ScrapingBee vs Steel

Detailed side-by-side comparison to help you choose the right tool

ScrapingBee

🔴Developer

Search Tools

ScrapingBee: Web scraping API with rendering, proxies, and anti-bot tools. - Enhanced AI-powered platform providing advanced capabilities for modern development and business workflows. Features comprehensive tooling, integrations, and scalable architecture designed for professional teams and enterprise environments.

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Starting Price

Free
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Steel

🔴Developer

Browser Automation

Open-source headless browser API for AI agents — managed Chromium sessions with stealth, captchas handling, file downloads, and per-session isolation.

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Starting Price

Free
Full ReviewVisit Site

Feature Comparison

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FeatureScrapingBeeSteel
CategorySearch ToolsBrowser Automation
Pricing Plans4 tiers11 tiers
Starting PriceFreeFree
Key Features
  • • Workflow Runtime
  • • Tool and API Connectivity
  • • State and Context Handling
  • • Open Source Architecture
  • • JavaScript Rendering
  • • Anti-Bot Detection

ScrapingBee - Pros & Cons

Pros

  • ✓Headless Chrome rendering handles JavaScript-heavy SPAs automatically
  • ✓Built-in proxy rotation across 195+ countries for geo-targeted scraping
  • ✓Google Search Results API extracts structured SERP data without parsing HTML
  • ✓Simple REST API with no browser infrastructure to manage or maintain

Cons

  • ✗Complexity grows with many tools and long-running stateful flows.
  • ✗Output determinism still depends on model behavior and prompt design.
  • ✗Enterprise governance features may require higher-tier plans.

Steel - Pros & Cons

Pros

  • ✓Truly open source under MIT — no SaaS lock-in
  • ✓Playwright/Puppeteer compatibility means existing scripts port over
  • ✓Stealth and proxy rotation are handled — no anti-bot whack-a-mole
  • ✓Self-host or cloud — same binary, you pick the deploy model
  • ✓Strong fit for regulated environments where data can't leave the VPC

Cons

  • ✗Cloud pricing not transparently published — verify before depending on it
  • ✗Stealth tactics are a moving target as anti-bot vendors evolve
  • ✗You still write the agent loop on top — Steel doesn't decide what to click
  • ✗Smaller ecosystem of pre-built integrations than Browserbase

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🔒 Security & Compliance Comparison

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Security FeatureScrapingBeeSteel
SOC2——
GDPR✅ Yes—
HIPAA——
SSO——
Self-Hosted❌ No✅ Yes
On-Prem❌ No✅ Yes
RBAC——
Audit Log——
Open Source❌ No✅ Yes
API Key Auth✅ Yes✅ Yes
Encryption at Rest——
Encryption in Transit✅ Yes✅ Yes
Data Residency——
Data Retention——
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Review ScrapingBeeReview Steel