Anakin vs Crawlbase: the difficulty tier that scales against you

Crawlbase, formerly ProxyCrawl, and Anakin both promise to keep web data flowing without you babysitting proxies and browsers. Both bill only for successful requests. The difference is in how each one prices difficulty, because on Crawlbase the harder a site fights back, the more each request quietly costs, up to twenty times the base rate.

That multiplier is the lead, but a real evaluation goes wider: data handling, identity, compliance, geo, and platform breadth. This covers all of it.

What Crawlbase does well

Crawlbase is a solid, developer-focused platform. Its line is "the web changes, your data shouldn't," and it delivers infrastructure that handles proxy rotation, rendering, CAPTCHAs, and retries behind one endpoint (Crawlbase). It bills only for successful requests, so timeouts and blocks are free (Crawlbase docs). The free trial is generous at up to 20,000 requests with no card, there are managed scrapers for high-value sites like Amazon and LinkedIn, and a Cloud Storage product retains crawled results.

All of its products draw from one shared credit balance, which keeps accounting simple (Crawlbase pricing). For a team that wants pay-per-success scraping with a big free trial, it's an appealing starting point.

Where difficulty sets the price

Here's the mechanic. A standard request is 1 credit, and JavaScript rendering doubles it to 2 (Crawlbase pricing). On top of that sits an automatic site-difficulty multiplier: based on a target's anti-bot defenses, Crawlbase applies a tier that runs from Standard at 1x up to "Extreme II" at 20x, and a response header tells you which tier hit (Crawlbase docs). So the request cost isn't something you set. It's something the target sets, and the tougher the site, the higher it climbs.

There's a second thing to note: per-request pricing compounds at scale, especially once difficulty multipliers stack on the hard targets. Worth flagging, the docs and the pricing page don't fully agree on the JavaScript cost, with the docs suggesting parity per successful response and the pricing table showing the 2x, so confirm the current figure before you model spend (Crawlbase docs).

How Anakin prices the same request

Anakin's URL Scraper charges 1 credit for a scrape, and JavaScript rendering carries no additional cost, billed "the same as basic" per the docs (Anakin pricing). There's no difficulty tier and no automatic multiplier. A page defended by aggressive anti-bot costs the same 1 credit as a static page, because anti-detection and proxy routing across 207 countries are part of the base request.

# Submit the job
curl -X POST https://api.anakin.io/v1/url-scraper \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com", "useBrowser": true}'
# -> { "jobId": "job_abc123xyz" }

# Poll until it's done
curl https://api.anakin.io/v1/url-scraper/job_abc123xyz \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"
# -> { "status": "completed", ... }

Like Crawlbase, Anakin bills only on success (Anakin quickstart). Unlike Crawlbase, the hard target and the easy target land at the same price, and structured JSON extraction is a flat 2 credits.

The full comparison

Data management and output

Crawlbase has a strong data layer for its category: HTML, JSON, Markdown, screenshots, and even fully rendered PDF output, plus a Cloud Storage product that retains results and an async mode with webhook callbacks, though async is currently gated to LinkedIn URLs (Crawlbase docs). Retention runs 14 days on the free tier and 30 on paid (Crawlbase storage). Anakin returns Markdown, an AI summary, or structured JSON, with a batch endpoint for up to 10 URLs in parallel and 24-hour caching where a repeat fetch costs zero credits (Anakin docs). Crawlbase's Cloud Storage is a nice touch if you want results persisted for you; Anakin's caching is about never paying twice for the same fetch.

Identity, credentials, and compliance

For authenticated pages, Crawlbase supports sticky cookie sessions via a `cookies_session` parameter that replays Set-Cookie values to hold a logged-in state, but there's no managed credential vault and no documented 2FA (Crawlbase docs). Anakin's Wire treats identity as managed infrastructure: named identities, credentials encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM and never returned by any endpoint, sourced from a vault you own like 1Password or Azure Key Vault (Anakin docs).

On compliance, Crawlbase states GDPR and CCPA compliance with SSL/TLS in transit, but publishes no SOC 2 or ISO 27001 attestation (Crawlbase security). Anakin carries SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001:2022, and GDPR as documented certifications (Anakin security).

Anti-bot, proxies, and geo

Crawlbase runs a large proxy pool with geotargeting, though the coverage numbers vary between its marketing (around 30 geographies) and its documented country list (23 codes) (Crawlbase docs). Anakin routes across 207 countries inside the flat 1-credit request, a wider documented footprint, and geo doesn't interact with a difficulty multiplier. Concurrency defaults to 20 per token on Crawlbase, liftable to hundreds by request.

Past a single URL

Both go beyond a raw fetch, but Anakin.io keeps every tool at a flat, difficulty-independent rate on one balance:

• Crawl a site at 1 credit per page, or Map its URLs for 1 credit (Anakin pricing)
• Search the web with full-content extraction for 3 credits, or run an Agentic Search pipeline for 10 credits plus 1 per URL read
• Drive a stealth browser over CDP with Playwright or Puppeteer through the Browser API, with residential exits in 20+ countries
• Monitor a page, site, or Wire action on a schedule and diff the JSON it returns
• Call pre-built Wire endpoints for 940+ popular sites instead of scraping them

Developer experience

Crawlbase is well-equipped, with SDKs for Python, Node, Ruby, PHP, and Go, a Smart Proxy endpoint, and an MCP server, though no CLI (Crawlbase scraper docs). Anakin ships Python, JavaScript, and Go SDKs, a CLI, and an Anakin MCP server that hands an agent a Wire tool covering the whole catalog. Both are agent-ready; the difference is the difficulty-independent pricing underneath.

When Crawlbase is the right call

If your targets are mostly low-difficulty pages, or you want to lean on its managed scrapers and Cloud Storage for a specific set of big sites, Crawlbase's pay-per-success model and large free trial make it easy to start. For scraping that stays in the Standard difficulty tier, the economics are reasonable.

The picture shifts when your workload is weighted toward protected sites, where difficulty multipliers stack, when compliance certifications or a credential vault matter, or when per-request pricing at scale starts to compound. That's where a flat rate that ignores difficulty gives you a bill you can actually predict.

The bottom line

Crawlbase is a capable pay-per-success scraper whose cost rises with a difficulty tier you don't control, up to 20x on the hardest sites. Anakin.io charges 1 credit for a scrape regardless of how defended the target is, keeps JavaScript rendering free, bills only on success, adds caching, vault-backed identities, and SOC 2 plus ISO 27001, and puts crawl, search, and browser automation on the same balance. When difficulty shouldn't move the price, a flat rate is the whole advantage.

Start on the free 300 credits at anakin.io and scrape your most defended target. It's still 1 credit.