ScraperAPI vs Crawlbase Comparison: Everything You Need to Know Before Choosing

Crawlbase, formerly known as ProxyCrawl, is a web data extraction platform that helps developers and businesses collect data from websites at scale without being blocked. Anyone who runs web scrapers encounters the same obstacles: websites ban repeated requests from the same IP address, present CAPTCHAs, rely on JavaScript rendering that simple HTTP clients cannot handle, and change behaviour depending on location. Maintaining proxy pools, headless browsers and retry logic in-house is costly and distracting. Crawlbase addresses these problems by routing requests through its own infrastructure, which rotates residential and data centre proxies, handles CAPTCHAs and renders dynamic pages, returning the resulting HTML or structured data to the caller. Its core approach is to provide scraping infrastructure as a simple API, so that teams can concentrate on the data they need rather than on evasion techniques. This allows engineering teams to scale data collection without building or maintaining their own anti-blocking infrastructure. The product range includes the Crawling API for fetching pages with automatic proxy rotation and optional JavaScript rendering, the Crawler for asynchronous, large-volume crawling with results delivered to webhooks, Smart Proxy for teams that want to use existing tools through a rotating proxy endpoint, and a Scraper API with ready-made parsers for sites such as Amazon, Google and major e-commerce and social platforms. Cloud storage keeps retrieved pages for later processing, and libraries are provided for Python, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, Java and other languages. The service is fully hosted and billed on usage, with dashboards for monitoring requests and success rates. Crawlbase is used by data engineers, price intelligence and SEO providers, market research firms, lead generation companies and AI teams collecting training data. Pricing starts from around USD 1, following a pay-as-you-go model, with a free trial, and a free version offering a limited number of requests is available.