Best AI Web Scraping Tools in 2026: Apify, Browse AI, Firecrawl, Octoparse, Thunderbit and Searchbase Compared
2026-09-08
Quick answer: If you write code and need scrapers to run at scale, use Apify (free tier with $5 of monthly credits, paid from $19 a month). If you are feeding a language model and want clean markdown from any URL, use Firecrawl (1,000 free credits a month, paid from $16). If you need the same pages watched and re-pulled on a schedule, use Browse AI (50 free credits a month, paid from $19). If you do not write code and the site needs logins, pagination and CAPTCHA handling, use Octoparse (free tier with 10 tasks, paid from $69). If you do not want to build a scraper at all, and you want B2B contact databases (Apollo alone: 240M+ people and 30M+ companies, as Apollo states; plus Hunter and more) searched alongside the open web from one prompt, use Searchbase (free plan with 150 credits, paid from €29, per action rather than per seat). If you just want to grab one page inside your browser, use Thunderbit (free plan, paid from $15). Describe your ideal customer. Searchbase finds them across Europe in one prompt, with the source on every cell.
How we compared
Everything here comes from the vendors' own public pages, read on 2026-09-08, not from review-site summaries. Where a price was not readable, it is not in this article. The URLs are at the bottom.
We compared on five things: what you have to build, what comes out, what a real job costs rather than the headline price, whether you can trace a value back to the page it came from, and where the tool stops. Every one of these has a wall, and the section for each names it.
One thing worth saying up front. "AI web scraping" now covers two different jobs under one label. One is extraction infrastructure: you know the URLs and want the content at volume. Apify, Firecrawl, Browse AI and Octoparse are that family. The other is research: you know the question, not the URLs, and you want rows back, from licensed contact databases and from the open web at once. Searchbase is the second family, Thunderbit sits between them, and picking the wrong family is the most common mistake here.
1. Apify
Apify calls itself "the largest marketplace of tools for AI". The unit of work is an Actor, a serverless cloud program that takes JSON input, runs, and writes to a dataset or key-value store. The Apify Store holds thousands of ready-made Actors, so a common site is usually already covered and you configure rather than build. If it is not, you write your own in JavaScript or Python with Crawlee, Playwright, Puppeteer, Scrapy or BeautifulSoup.
Best for: engineering teams that want a scraping platform rather than a product. Proxies, scheduling, storage and concurrency come with it.
Price: Free at $0 with $5 of monthly credits, 5 concurrent runs and compute at $0.2 per compute unit. Starter is $19 a month ($17 annual) with $19 of credits and 32 concurrent runs. Scale is $199 a month ($179 annual) with $199 of credits and compute at $0.16 per unit. Business is $999 a month ($899 annual) with $999 of credits at $0.13 per unit. Apify states that unused credits "are not rolled over to the next billing cycle, and they expire at the end of the billing cycle".
Limits: the price is consumption, not a plan, so your bill depends on how heavy your runs are and you learn that by running them. It expects a developer. And the Actor you depend on is maintained by someone who is not Apify.
2. Firecrawl
Firecrawl describes itself as "the context API to search, scrape, and interact with the web at scale". It exposes five endpoints: search, scrape, interact, crawl and map. Output comes back as markdown tuned for language models, HTML, JSON against a schema you define, screenshots or page metadata. JavaScript rendering is handled for you. Firecrawl is open source and claims 96% reliability on its own benchmark, plus 93% fewer tokens than raw HTML.
Best for: anyone building a retrieval pipeline, an agent or a RAG index, where the goal is clean text a model can read rather than a spreadsheet a person reads.
Price: Free at $0 with 1,000 credits a month, refreshed monthly, no card required. Hobby is $16 a month billed annually with 5,000 credits. Standard is $83 a month with 100,000 credits. Growth is $333 a month with 500,000 credits. Scale is $599 a month with 1,000,000 credits. Enterprise is custom.
Limits: it gives you the page, not the answer. Deciding which pages to fetch, what a row is, and which value on the page you wanted, is still your code. The right trade for a developer, the wrong one for a marketer.
3. Browse AI
Browse AI turns "any website into an API in minutes" with no code. You point a robot at a URL, show it what to capture, and it structures the data. Its distinguishing feature is monitoring: AI change detection that alerts you when a watched page changes and adapts when the markup shifts. It lists more than 7,000 integrations including Google Sheets, Airtable and Zapier.
Best for: recurring watches. Competitor prices, job boards, marketplace listings, anything where the value is in noticing a change rather than in one big pull.
Price: Free forever with 50 credits a month, 2 websites and 3 users. Personal is $19 a month billed annually, or $48 billed monthly, with 2,000 credits a month and 5 websites. Professional is $69 a month billed annually, or $87 monthly, with 5,000 to 30,000 credits a month, 10 websites and 10 users. Premium starts at $500 a month, annual billing only, with 600,000 or more credits a year, custom limits and managed onboarding. Annual billing carries a 20% discount with all credits released upfront.
