What are some underrated or lesser-known web scraping / unblocking services worth trying?
If you have already looked at Bright Data, Oxylabs and Zyte, other web scraping and unblocking services worth testing include Scrapfly, Zenrows, Scrapingdog, Crawlbase, Firecrawl, Browserless and ScrapeUnblocker. Each publishes a free allowance, from 200 credits on Scrapingdog to 5,000 credits a month on Zenrows, and each differs in how it prices a request or what it returns. Which one is worth your time depends on your targets: plain pages, JavaScript-heavy pages, sites behind bot protection, or output meant for an LLM. Try two or three on the same URLs before you commit.
What makes each of these services different?
ScrapeUnblocker publishes this page; every competitor detail comes from that provider’s own pages.
| Service | What stands out, per its own pages | Free allowance |
|---|---|---|
| Scrapfly | Five APIs share one credit pool; sessions keep cookies, fingerprint and proxy and expire seven days after last use | 1,000 credits, no card, no time limit |
| Zenrows | mode=auto starts with the cheapest setup and bills only the configuration that succeeds; Markdown, plaintext or PDF output | 5,000 credits a month, no card |
| Scrapingdog | One credit pool across dedicated APIs for Google, Amazon, Walmart, eBay and others; unused credits roll over from the Standard plan up | 200 credits, no card |
| Crawlbase | Pay as you go with no monthly fee, from $3.00 down to $0.02 per 1,000 standard requests as volume grows; .onion sites over Tor | 1,000 credits, up to 5,000 after setup steps |
| Firecrawl | Returns Markdown by default; 1 credit per page on a basic scrape, enhanced proxies at no extra credit | 1,000 credits a month, no card |
| Browserless | Hosted browsers you drive with Puppeteer or Playwright, billed in units of up to 30 seconds of browser time | 1,000 units a month, no card |
| ScrapeUnblocker | 1 credit per request with real-browser rendering always on; plugin endpoints return JSON for sites such as Amazon, eBay and Airbnb | 500 requests, no card |
How do their pricing models differ?
Their pricing models differ in what makes a request cost more. Scrapfly, Zenrows and Scrapingdog charge more credits for JavaScript rendering and premium or residential proxies. Crawlbase multiplies credits by a site difficulty tier, from Standard x1 to Extreme II x20, and JavaScript rendering doubles any tier. Firecrawl charges per page, with extras such as LLM extraction adding credits. Browserless bills browser time, proxy traffic and CAPTCHA solves in units. ScrapeUnblocker charges the same one credit for every request, from €1.00 per 1,000 on pay as you go to about €0.55 on its Ultimate plan. If your pages work without rendering, a credit API can cost less than a flat per-request price.
How do you test a service you have not used before?
- Pick 50 to 100 URLs that represent your real workload, including your hardest targets.
- Run them through each free allowance with the settings you would use in production.
- Check the content of every response, not only the status code, because a block page can come back as HTTP 200.
- Note what each service billed for failures, using its own documentation.
- Divide the monthly price you would pay by the number of good pages you got.
ScrapeUnblocker’s own 2026 benchmark, on Proxyway’s 2025 target list with 6,000 calls per target, measured 97.0% content-verified success across 14 protected sites. It is not a head-to-head test, so your own URLs remain the real test.
Where does ScrapeUnblocker not fit?
ScrapeUnblocker does not offer screenshots, Markdown output, asynchronous requests or custom request headers, and its maximum request time is 60 seconds (90 with steps). If you need Markdown for an LLM, Firecrawl and Zenrows list it. If you want to drive a browser yourself, Browserless is built for that. If you want a larger recurring free tier, Zenrows lists 5,000 credits a month. ScrapeUnblocker fits when you want rendered pages at one fixed price per request. See the pricing page.
Sources
- Scrapfly pricing and sessions documentation, viewed 24 September 2026
- Zenrows pricing and Fetch API reference, viewed 24 September 2026
- Scrapingdog pricing and documentation, viewed 24 September 2026
- Crawlbase pricing and Crawling API documentation, viewed 24 September 2026
- Firecrawl pricing, billing and scraping guide, viewed 24 September 2026
- Browserless pricing and documentation, viewed 24 September 2026
- ScrapeUnblocker pricing, documentation and 2026 benchmark
Competitor details come from each provider’s public pages as viewed on 24 September 2026 and may have changed. Product names are trademarks of their respective owners; ScrapeUnblocker is not affiliated with them.
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95%+ success rate · from 0.55€ per 1,000 calls · 500 free requests on signup.