# Crawl4AI vs Bright Data

Both fetch web pages that block bots. Bright Data's Unlocker charges one price per request, plain or hard, and its plans start at $499 a month. Crawl4AI charges by the work the page needed, never charges a failed call, and comes from the team that wrote the open-source crawler.
Facts last checked 12 Nov 2026

Crawl4AI vs Bright Data: the short answer
Crawl4AI charges by the work each page needs ($0.10 per 1,000 plain pages, $0.50 with a real browser) and nothing for a failed or blocked call; Bright Data's Unlocker charges $1.50 per 1,000 requests for every page, and its plans start at $499 a month. Crawl4AI refunds within 14 days and its extra credits never expire; Bright Data's agreement calls its fees "non-cancelable and non-refundable". Crawl4AI runs in the EU, Singapore and the US with teams and an audit log from the $99 Builder plan; Bright Data lists SSO and audit logs under Enterprise and publishes no data region. Agents set Crawl4AI up from one message, run their own budget with 17 MCP tools, and 93 recipes return named sites such as LinkedIn as rows for 1 credit.

## Which one fits

Different tools fit different jobs. Here is when each one is the better choice.

### Choose Bright Data if

- You want to buy proxies as their own product: 400M+ residential IPs in 195 countries.
- You need a live browser your code drives, with Puppeteer, Playwright or Selenium, billed per GB.
- You want to buy datasets collected in advance instead of fetching pages.
- Almost every page you fetch is a hard site, where their flat price per request costs less.

### Choose Crawl4AI if

- You build with AI agents: one message sets Crawl4AI up in Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, Gemini CLI or OpenCode, and 17 MCP tools let the agent run recipes, price a call first and manage its budget.
- You want to pay for the work a page needed: $0.10 per 1,000 plain pages, and nothing for a failed or blocked call.
- You want to start the same day: a free plan with no card, then $10, $99 or $499. New Bright Data accounts are held at 100 requests a minute until verification.
- You want money that stays yours: 14-day refunds and extra credits that never expire.
- You need data in the EU, Singapore or the US, and a team with an audit log from Builder.
- You want to run it inside your network on the same engine, Apache 2.0.

For enterprise teams

## The controls your security team asks for

Crawl4AI's Enterprise plan next to Bright Data's. Bright Data's side restates its own pages; click a line to see the quote.

| Control | Crawl4AI Enterprise | Bright Data Enterprise |
|---|---|---|
| SSO (SAML, OIDC) | **✓ Yes** | Enterprise only |
| SCIM user sync | **✓ Yes** | Not published |
| Teams, roles and audit log | **✓ From Builder ($99), no seat limit** | Audit log: Enterprise only |
| Zero data retention | **✓ Yes** | Not published; deletion on request |
| IP allowlist and key limits | **✓ Yes** | IP allowlists; one key per user |
| Static exit IPs | **✓ Yes** | ISP and datacenter IPs, sold per IP |
| Where data is processed | EU, Singapore or US, your choice | Not published; "based in Israel" |
| Deployment | Cloud, dedicated fleet, inside your network, managed pipeline; one engine | Managed service; on-premise not published |
| DPA and invoice billing | **✓ Every Enterprise plan** | Wire transfer for larger accounts; DPA not published |
| Refunds | 14 days, if no credits were used | None |
| Status page | Hourly uptime per service, public | 50 incidents in 12 months, 7 outages |
| Uptime and response SLA | Typical: 99.9% a month; service down: first answer within 1 hour, 24/7; part broken: 4 business hours; a question: 1 business day; 5% of the month's fee back if missed, 10% under 99% | 99.9%; credits capped at $1,000 or $2,000 |
| Support | A named engineer | Sunday to Friday, 7AM to 8PM UTC; 24/7 for P0 |
| Security assurance | Controls monitored every day in Drata, with the evidence kept; dependencies watched for known vulnerabilities; SOC 2 audit by Sensiba under way, report target January 2027. Security pack on request: policies, audit status, DPA, questionnaire answers. | SOC 2 Type II for Jun 2024 to May 2025; ISO 27001 |

## Same job, two calls

5 jobs an agent does every day. The call on each side, and the price of 1,000 of them at list. The label marks the side that costs less for that job.
**01 · One page to Markdown**a plain page
**Crawl4AI costs less$0.10/ 1,000

```
curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com","format":"md"}'
```

0.1 credit. $0.08 per 1,000 on Builder.

