Alternatives
Diffbot alternatives
One of the very few independent commercial web crawls, feeding a structured Knowledge Graph. Entity-shaped rather than passage-shaped.
Verified 7 October 2026·Figures from vendors' own pages
Diffbot at a glance
- Vendor
- Diffbot
- Category
- Crawl & extraction
- Own index
- Yes — Independent crawl plus a Knowledge Graph
- Price per 1,000
- Not published as a flat rate
- Free tier
- 10,000 credits per month, no card required
- Rate limit
- 5 requests / min (Free); 5 / sec (Startup); 25 / sec (Plus)
- MCP server
- No
- Graph traversal
- No
- Coverage transparency
- No
Pricing detail. Subscription plans with credit allowances. The Web Search API costs 1 credit a search (10 results with page-chunk highlights), extraction 1 credit a page and a Knowledge Graph entity export 25 credits; Startup is $299 a month for 250,000 credits. No per-1,000-searches rate is published.
Why teams look for a Diffbot alternative
Diffbot is entity-shaped and most retrieval problems are passage-shaped. The Knowledge Graph answers questions about things — organisations, people, products and how they relate — and an agent that needs the paragraph where a claim is actually made is asking a different question of a differently organised corpus.
The second reason is commercial fit. It is sold as an enterprise data product with a short trial rather than a self-serve API with a published per-call rate, which makes it hard to evaluate quickly and harder to scale a small workload into.
Where Diffbot beats us
They run one of the very few independent commercial web crawls, and the structured Knowledge Graph on top of it is a genuinely different product from passage retrieval. If your question is about entities and their relationships rather than about documents, a graph of extracted entities beats searching text and then extracting entities yourself. Our coverage graph relates documents; theirs relates things.
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.
Bright Data
$1.50/1kProxy and unblocking infrastructure with a scraping suite and an agent-facing MCP server. Built for volume collection, priced accordingly.
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
- Diffbot pricingread 7 October 2026
- Diffbot Web Search APIread 7 October 2026
Frequently asked questions
What is the best alternative to Diffbot?
It depends what you are replacing. If you need an independent index at the lowest price, unlob is $0.40 per 1,000 searches. If you need systematic crawling of specific sites, Diffbot may still be the right tool — we say so on our comparison page rather than pretending otherwise.
Does Diffbot own its own web index?
Yes — Independent crawl plus a Knowledge Graph. That matters because a provider without its own index inherits the deprecation and repricing risk of whoever it depends on.
How much does Diffbot cost?
Subscription plans with credit allowances. The Web Search API costs 1 credit a search (10 results with page-chunk highlights), extraction 1 credit a page and a Knowledge Graph entity export 25 credits; Startup is $299 a month for 250,000 credits. No per-1,000-searches rate is published.
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.