How Irmu stacks up
No strawmen. Each page states what the other provider is genuinely good at, quotes their current list pricing, and says plainly when you should pick them instead.
Most of this market sells one thing well. Proxy vendors sell IPs and charge per gigabyte. Rendering APIs sell a headless Chrome you cannot reach into. Agent-era tools sell clean markdown but leave you without a browser or a proxy port. Irmu sells the whole path — fetch, render, screenshot, extract, proxy — behind one key, one quota and one credit ledger.
The three questions that actually decide these evaluations are: what does a unit of successful work cost, what happens when a target blocks you, and how much glue code do you write around the API. Every page below answers those three for one provider.
Eight providers, one table
Entry paid plan and billing model for each. List pricing checked 2026-08-29.
| Provider | Entry paid plan | Billing model | Best at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Irmu | $40 / 200,000 credits | Credits per successful request | Fetch, browser, screenshot, extract and proxy on one key |
| Firecrawl | $19 / month (Hobby) — 5,000 credits | Credits per call, varying by endpoint | Clean markdown built for LLM pipelines |
| ScrapingBee | $49 / month (Freelance) — 250,000 API credits | API credits with published multipliers | Exceptionally clear credit documentation |
| ScrapingDog | $40 / month (Lite) — 200,000 request credits | Request credits, varying by target difficulty | Dedicated parsers for Google, Amazon and LinkedIn |
| ScraperAPI | $49 / month (Hobby) — 100,000 API credits, 20 concurrent threads | API credits, varying by domain and mode | Wide catalogue of structured e-commerce endpoints |
| ZenRows | Credit-slider plans starting at roughly 120,000 credits per month — exact entry price not published as a plain figure | Shared credits with published multipliers | MCP server and agent tooling as first-party products |
| Bright Data | Web Unlocker pay-as-you-go at $1.50 per 1,000 requests; Scale plan $499 / month | Per request (Unlocker) and per GB (Browser) | Largest residential and mobile IP network |
| Apify | $29 / month (Starter) — $29 of included platform usage | Compute units, transfer and per-Actor fees | Thousands of ready-made Actors |
| Oxylabs | Web Scraper API Micro — from $0.50 per 1,000 results, up to 98,000 results | Per 1,000 successful results, tiered by target | Per-target pricing that rewards concentrated volume |
Irmu vs Firecrawl
Agent-ready markdown and crawling versus a full fetch, browser, screenshot and proxy stack.
Read comparisonIrmu vs ScrapingBee
A closely matched credit model — the difference is browser control and the proxy port.
Read comparisonIrmu vs ScrapingDog
Similar entry pricing — the split is dedicated site scrapers versus general-purpose access.
Read comparisonIrmu vs ScraperAPI
Structured e-commerce endpoints and no-code pipelines versus a general access layer.
Read comparisonIrmu vs ZenRows
Two similar credit-based platforms — the difference is agent tooling versus browser and proxy depth.
Read comparisonIrmu vs Bright Data
The largest proxy network in the market versus a simpler, credit-priced access layer.
Read comparisonIrmu vs Apify
A marketplace of pre-built Actors versus a direct API you call from your own code.
Read comparisonIrmu vs Oxylabs
Per-target enterprise pricing and strict pay-for-success versus a single credit ledger.
Read comparisonStart building with Irmu today
200 free credits every month, no card required. Every API, every integration, one key.