**Bright Data $1.00–$1.50/ 1,000

```
curl https://api.brightdata.com/request \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com",
       "zone":"'$ZONE'","format":"raw",
       "data_format":"markdown"}'
```

One price per request: $1.50 pay as you go, $1.00 on the $1,999 plan.

**02 · A page that needs a real browser**JavaScript renders the content
**Crawl4AI costs less$0.50/ 1,000

```
curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"url":"https://app.example.com","format":"md"}'
```

0.5 credit. We pick the effort per page, and the answer says which one it needed.

**Bright Data $1.00–$1.50/ 1,000

```
curl https://api.brightdata.com/request \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"url":"https://app.example.com",
       "zone":"'$ZONE'","format":"raw",
       "data_format":"markdown"}'
```

The same price per request, browser rendering included.

**03 · A site that blocks bots**proxies and a real browser
**Crawl4AI $2.00/ 1,000

```
curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"url":"https://hard-site.example",
       "proxy":"extra"}'
```

2 credits for a hard page. A page we cannot get costs nothing.

**Bright Data costs less$1.00–$1.50/ 1,000

```
curl https://api.brightdata.com/request \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"url":"https://hard-site.example",
       "zone":"'$ZONE'","format":"raw"}'
```

The same price per request. Failed requests are free, unless you send your own headers or cookies: then every request is billed.

**04 · Google results as data**organic, ads, maps
**Crawl4AI costs less$1.00/ 1,000

```
curl "https://api.crawl4ai.com/serp?q=best+crm&country=us" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY"
```

1 credit a Google page: organic, ads, maps, AI overview. $0.67 per 1,000 at the Scale plan rate.

**Bright Data $1.00–$1.50/ 1,000

```
curl https://api.brightdata.com/request \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"zone":"'$ZONE'",
       "url":"https://www.google.com/search?q=best+crm",
       "format":"raw","data_format":"parsed_light"}'
```

$1.50 per 1,000 pay as you go, $1.30 on the $499 plan, $1.00 on the $1,999 plan.

**05 · A LinkedIn profile as rows**name, title, company, history
**Crawl4AI costs less$1.00/ 1,000

```
curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/recipes/linkedin-profile \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"profile":"satyanadella"}'
```

A recipe: 2 units × 0.5 credit. The same named columns every time; one of 93.

**Bright Data $1.00–$1.50/ 1,000

```
curl "https://api.brightdata.com/datasets/v3/scrape\
?dataset_id=gd_l1viktl72bvl7bjuj0&format=json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '[{"url":"https://www.linkedin.com/in/…/"}]'
```

Scraper API: $1.50 per 1,000 records pay as you go, $1.00 on the $1,999 plan.

## Crawl4AI vs Bright Data, side by side

Each Bright Data cell restates Bright Data's own pages, read on 12 Nov 2026. Click it to see the quote and the page. "Not published" means those pages say nothing about it, not that it is missing.

