Anakin vs Spider.cloud: fast crawls, or covered ones

Spider is fast. That is the honest starting point for any comparison. It is a crawler written in Rust, its core engine is open source under an MIT license, and the same engine that powers the cloud service ships as spider-rs on GitHub. For pulling large volumes of open web pages quickly and cheaply, self-hosting is a real option rather than a marketing line.

The question this post answers is narrower than "which is faster." It is what happens when the pages you need are protected, when you need the output typed to a schema, and when the buyer signing off on the tool asks about compliance. Speed on open pages and coverage on defended ones are two different problems. Spider is built for the first. Anakin is built for the second.

What each tool is built for

Spider is a data-collection API. You point it at URLs and it returns them as markdown, HTML, JSON, text, screenshots, or WARC, with crawl modes for plain HTTP, a smart mode, and a full browser mode running its own Rust Chrome. The design goal is throughput: crawl a lot of pages, fast, for a low unit cost. Because the engine is open source, a team can prototype locally and move the same code to the cloud without a rewrite.

Anakin is a general web-data platform. The URL Scraper takes any URL and returns the page or structured JSON. Crawl walks a site, Map discovers its links, the Search API handles discovery, the Browser API drives a real browser over CDP, and Wire adds typed read and write actions for sites that have no public API. It is a collection of products behind one API key rather than a single crawler, and that breadth is the point of difference, not an accident of scope.

Speed, and which numbers to trust

Spider's headline throughput number is large, and it is worth reading carefully. Its own materials cite a ceiling near 100,000 pages per second, while Spider's own benchmark reports more grounded figures near 182 pages per second on static HTML and 48 per second on JavaScript-heavy pages. Those live numbers are the ones to plan against. They are still fast, and fast is a real advantage for high-volume crawling of open pages. The marketing ceiling is not the number a workload will actually see.

There is a similar wrinkle in coverage. Spider's documentation describes a proxy pool of 200M or more residential and ISP addresses, but the stated country count moves between 100-plus and 199-plus depending on the page. That inconsistency is worth flagging because it points at a broader theme: Spider's competitive claims are vendor-authored, including its own head-to-head benchmark posts ranking scraping APIs, which naturally place Spider well. Fast is true. The specific comparative numbers deserve independent verification before a team leans on them.

Getting past anti-bot

Spider's documentation describes fingerprint rotation, stealth mode, and a retry engine to bypass bot protection through its proxy layer and browser mode, without naming the specific WAF vendors it clears. What it does not publish is independent, verified evidence of that coverage on defended targets, and competitors in the space describe its anti-bot handling as more basic than the managed platforms. That is a competitor-sourced view, so treat it as a claim to test, not a settled fact.

Anakin treats anti-bot as managed infrastructure rather than a configuration exercise. Residential rotation, fingerprint variation, and CAPTCHA handling run without setup, and the platform is built to get through Cloudflare, DataDome, Akamai, and PerimeterX on pages that actively fight scrapers, across 207 countries of proxy egress. On open pages the difference is invisible. On protected ones it decides whether the job returns data at all.

Pricing and how you get billed

Spider moved to a usage model priced on bandwidth and compute: roughly $1 per gigabyte plus $0.001 per CPU-minute, with no separate multipliers for JavaScript or proxies, and failed requests billed at zero. Spider self-reports, in its own benchmark, that this works out to about $0.48 per 1,000 pages. There are also subscription tiers that run from a low monthly "unlimited" entry point up into five figures for high concurrency. The model is cheap at volume, and the success-only billing is fair. The tradeoff is predictability: a bill built from gigabytes plus CPU-minutes plus prepaid balance is harder to forecast than a flat per-unit price.

Anakin bills per credit. A scrape is one credit, JavaScript rendering is included rather than surcharged, and charges apply only on success, so failed requests and cache hits cost nothing and purchased credits do not expire. Both tools bill only for what works, so success-only billing is a parity between them, not an edge for either. The live per-plan numbers sit on the Anakin pricing page.

Structured output

Spider can return JSON among its supported output formats, which is useful for downstream processing. Anakin adds an outputSchema parameter: pass a JSON Schema with the request and the response comes back shaped to that schema on any page, not a preset list of sites. For agents and pipelines that need typed fields rather than a blob of content, that constraint is the difference between parsing text and reading a record.

curl -s -X POST https://api.anakin.io/v1/url-scraper \
  -H "X-API-Key: $ANAKIN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com/product/9912", "country": "us"}'

The call returns a jobId. Poll GET /v1/url-scraper/{id} until the status reads completed, and the page comes back as markdown, HTML, or schema-constrained JSON.

Platform breadth versus a collection tool

This is the structural gap. Spider is a crawler: it reads pages well and fast. It does not act on sites, and it does not carry the surrounding pieces a production system tends to need over time. Anakin ships more than a scraper. Wire exposes typed actions for sites without an API, so an agent can submit a form or place an order, not just read a page. The Browser API drives a real browser over CDP for the cases that need one. Website Monitoring, the Search API, and Map round out discovery and change tracking, all under one key. For a team that starts with crawling and later needs to act, that breadth is coverage the crawler does not have.

Compliance and enterprise trust

Anakin publishes SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001:2022, and GDPR compliance, with encryption in transit and at rest. Spider does not publicly document SOC 2, ISO 27001, or GDPR compliance on its site. That is a real difference for a regulated buyer, and it is worth stating precisely: the absence is in the public documentation, which is what a security review reads. For a solo developer crawling open pages it may not matter. For a procurement team it often decides the shortlist.

When Spider is the right call

If the job is high-volume crawling of open web pages, if unit cost matters more than typed output, and if self-hosting an MIT-licensed Rust engine to avoid lock-in is appealing, Spider is a strong choice. It is fast, it is cheap at scale, it bills only on success, and it integrates with the common agent frameworks and MCP. A specialist that does one thing well earns its place.

The bottom line

The choice comes down to what "coverage" means for the work. If the pages are open and the priority is fast, cheap, self-hostable crawling, Spider is genuinely good and its open-source core is a real advantage. If the pages are protected, the output needs a schema, the workflow needs to act and not just read, and the buyer needs documented compliance, that is a platform problem, and it is what Anakin is built for: any URL, past the defenses, structured to your schema, charged only on success.