Head to head
unlob vs Bright Data
Bright Data is proxy and unblocking infrastructure at industrial scale. unlob is a search index. Different layers of the stack.
Verified 7 October 2026·Figures from vendors' own pages
On the headline rate that is 3.8× — $1.50 per 1,000 for Bright Data’s SERP API, pay as you go, its cheapest comparable mode, against $0.40per 1,000 searches. Other modes cost more; the pricing detail below lists them. Both figures are computed from the published plan tables rather than typed into this page, so they follow the vendors rather than drifting from them.
Price
- unlob$0.40
- Bright Data$1.50
| Provider | Own index? | $ / 1,000 searches | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
Priced: SERP API, pay as you go. 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. | No Proxy, unblocking and scraping infrastructure | $1.50 | Bright Data SERP API pricing |
$29 per month for 50,000 credits, and a search is one credit. | Yes Our own crawl and index | $0.58 | This page |
$199 per month for 500,000 credits, and a search is one credit. | Yes Our own crawl and index | $0.40 | This page |
When Bright Data is the better choice
A comparison page that cannot name a scenario where the competitor wins is an advertisement. Here are the real ones.
Choose Bright Data
- Collecting from specific sites at volume, particularly where blocking is a problem.
- Browser automation as managed infrastructure.
- Datasets and structured feeds from named sources.
- Residential proxy infrastructure, which we do not offer at all.
Choose unlob
- Discovery — finding which pages matter across the whole web.
- A flat per-query price rather than per-request-and-per-GB across several products.
- Trust signals and graph traversal.
The substantive differences
| Bright Data | unlob | |
|---|---|---|
| Layer | Collection infrastructure. | Retrieval over an index we already built. |
| Pricing | Per request and per GB across multiple products. | A monthly allowance of credits, with a fixed, published price per call. |
Sources
Every figure on this page was read from the vendor's own pricing page or funding announcement on the date shown.
- Bright Data: Bright Data SERP API pricingread 7 October 2026
- Bright Data: Bright Data Web MCP pricingread 7 October 2026
Frequently asked questions
Can unlob scrape a specific website for me?
No. We crawl the open web to build an index and honour robots.txt; we are not a scraping service and will not fetch a site on demand on your behalf. For targeted collection, a collection vendor is the right tool.
Check the claims yourself
The free tier is 10,000 credits a month with no card. That is enough to test coverage, latency and result quality against your own queries — which is a better comparison than this page.