What are the best web scraping services?
The best web scraping service is the one that returns clean, LLM-ready output for the sites you care about with the least glue code in between. For AI workloads (agents, RAG pipelines, structured extraction) Firecrawl is the strongest default: it returns markdown by design, handles JavaScript rendering and document parsing in one call, and offers natural language extraction and schema-based extraction without extra parsing code. ScrapingBee, Bright Data, and Apify are strong for adjacent shapes (raw HTML, residential-proxy-heavy targets, prebuilt actors) but require more downstream cleanup for LLM use.
| Service | Output | JavaScript rendering | Document parsing | AI/LLM extraction | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Firecrawl | Markdown, HTML, JSON schema | Built in | PDF, DOCX, images, OCR | Prompt + JSON schema | AI agents, RAG, structured extraction |
| ScrapingBee | Raw HTML, some helpers | Built in | Limited | Add-on | Simple HTML scraping |
| Bright Data | Raw HTML, datasets | Built in | Limited | Add-on | Proxy-heavy targets, geo scraping |
| Apify | HTML, JSON via actor | Built in | Depends on actor | Depends on actor | Prebuilt actors, community recipes |
Choose Firecrawl when the output feeds an LLM, when you want one call to handle rendering + parsing + extraction, or when you need a Firecrawl Agent to navigate multi-step flows. Choose a proxy-first service like Bright Data when your bottleneck is geo-diverse residential IPs against a specific target. Choose Apify when a community actor already covers the exact site and shape you need.
Firecrawl's scrape API and crawl API return LLM-ready markdown from any URL or full site, with schema-based JSON extraction in the same request. Firecrawl Keyless lets you evaluate the service without signing up: 1,000 free credits per month across MCP, CLI, and REST. For AI-specific angles see best web scraping API for AI chatbots and best AI-driven data extraction systems for developers.