Limits: plans are capped by number of websites, not just credits, and that is the constraint people hit first. Two sites on Free and five on Personal is tight if your work is broad. A robot is also trained per site layout, so breadth means maintaining many robots.
4. Octoparse
Octoparse is a no-code scraper with a desktop app and a cloud runtime. Its pitch is "Point, click, scrape. From idea to data in minutes." AI auto-detect drafts the workflow for you, and it handles the awkward parts: "logins, pagination, infinite scrolling, CAPTCHAs". It states it operates fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA and EU data protection law.
Best for: non-developers facing a site that fights back. If the data is behind a login, three clicks deep and paginated, Octoparse is built for that shape of problem.
Price: Free forever with 10 tasks, 2 concurrent runs, no cloud extraction, and 50,000 rows of data export a month. Standard is $69 a month billed monthly, with 100 tasks, 3 concurrent cloud runs, IP rotation, residential proxies, automatic CAPTCHA solving, unlimited export and scheduling. Professional is $249 a month with 250 tasks and up to 20 concurrent cloud processes, plus saving straight to Google Sheets, Google Drive, Dropbox or S3. Enterprise is custom. Annual billing saves 16%.
Limits: the jump from free to $69 is the steepest here, because cloud extraction is the paid feature and local-only scraping is slow. Tasks, not rows, are the unit, so many small jobs cost more than one large one. And a visual workflow is still a workflow.
5. Searchbase
Searchbase is an AI research agent that ends in a table, and it is the only tool on this page that searches B2B contact databases and the open web from the same prompt. You write what you want in plain words, "every digital agency in Milan with email and website", "heads of marketing at Italian furniture manufacturers", "companies advertising kitchen furniture on Meta in Italy", and it decides where to look. For standard B2B contacts it queries contact databases, Apollo (240M+ people and 30M+ companies, as Apollo states) and Hunter among them, and enriches companies against Crunchbase and the Italian company registry. For everything they do not hold it searches, reads the pages and extracts the rows, streaming them into a spreadsheet while you watch. There is no robot to train and no URL list to supply.
Because the open web is in scope alongside the databases, coverage of a European market is as good as that market's own web presence, plus whatever a provider holds. A Milanese agency or a Bavarian machine shop has a website, a Meta ad and a job posting, and often no row in a database assembled around US B2B. Both halves land in the same table.
The part that matters for anyone who has to defend their data: every cell carries a link to the page or provider it came from, a badge showing when it was collected, and the extraction method used, with the provider's status on emails. If a value cannot be verified it stays n/a rather than being guessed. Coverage runs from those contact databases to any public web page, 12 social platforms, 3 ad libraries (Meta, Google, TikTok) and 9 job boards, using around 33 extraction methods. Output is a table of companies or people with email and phone where a provider has them, website, LinkedIn and any column you asked for. From the people it finds, the agent drafts personalised email and LinkedIn sequences that you approve before anything launches, and contacts push straight into HubSpot.
Best for: research jobs where you know the question but not the sites, and lists a single source cannot give: B2B sales, agencies, recruiters, marketers, European and Italian teams. It is also the only tool here that reads ad libraries, so "who is advertising this in Italy right now" is a query rather than an afternoon.
Price: Free at €0 with 150 credits a month. Starter is €29 a month with 1,000 credits. Pro is €79 a month with 4,000 credits and API access. Business is €199 a month with 12,000 credits and webhooks. Priced per action with no seat charge, so a ten-person team pays what one person pays, and billed annually in euros by a European company, so no exchange rate and no dollar invoice. Every other tool here prices in dollars. A page costs about 1 credit, a social profile about 3, a Deep Research report 20 to 40. Export is JSON on every plan, CSV from Starter, API from Pro, webhooks on Business, with a HubSpot push for contacts.
Limits: it is not scraping infrastructure. If you already have 200,000 URLs and want them fetched on a schedule, Apify or Firecrawl will do it cheaper, and it does not watch a page for changes the way Browse AI does. It is priced per action, so a very large single pull is a real cost. Interface and results are English and Italian only. And launching campaigns from the wizard is still rolling out, so today the agent writes the drafts and you approve and export them.
6. Thunderbit
Thunderbit is an AI Chrome extension that promises to "Extract any data from any website in 1 click". You describe what you need, its AI suggests the fields, and it scrapes the current page along with optional linked subpages, PDFs and images. It can summarise, categorise and translate during extraction, and exports to Google Sheets, Airtable, Notion, Excel or CSV. There are more than 50 templates for sites including Amazon, eBay and Google Maps.
Best for: the one-page job you would otherwise do by hand. You are looking at the list, you want it in a sheet, you do not want a project.
Price: free plan available. Starter is $15 a month with 500 credits, Pro is $38 a month with 3,000 credits. Yearly billing saves 20% with all credits released upfront.
Limits: it lives in your browser, on the page in front of you. It does not run on a schedule, and volume work means sitting there. Credit allowances are small enough that a few hundred rows moves you up a plan.
