heavy pages.
Here is a practical example of scraping a web page and extracting data using ScraperAPI and BeautifulSoup:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
# ScraperAPI - get your free key at scraperapi.com
API_KEY = "your-scraperapi-key"
def scrape_page(url, render_js=False):
"""Scrape a web page using ScraperAPI with proxy rotation."""
params = {
"api_key": API_KEY,
"url": url,
"render": str(render_js).lower() # Enable headless browser
}
response = requests.get("https://api.scraperapi.com", params=params)
response.raise_for_status()
return response.text
# Example: Scrape Hacker News front page
html = scrape_page("https://news.ycombinator.com")
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")
# Extract story titles and links
stories = soup.select(".titleline > a")
for i, story in enumerate(stories[:10], 1):
title = story.get_text()
link = story.get("href", "")
print(f"{i}. {title}")
print(f" {link}\n")
# Example: Scrape a JavaScript-rendered SPA
spa_html = scrape_page("https://example-spa.com", render_js=True)
spa_soup = BeautifulSoup(spa_html, "html.parser")
# Now parse the fully rendered DOM...
For visual capture alongside scraping, combine this with the DevProToolkit Screenshot API:
# Capture a visual screenshot with DevProToolkit
screenshot_url = "https://api.commandsector.in/api/screenshot/capture"
params = {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com", "width": 1280, "height": 720}
headers = {"X-API-Key": "YOUR_API_KEY"}
resp = requests.get(screenshot_url, params=params, headers=headers)
with open("hn_screenshot.png", "wb") as f:
f.write(resp.content)
print("Screenshot saved: hn_screenshot.png")
Need visual web capture for your scraping pipeline? Our Screenshot API renders any URL with headless Chromium. 100 free screenshots per day.
Try Screenshot API →ScraperAPI is the best overall free web scraping API, offering 5,000 free credits with proxy rotation, CAPTCHA solving, and JavaScript rendering. For recurring free usage, Apify provides $5 of credit every month.
Web scraping of publicly available data is generally legal in most jurisdictions, but it depends on the website's terms of service, the type of data collected, and how you use it. The 2022 US Ninth Circuit ruling in hiQ vs. LinkedIn affirmed that scraping public data does not violate the CFAA. Always consult legal advice for your specific situation.
For small-scale scraping (a few hundred pages), you may not need proxies. For anything beyond that, proxy rotation is essential to avoid IP blocks. Web scraping APIs like ScraperAPI handle proxy rotation automatically.
You need a headless browser (Chromium, Playwright, Puppeteer) to render JavaScript. All the APIs in this guide offer JS rendering as an option. Alternatively, use our Screenshot API to capture the visual output of any JavaScript-rendered page.
Web scraping extracts the HTML content and data from a page. A Screenshot API captures a visual image (PNG/JPEG) of how the page looks in a browser. They complement each other: scraping for data, screenshots for visual verification.
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curl "http://147.224.212.116/api/..." \
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