Bright Data vs Diffbot
Bright Data is a Proxy & data infrastructure, while Diffbot is an AI extraction API. Bright Data fits best for: Companies scraping heavily protected sites at scale that need the strongest proxy and unblocking infrastructure. Diffbot fits best for: Teams that need rule-free, consistent structured data across many sites, or entity data from a Knowledge Graph.
| Bright Data | Diffbot | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Proxy & data infrastructure | AI extraction API |
| Starting price | Pay as you go | $299/mo |
| Free tier | Web Unlocker / MCP: 5,000 free requests per month (per official MCP docs and pricing page as indexed by search); first deposit matched up to $500 in promo credits (docs) | 10,000 credits/month, all APIs, 5 requests/min, no credit card |
| Pricing model | per GB (proxies) and per 1K successful requests (Unlocker/SERP/Scraper APIs) | credits |
| AI extraction | ||
| Structured JSON | ||
| JS rendering | ||
| Proxies / anti-bot | ||
| API | ||
| No-code UI | ||
| Open source | ||
| MCP server | ||
| Best for | Companies scraping heavily protected sites at scale that need the strongest proxy and unblocking infrastructure. | Teams that need rule-free, consistent structured data across many sites, or entity data from a Knowledge Graph. |
| Visit Bright Data | Visit Diffbot |
Why choose Bright Data
- Residential, ISP, datacenter and mobile proxy networks
- Web Unlocker with automatic CAPTCHA/anti-bot handling
- Browser API (hosted headless browsers)
- SERP API and site-specific Web Scraper APIs
Watch out for
- Pricing is complex and spread across many products
- Overkill and expensive for small projects
- Promotional vs list prices make cost comparison tricky
Why choose Diffbot
- Automatic Extract APIs (article, product, discussion etc.) with no rules
- Crawlbot for whole-site crawling
- Knowledge Graph of organizations, people and articles
- Natural-language processing API
Watch out for
- High jump from free to $299/mo
- Fixed page-type schemas; less flexible than prompt-based extraction
- Knowledge Graph credits are expensive per record
Our product
Only need structured JSON from pages?
BestAIScraper's extraction API takes a URL and a list of fields and returns typed JSON. Pay per use, no subscription.
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