|  | Crawl4AI Cloud | Bright Data |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing |  |  |
| How you pay | Credits in every plan: Free, Starter $10, Builder $99, Scale $499 | Pay as you go, then plans from $499 a month |
| Free start | 1,000 credits a month (10,000 plain pages), no card | 5,000 credits a month, 1 per request |
| 1,000 plain / browser / hard pages | $0.10 / $0.50 / $2.00 | One price: $1.50, down to $1.00 on $1,999 |
| Failed calls | Free, blocked pages included | Free, but all billed with your own headers |
| A page already cached | Half price | No cached copy (Fetch API) |
| Unused money | Extra credits never expire | Monthly commitment does not roll over |
| Refunds | 14 days, if no credits were used | None |
| New accounts | The full product from sign-up | 100 a minute and $100 top-ups until verified |
| What you get back |  |  |
| Formats | Markdown, HTML, links, media, metadata, tables; engine and cache on every answer | Raw HTML, JSON or Markdown |
| Whole site | /site deep crawl (500 pages a call); /scan up to 50,000 URLs | Crawl API from a root URL |
| Search | /search 1 credit; Google results as data with /serp | SERP API, $1.50 per 1,000 pay as you go |
| Named sites | 93 recipes; a LinkedIn profile 1 credit | Scraper API, $1.50 per 1,000 records |
| Extraction | /extract: JSON by your schema or plain words | One schema-to-JSON call: Not published |
| Documents | PDF, Word and Excel; a PDF costs one page | Not published |
| Change monitoring | Watch (beta) | Not published |
| Hard sites |  |  |
| Addresses | Our own addresses; rented residential ones at the extra level; country choice | Residential only after a company KYC |
| Bot checks and CAPTCHA | Gets past bot checks and CAPTCHA pages on hard sites, and a page we cannot get costs nothing | CAPTCHA solving, "98% success rate" |
| Agents |  |  |
| MCP | Hosted, no install; key or OAuth; 17 tools | Hosted and local; 30 tools |
| Setup | One message sets it up in 7 coding agents | A skills package; agent sign-up gets $2 |
| Agent budget | Estimate, balance, spend cap and top-up as tools; cost on every answer | No budget tool; a call counter |
| Page tool | A real browser when the page needs one | "No JavaScript rendering" |
| Open source |  |  |
| License | Apache 2.0, 87,236 GitHub stars | Open-source clients of the paid API |
| Self-host | The same engine as the Cloud | Engine: Not published; MCP needs their token |

Crawl4AI's prices come from its live price list, GET /v1/prices. Prices change; check each product's own pricing page before you decide.

The trade-off

## What each one does better

### Where Bright Data does best

1. **A proxy network.** 400M+ residential IPs in 195 countries, sold by the GB, plus ISP and datacenter IPs.
2. **Live browser sessions.** A cloud browser your code drives with Puppeteer, Playwright or Selenium.
3. **Ready datasets.** Data collected in advance from hundreds of domains, sold by the record.
4. **One flat page price.** A hard page costs the same as a plain one.

### Where Crawl4AI is the better choice

1. **Pay for the work, not the attempt.** 0.1 credit for a plain page, nothing for a failed or blocked call, half price for a page we already hold.
2. **Made for agents.** One message sets it up; 17 MCP tools cover recipes, jobs, cost estimates and the budget.
3. **Start small, keep your money.** A free plan with no card, plans from $10, 14-day refunds and credits that never expire.
4. **Built for enterprise.** Three regions, teams and an audit log from Builder, SSO and SCIM, and a named engineer.

Switch in one prompt

## Move your Bright Data calls in minutes

Paste this into Claude Code, Cursor or Codex in your project. It finds your Bright Data calls and moves them to Crawl4AI, one endpoint at a time, and keeps both working until you check the results.
Move this project's Bright Data calls to Crawl4AI Cloud. Read https://crawl4ai.com/llms.txt first. 1. Find every call to the Bright Data API or SDK. 2. Map each one: POST /request (Unlocker zone) → POST /scrape · /datasets/v3/scrape (Fetch API) → POST /scrape · /datasets/v3/trigger → POST /scrape/jobs · Crawl API → POST /site · /scan · POST /request (SERP zone) → GET /serp · /search · Scraper API datasets → POST /recipes/{name} · Scraper Studio → POST /extract · GET /customer/balance → x-c4-balance · MCP balance. 3. Read the key from CRAWL4AI_API_KEY (YOUR_CRAWL4AI_API_KEY). 4. Keep the old path behind a flag; compare 20 real URLs on both; show me the diff.

| Bright Data |  | Crawl4AI |
|---|---|---|
| POST /request (Unlocker zone) | → | POST /scrape |
| /datasets/v3/scrape (Fetch API) | → | POST /scrape |
| /datasets/v3/trigger | → | POST /scrape/jobs |
| Crawl API | → | POST /site · /scan |
| POST /request (SERP zone) | → | GET /serp · /search |
| Scraper API datasets | → | POST /recipes/{name} |
| Scraper Studio | → | POST /extract |
| GET /customer/balance | → | x-c4-balance · MCP balance |

From both products' docs, 12 Nov 2026.

