◆ Free recommender
Which web scraper should you use?
Apify, Bright Data, or Oxylabs? Answer three questions and you get one opinionated recommendation based on your target, your cadence, and your coding comfort. No signup.
Answer three questions
The reasoning
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 are scraping, how often, and whether you will 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.
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 will not point a non-coder at a code-first tool.
A scraper extracts data from pages; a proxy routes your requests through different IPs so you are not blocked. Most serious scraping needs both — a scraping tool plus residential or datacenter proxies for reliable access at scale.
Because these are the three that come up in almost every scraping decision, and a chooser that returns one clear answer is more useful than a table of twenty. If none of them fits, the proxy and scraping-API categories list everything else we track.
Some links on this page are affiliate links. They never change the price you pay, and they never change the recommendation — the chooser follows the decision tree above, which is the same for everyone. How we score · Affiliate disclosure.