# Onto vs ScrapingBee · AI-grade reads vs general-purpose scraping > ScrapingBee handles raw scraping at scale with proxy rotation and JS rendering. Onto returns clean Markdown plus an accuracy score for AI grounding. Different jobs — here's when each one is right. **Source:** /compare/scrapingbee **Extracted:** 2026-05-20T20:59:17.595Z --- Compared · Onto vs ScrapingBee ## ScrapingBee scrapes any site. _Onto reads + scores for AI._ Different products optimized for different jobs. ScrapingBee is general-purpose web scraping at scale — proxy rotation, captcha bypass, raw HTML, selector-based extraction. Onto is a read-and-score API for the AI agent web — clean Markdown plus a 0–100 accuracy score and hallucination flags, designed to feed LLMs directly. Honest framing: if you're grounding an agent, Onto. If you're scraping data, ScrapingBee. [Try the scanner free](/scanner)[Read API docs](https://docs.buildonto.dev/api/read) 0–100 Accuracy score per read <100 ms Cache-hit latency 1,000 Free reqs / month, forever 01 // Shared ground ### What both products do well. The basic plumbing is the same — both fetch pages for you, handle JS rendering, and manage retries / auth. The differences show up in what they give you back. Fetching01 We get the page for you Both APIs handle the fetch — auth, redirects, headers, JavaScript rendering. You pass a URL, you get content. No headless browsers or proxy pools to operate. JS rendering02 Handles dynamic pages Both render JavaScript-heavy SPAs and resolve client-rendered content. Both have a JS-rendering flag or default behavior that handles modern frameworks. Managed03 Auth, quotas, retries Both are managed APIs with API-key auth, per-tier rate limits, and built-in retry/error handling. Neither requires you to build crawler infrastructure. Pricing tiers04 Subscription-based Both offer tiered subscription pricing with free starting points. Both bill on a per-call (or credit) basis as you scale up. 02 // Capability matrix ### Optimized for different jobs. Em-dashes mean "not a current capability," not "intentionally missing." In several rows the em-dash is a deliberate product choice. Onto Read API ScrapingBee Output format ✓Clean Markdown + JSON metadata Raw HTML (or JSON-extracted by selector) AIO accuracy score (0–100) ✓Every response — Hallucination-risk flags ✓Per-field risk labels — Proxy rotation / IP rotation — (honors robots, single Onto-Reader UA) Yes (residential + datacenter) Captcha bypass — Yes Selector-based extraction — Yes (CSS / XPath) Screenshot endpoint — Yes Robots.txt enforcement ✓Yes (short-circuits before fetch) Configurable (default: respects) Site-side SDK (Serve) ✓@ontosdk/next, request-time inject — Official MCP server ✓@ontosdk/mcp — Use-case fit ✓Feeding LLMs / agents General data scraping 03 // Where Onto extends ### What read-and-score adds for AI grounding. General scraping returns bytes. Agent-grade reading returns bytes plus the metadata your agent needs to decide whether to trust them. 01 Markdown, not HTML ScrapingBee returns raw HTML by default. You'd then run an extraction pipeline (Readability, cheerio, custom selectors) to get LLM-ready content. Onto skips that step — clean Markdown is the primary output, optimized for token efficiency from the start. 02 0–100 accuracy score per read Scraping returns content; it doesn't tell you whether the content is good. Onto scores every response on semantic clarity, structure, and content-negotiation health — your agent skips low-score pages instead of grounding on noise. 03 Per-field hallucination flags Onto surfaces specific fields on the page that are ambiguous or self-contradictory. Pricing, model names, dates — the fields agents most often hallucinate. ScrapingBee returns the bytes; Onto returns the bytes plus a risk label per field. 04 Designed for the agent web ScrapingBee is general-purpose web scraping with proxy rotation and captcha bypass — built for the adversarial scrape-vs-block landscape. Onto is built for the cooperative side: sites can install Serve SDK to opt in, agents get clean Markdown with accuracy signals, robots.txt is honored not bypassed. 04 // Which to pick ### The honest decision matrix. The two tools rarely overlap in practice. If your use case is "grounding an LLM," pick Onto. If your use case is "scraping the web at scale," pick ScrapingBee. Pick Onto if01 * ✓You're feeding an LLM and want Markdown plus accuracy signals in one call — no extraction pipeline to maintain. * ✓You need to know whether to trust a source before grounding on it (per-page AIO score, per-field risk). * ✓You're a site owner who wants to participate in the agent web via the Serve SDK, not just consume it. * ✓You want a managed service that respects robots.txt out of the box (matters for legal + ethical posture). Pick ScrapingBee if02 * →You need raw HTML, screenshots, or selector-based data extraction — Onto doesn't return any of these. * →Your targets actively block crawlers and you need residential proxies / captcha bypass to reach them. * →Your use case is general scraping (price monitoring, lead gen, market intel) — not LLM grounding. * →You're scraping sites whose robots.txt disallows AI agents and you have legal cover to override — Onto won't fetch those. 05 // Common questions ### What developers ask before choosing. Can I use ScrapingBee and Onto together?+ In niche cases, yes — if you have a hard-to-reach source that needs proxy rotation to fetch, you could pipe ScrapingBee output through your own Markdown extractor and skip Onto entirely. For most AI use cases though, the right answer is one or the other: Onto for AI grounding (clean Markdown + scoring), ScrapingBee for general scraping at scale. Does Onto bypass anti-bot defenses?+ No, and we don't plan to. Onto fetches with a single, declared User-Agent (Onto-Reader) and short-circuits before fetch if the site's robots.txt disallows it. That's a deliberate product choice — it puts us on the cooperative side of the agent-web equation, which most AI-grounding use cases want. If you specifically need to bypass blocks, ScrapingBee is the right product for that job. How does pricing compare?+ Different shapes. ScrapingBee charges per API credit (more credits for JS-rendering / premium proxies). Onto charges per request (with credit packs for overage on paid tiers, and a 1,000 req/month forever free tier). Compare apples-to-apples by figuring out your monthly read volume and computing both — published pricing pages change, so we won't quote ScrapingBee's numbers here. What's the AIO score actually grading?+ The score is _subtractive_: a page starts at 100 and loses points for specific structural problems — missing headings, schema not parseable, content-negotiation absent, JS-rendered content with no SSR fallback. Every penalty is traceable to a named cause. [Full methodology](/scoring). Is this comparison fair?+ We tried. ScrapingBee is a strong, mature scraping product — they're best-in-class at the general-purpose scraping job. We're not. We're better at the LLM-grounding job, which is a different job. If your use case is feeding an agent, Onto. If your use case is general data extraction, ScrapingBee. The two rarely overlap in practice. Try it on your URLs ### Feeding an agent? Skip the extraction pipeline. Drop any URL into the scanner — get clean Markdown plus the AIO score in seconds. No raw-HTML-to-Markdown to maintain. [Open the scanner](/scanner)[// Or see pricing](/pricing)