Anakin vs Diffbot: structured data without the $299 floor

Diffbot and Anakin both hand back clean JSON instead of raw HTML, so at a glance they solve the same problem. They arrive at it from very different places. Diffbot is an AI extraction platform and a Knowledge Graph, built to turn the whole public web into structured entities. Anakin is a web data API that extracts structured fields from any page you point it at, one call at a time.

That difference sets who each one is for, and it runs through cost, control of the fetch, geo, identity, and everything else a real integration touches. This is the full comparison.

What Diffbot does well

Diffbot is genuinely differentiated. Its Extract APIs use machine learning and computer vision to read a page and return structured JSON with no selectors and no per-site rules, described as "the automatic web scraper that doesn't use any rules" (Diffbot Extract). Point the Article, Product, or Analyze endpoint at a URL and it classifies the page type and fills in a standard schema.

The bigger asset is the Knowledge Graph, which Diffbot calls "the largest structured database of the public web," billions of people, organizations, products, and articles, queryable through its own DQL query language (Diffbot). For a team building on top of a broad entity database, or grounding an LLM on verified facts, there isn't much like it. That's real capability, and it's the reason to choose Diffbot.

Where it fits, and where it doesn't

Two things narrow the fit for a general scraping job. The first is price. The cheapest paid plan is Startup at $299 a month, with the free tier capped at 10,000 credits (Diffbot pricing). That's a steep floor if your need is structured data from a few hundred pages a day rather than a web-scale knowledge product.

The second is the schema. Diffbot's extraction is powerful precisely because it's opinionated: it returns the standard fields for a page type it recognizes, drawn from its own ontology (Diffbot Extract). That's a strength when your data matches its model of articles and products. It's a constraint when you want arbitrary custom fields, or when the page doesn't fit a page type it knows.

How Anakin approaches it

Anakin treats structured extraction as an option on a plain scrape rather than the whole platform. A scrape is 1 credit with JavaScript rendering included at no extra cost, and structured JSON extraction is a flat 2 credits on top (Anakin pricing). The extraction is prompt-driven, so you ask for the fields you actually want instead of accepting a fixed ontology.

# Scrape and extract structured JSON in one call
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", "generateJson": true}'
# -> { "jobId": "job_abc123xyz" }

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

There's no $299 entry point. The free tier is 300 credits with no card, failed jobs aren't charged, and you keep full control of the fetch, including JavaScript rendering and proxy routing across 207 countries (Anakin quickstart).

The full comparison

Data management and output

Diffbot's output is structured JSON shaped by its ontology, with a Crawlbot for large jobs that downloads as JSON or CSV and fires a webhook on completion, and it can return raw page markup when asked (Diffbot Crawlbot). Anakin returns Markdown, an AI summary, or structured JSON with your own fields, plus a batch endpoint for up to 10 URLs in parallel and 24-hour caching where a repeat fetch costs zero credits (Anakin docs). The split is between fitting your data to a fixed schema and defining the schema yourself.

Anti-bot, proxies, and geo

This is a clean gap. Diffbot is an extraction platform, not a proxy product: its proxy options are on, off, or bring-your-own, with no country-level control documented (Diffbot proxies). If your target blocks by geography or needs a specific country's view of a page, that's not what Diffbot is built for. Anakin folds anti-detection and routing across 207 countries into the base 1-credit request, so geo-targeting is a parameter, not a missing feature.

Identity, credentials, and compliance

For content behind a login, Diffbot supports cookie injection only: you retrieve session cookies yourself and re-supply them when they expire, with no form-login automation or credential store (Diffbot behind logins). 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, Diffbot states GDPR alignment with a DPA and Standard Contractual Clauses, but publishes no SOC 2 or ISO 27001 attestation (Diffbot GDPR). Anakin carries SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001:2022, and GDPR as documented certifications (Anakin security).

More than extraction

Diffbot's surface is extraction and the Knowledge Graph. Anakin.io is a broader set of primitives on one credit 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

Diffbot ships an official Python client and its DQL query language for the Knowledge Graph, with integrations into Sheets, Excel, and Make, though first-party Node and Java SDKs aren't published (Diffbot DQL). 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. For an agent that needs scrape, crawl, and search as tools, that's the closer fit.

When Diffbot is the right call

If your project is built around a web-scale knowledge base, entity resolution across millions of sources, or grounding an AI system on a structured graph of the public web, Diffbot is purpose-built for exactly that and does it well. For that job, the $299 floor is a rounding error against the value.

For the more common job, structured data from specific pages, with your own fields, with geo control and without committing to a platform subscription, the match tips toward a per-call API. That's where a flat 1-credit scrape and 2-credit JSON extraction, on a free tier you can actually test with, fit better.

The bottom line

Diffbot is an excellent AI extraction and Knowledge Graph platform for teams that need one. Anakin.io gives you structured JSON from any page for a flat 3 credits all in, with your own fields, geo across 207 countries, vault-backed identities, SOC 2 and ISO 27001, a 300-credit free tier, and crawl, search, and browser automation on the same balance. When you need extracted data and not an entity graph, you shouldn't have to start at $299 to get it.

Start on the free 300 credits at anakin.io and pull structured JSON from a page that matters to you.