Alternatives
Bright Data alternatives
Proxy and unblocking infrastructure with a scraping suite and an agent-facing MCP server. Built for volume collection, priced accordingly.
Verified 7 October 2026·Figures from vendors' own pages
Bright Data at a glance
- Vendor
- Bright Data
- Category
- Crawl & extraction
- Own index
- No — Proxy, unblocking and scraping infrastructure
- Price per 1,000
- $1.50
- Free tier
- 5,000 SERP API requests per month (and 5,000 Web MCP requests), no card required
- Rate limit
- Unlimited concurrency
- MCP server
- Yes
- Graph traversal
- No
- Coverage transparency
- No
Pricing detail. The SERP API returns scraped search-engine results pages at $1.50 per 1,000 requests pay as you go; the $499-a-month Scale plan includes 380,000 requests, then $1.30 per 1,000. Proxy and browser products are priced per GB.
Why teams look for a Bright Data alternative
Bright Data sells collection infrastructure — proxies, unblocking, scraping at volume — and is priced for it. A team that needs a search call inside an agent loop is buying a data-acquisition platform to get one, and paying platform prices for a per-call dependency.
The second reason is operational surface. Proxy infrastructure brings rotation, blocking, retries and a compliance conversation about what you are collecting and from where. That is a reasonable cost when collection is the product; it is a lot of machinery to carry when you only wanted an answer.
Where Bright Data beats us
For getting data out of sites that actively resist being read, nothing in this comparison is close. That is a real and legitimate need, their agent-facing MCP server makes it reachable from a model, and an index over the openly crawlable web — which is what we operate — simply does not address it. If a source blocks crawlers, we will tell you it is absent and why; they will get you the page.
Every page in this section names this. A comparison that cannot say where the other product wins is an advertisement.
The alternatives
unlob
$0.40/1kWe index the openly crawlable web and return passages from it; an extraction tool turns URLs you already have into clean text. That is a different job, and plenty of stacks run both. What we add is the discovery step — finding which URLs are worth fetching — plus an answer about what the index does not hold and why.
Firecrawl
Crawl, scrape and clean any URL into markdown for an LLM. A complement to a search API rather than a replacement — it needs URLs to start from.
Jina Reader
Prefix any URL and get clean markdown back. The lowest-friction extraction tool there is, and priced per token rather than per page.
Diffbot
One of the very few independent commercial web crawls, feeding a structured Knowledge Graph. Entity-shaped rather than passage-shaped.
DataForSEO
$0.60/1kIndustrial SERP infrastructure built for SEO tooling rather than agents. The cheapest per query in the field, with the lowest-level API to match.
Parallel Search
$1/1kA suite of web search, extraction and research APIs on a proprietary index, from the former Twitter CEO. The closest competitor to unlob by thesis.
Serper
$1/1kThe cheapest way to get raw Google results into an agent. Fast, minimal, and entirely dependent on Google continuing to be scrapeable.
Perplexity
$1/1kRaw web search over its own index through the Search API, and search with synthesis through the Agent API, which replaced Sonar Chat Completions in September 2026.
Exa
$4/1kNeural, embeddings-first search over a proprietary index, sold alongside content extraction, answers and agentic research products.
Sources
- Bright Data SERP API pricingread 7 October 2026
- Bright Data Web MCP pricingread 7 October 2026
Frequently asked questions
What is the best alternative to Bright Data?
It depends what you are replacing. If you need an independent index at the lowest price, unlob is $0.40 per 1,000 searches against $1.50 for Bright Data's SERP API, pay as you go. If you need systematic crawling of specific sites, Bright Data may still be the right tool — we say so on our comparison page rather than pretending otherwise.
Does Bright Data own its own web index?
No — Proxy, unblocking and scraping infrastructure. That is a legitimate architecture, but it means the product depends on an upstream provider it does not control.
How much does Bright Data cost?
The SERP API returns scraped search-engine results pages at $1.50 per 1,000 requests pay as you go; the $499-a-month Scale plan includes 380,000 requests, then $1.30 per 1,000. Proxy and browser products are priced per GB.
Try the cheapest own-index alternative
10,000 free credits a month, no card. Test coverage and latency against your own queries before you commit to anything.