Which web scraper should you use?
Apify, Bright Data, or Oxylabs? Answer three questions and our scraper chooser gives one opinionated recommendation based on your target, cadence, and coding comfort. No signup.
How to pick a web scraper
The three big names solve overlapping but different problems. Apify is the fastest route to a working scraper — pre-built actors, a managed runtime, and a no-code option for common sites. Bright Data brings the largest proxy network and the deepest unblocking stack, which pays off on big or heavily-protected targets. Oxylabs sits close to Bright Data on scale with strong enterprise support and a clean API. The chooser weighs what you're scraping, how often, and whether you'll write code, then points you at the best fit.
Remember that scraping at scale usually needs two things: a scraping tool and good proxies. Compare options across scraping APIs, residential proxies, and datacenter proxies.
FAQ
- Do I need to know how to code to scrape?
- Not always. Apify offers ready-made actors and a no-code interface for common sites, while Bright Data and Oxylabs are usually paired with your own code or a proxy/unblocker API. The chooser asks about your coding comfort so it won't point a non-coder at a code-first tool.
- What's the difference between a scraper and a proxy?
- A scraper extracts data from pages; a proxy routes your requests through different IPs so you aren't blocked. Most serious scraping needs both — a scraping tool plus residential or datacenter proxies for reliable access at scale.