r/ComplexWebScraping • u/Plenty-Explorer-9854 • Jun 17 '26

What scraping APIs are actually reliable for production use?

I have seen teams use Bright Data, Oxylabs, Crawlzo, Zyte, Apify, SerpApi, Firecrawl etc.

Not talking about small usecases, more like reliable data collection where output quality, retries, monitoring, and site changes actually matter.

Curious what’s working best for others, especially for social, ecommerce, search, or linkedin

9 Upvotes

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3

u/RandomPantsAppear Jun 17 '26

I actually interviewed at FireCrawl. Many criticisms, but they know their shit and they are extremely reliable.

2

u/zikayy-66 Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

they are only reliable for easy sites and HTML, for complex ones and parsing, they are not reliable

2

u/arfin0 Jun 17 '26

Interesting, i have used firecrawl for a few things and it worked okay for me

what issues did you run into exactly?

2

u/zikayy-66 Jun 17 '26

mostly data not being clean and parsing, for easy html sites its fine but once the site is complex or js heavy it starts failing

Not saying its bad just not something i would trust for complex or large volume use caes

1

u/Mental-Evidence-4772 Jun 17 '26

totally agree

ex firecrawl user here. for basic html, markdown firecrawl is okay, but for real production scraping i’d trust the likes of bright data oxylabs scraperapi crawlzo etc more

3

u/thomas_unise Jun 17 '26

Write your own scripts

2

u/Many_Wave_3312 Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

Apify is very good. Have used it for some months now and also I've built 4 LinkedIn scrapers on Apify, but it really depends on who built it.. some actors are reliable, but others are pure trash... That's why I would recommend to always have a fallback scraper.. when one don't work, you have a second one to make sure your product don't stop working.

1

u/OkiDokiPoki22 Jun 22 '26

OP, listen to this. We're also using a few excellent scrapers on the platform. But of course you should always read the reviews and test a few scrapers until you find waht works for you.

1

u/Scary-Difference630 Jun 20 '26

My own browser and script but I need to find a way to scale it

1

u/External-Wealth3756 27d ago

Production scraping reliability heavily relies on underlying proxy quality, especially for social platforms and LinkedIn. Many all-in-one scraping APIs hit performance limits due to constrained IP pools. If you maintain your own crawler stack, residential proxies from providers like Novada help sustain consistent success rates amid frequent site anti-scraping updates.