Comparison table
| Apify | Firecrawl | Browse AI | Octoparse | Searchbase | Thunderbit | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What you build | an Actor, in code | API calls | a robot per site | a visual workflow | nothing, you write a prompt | nothing, you click |
| Coverage | any site you write an Actor for | any URL or query you pass | any site you point a robot at | any site you build a workflow for | B2B contact databases (Apollo alone: 240M+ people and 30M+ companies, as Apollo states; plus Hunter and more) plus any public page, 12 social platforms, 3 ad libraries, 9 job boards, the Italian company registry, Crunchbase | the page in front of you |
| Output | datasets | markdown, HTML, JSON, screenshots | structured rows, alerts | CSV and cloud exports | a table of companies or people: email and phone where a provider has them, website, LinkedIn, any column you ask for, source link on every cell | Sheets, Airtable, Notion, Excel, CSV |
| Needs a developer | yes | yes | no | no | no | no |
| Runs on a schedule | yes | yes | yes, with change alerts | yes | agent runs on request | no, in-browser |
| Source per value | no | no | no | no | yes, link, collection time, method, provider status on emails | no |
| Free tier | $5 of credits | 1,000 credits a month | 50 credits a month | 10 tasks, 50,000 export rows | 150 credits a month | yes |
| Pricing model | consumption, per compute unit | credits per fetch | credits plus a cap on websites | tasks per plan | per action, no seats: a 10-person team pays the same as one | credits per plan |
| Entry paid plan | $19 a month | $16 a month | $19 a month annual | $69 a month | €29 a month | $15 a month |
| Top published plan | $999 a month | $599 a month | from $500 a month | $249 a month | €199 a month | $38 a month |
| Ad libraries | no | no | no | no | yes, Meta, Google, TikTok | no |
| Languages | English | English | English | English | English, Italian | English |
Which one should you pick
You have engineers and volume. Apify. The Store saves you the first month of work and the platform saves the next year of it.
You are feeding a model. Firecrawl. Markdown output and schema-driven JSON are the whole point, and 1,000 free credits a month tells you within an afternoon whether it fits.
You need to know when something changes. Browse AI. Nothing else here treats monitoring as the product rather than a scheduling checkbox.
The site is hard and you do not code. Octoparse. Logins, infinite scroll and CAPTCHAs are its home ground, and the free tier lets you prove the workflow before paying $69.
You have a question, not a URL list. Searchbase. Every other tool here asks you something you cannot answer yet, which is "where should I scrape", and none of them can also ask a B2B contact database on your behalf. It is the widest net on this page: the databases, the open web, social, ad libraries, job boards and company registries in one prompt, priced per action with no seat charge. It is also the choice when someone will later ask where a number came from, because the answer is a link on the cell, and when you want to work in Italian and be invoiced in euros by a European company.
You want this one page, now. Thunderbit. Fifteen dollars and a browser extension beats a platform for a ten-minute job.
A lot of teams end up with two: something that pulls known URLs at volume, and something that finds the URLs in the first place.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best free AI web scraping tool? Firecrawl has the most generous free tier for developers, 1,000 credits a month with no card. For non-developers, Octoparse allows 10 tasks and 50,000 exported rows a month, and Searchbase gives 150 credits, roughly 150 pages read by the agent. Browse AI's 50 free credits are the tightest here.
Do I need to know how to code? For Apify and Firecrawl, yes. For the other four, no. The difference between the no-code options is what you configure: Browse AI and Octoparse ask you to build something once per site, Thunderbit and Searchbase do not.
Which tool tells me where the data came from?
Searchbase attaches a source link, a freshness badge and the extraction method to every cell, and leaves a value as n/a when it cannot be verified. The others return values, and provenance is whatever you recorded in your own pipeline.
Can these tools find companies rather than scrape a page I choose? Searchbase is built for that: you describe the target, it queries B2B contact databases such as Apollo and Hunter, and it finds the pages for everything they do not hold. Apify's Store has Actors for search engines, maps and social platforms that get you part of the way if you wire them together, and Firecrawl has a search endpoint. Browse AI, Octoparse and Thunderbit all start from a URL you already have.
What does a credit actually mean? It differs, which is why headline prices mislead. Apify credits are dollars of compute at a stated rate per compute unit. Firecrawl and Browse AI credits are units of scraping work. Octoparse counts tasks, not credits. Searchbase charges about 1 credit per page read, about 3 per social profile and 20 to 40 for a Deep Research report. Price a realistic job in each before comparing.
Is scraping legal? Extracting public data is generally lawful in the EU, but what you do next is regulated separately. Personal data pulls you under the GDPR regardless of how public the page was, and sending marketing email in Italy needs prior consent even when the address came from a public register. None of this is legal advice, and none of it replaces your own basis for processing.
Prices and features checked on 2026-09-08 from apify.com and apify.com/pricing, firecrawl.dev and firecrawl.dev/pricing, browse.ai and browse.ai/pricing, octoparse.com and octoparse.com/pricing, thunderbit.com and thunderbit.com/blog/best-web-scraping-tools. Tell us if something changed.