## Using both

Not either-or. Both speak MCP, so one agent can hold both. A team could keep Bright Data for its proxy network, live browsers and datasets, and use Crawl4AI for plain and browser pages, recipes, agent budgets and EU data.

## Frequently asked questions
How much does Bright Data cost?

Bright Data's Unlocker costs $1.50 per 1,000 requests pay as you go, the same for plain, browser and hard pages. Its plans start at $499 a month for 383,000 requests, down to $1.00 per 1,000 on the $1,999 plan. Pre-built scrapers cost $1.50 per 1,000 records, and the Browser API $8 per GB. Crawl4AI charges $0.10 per 1,000 plain pages and $0.50 per 1,000 browser pages, with plans from $10.
Does Bright Data charge for failed requests?

Not by default: Unlocker and SERP bill successful requests. When you send your own headers or cookies, Bright Data says "you'll be charged for 100% of the requests (both successful and failed)", and the Browser API bills every byte of traffic. On Crawl4AI a failed call is free, a blocked page included.
Does Bright Data give refunds?

Bright Data's agreement says "The Subscription Fees are non-cancelable and non-refundable", and a monthly commitment does not roll over. On Crawl4AI, a first plan payment or an extra-credit purchase is refundable within 14 days if none of its credits were used, and extra credits never expire.
Where does Bright Data keep data?

Bright Data's security page names AWS with a recovery site in AWS EU, and its privacy policy says "we are based in Israel" and some recipients "may be located outside the European Economic Area". It does not publish a region choice. Crawl4AI runs in the EU, Singapore and the US, and keeps account and billing data in the EU.
Can I start on Bright Data without a company check?

New Bright Data accounts are limited to 100 requests a minute and $100 per top-up until verification. Residential proxies need a human-reviewed KYC, open only to registered businesses with a company email. Crawl4AI gives every account the same product from sign-up, with 1,000 free credits a month and no card.
Bright Data or Crawl4AI for AI agents?

Bright Data's MCP has 30 tools, but none for balance, a price estimate or a top-up, and its page tool runs with "No JavaScript rendering". Crawl4AI's hosted MCP has 17 tools, among them estimate, balance and spend_cap, every answer carries its cost, and one message sets it up in a coding agent.
Is Crawl4AI only a self-hosted library, with no cloud and no support?

No. Blog posts on Bright Data's site say so, and they are out of date. Crawl4AI Cloud is live in three regions with public plans from $0 to $499, support from email to a named engineer, a public status page and a hosted MCP server. The open-source engine has 87,236 GitHub stars (GitHub, 2026-11-12).

Sources and method

1. [Bright Data Web Unlocker pricing ↗](https://brightdata.com/pricing/web-unlocker)
2. [Bright Data SERP and Scraper API pricing ↗](https://brightdata.com/pricing/web-scraper)
3. [Bright Data Master Service Agreement ↗](https://brightdata.com/license)
4. [Bright Data SLA ↗](https://brightdata.com/sla)
5. [Bright Data docs: limited trial, Residential KYC, Unlocker billing, MCP tools ↗](https://docs.brightdata.com)
6. [Bright Data security overview ↗](https://docs.brightdata.com/general/security/security-overview)
7. [Bright Data network status ↗](https://brightdata.com/network-status)
8. [Crawl4AI prices ↗](https://crawl4ai.com/v1/prices)
9. [Crawl4AI legal ↗](https://crawl4ai.com/legal/)

We read these pages on 12 Nov 2026. Crawl4AI's facts come from its live price list, docs and terms. Something wrong or out of date? Write to hello@crawl4ai.com and we fix it.