ScrapeCreators alternative: ScrapingBot vs ScrapeCreators

ScrapeCreators and ScrapingBot both turn public social media into JSON over a simple HTTP API, charge per call, and offer a hosted MCP server. The real differences are price per call, how many platforms you need, and whether you prefer prepaid credits that never expire or a monthly plan.

The short version

ScrapingBot vs ScrapeCreators at a glance

Per-1,000 figures are plan price divided by credits, times credits per call: $49.99 ÷ 275,000 × 1,000 = $0.18, and $47 ÷ 25,000 × 1,000 = $1.88. ScrapeCreators prices a few endpoints higher (its TikTok audience endpoint costs 26 credits), and a cache hit with cache_max_age costs nothing.

Pricing in practice

The gap is largest for TikTok, because a ScrapingBot TikTok call costs 1 credit while an Instagram call costs 5. Three realistic monthly workloads:

At very low volume the picture flips. If you make 3,000 calls one month and none the next, a $47 ScrapeCreators pack lasts you months, while a ScrapingBot plan bills every month and its unused credits reset. Our free 100 credits are enough to test, not to run a small project indefinitely.

Coverage: where each one is stronger

On TikTok the two overlap heavily: profiles, a creator's videos, single videos, sounds and the videos that use them, comments, comment replies, followers, following and search. ScrapeCreators goes further on TikTok with transcripts, live, trending feeds, TikTok Shop and the ad library. ScrapingBot's /user/followers and /user/following return a single page of up to 50 accounts.

Outside social media the roles reverse. ScrapingBot includes a Google Search API (web, images, videos, news, shopping, places, maps and reviews), an Amazon API for the US store, and website scraping with JavaScript rendering, premium proxies and AI extraction, all drawing on the same credits. ScrapeCreators has a Google search endpoint and an Amazon shop endpoint, but its focus is creators and ads.

Migrating from ScrapeCreators

ScrapeCreators exposes one GET path per endpoint. ScrapingBot has one POST URL per platform and takes the endpoint name in the JSON body. Here is the same call, the videos that use a sound, on both:

# Before: ScrapeCreators
import requests

res = requests.get(
    "https://api.scrapecreators.com/v1/tiktok/song/videos",
    headers={"x-api-key": SCRAPECREATORS_KEY},
    params={"clipId": "7682907287056337667"},
    timeout=60,
)
page = res.json()
items, cursor, more = page["aweme_list"], page["cursor"], page["has_more"]

# After: ScrapingBot
import requests

res = requests.post(
    "https://scrapingbot.io/api/v1/tiktok",
    headers={"x-api-key": SCRAPINGBOT_KEY},
    json={"endpoint": "/music/posts", "params": {"music_id": "7682907287056337667"}},
    timeout=60,
)
page = res.json()["data"]
items, cursor, more = page["videos"], page["cursor"], page["hasMore"]
# next page: add "cursor": cursor to params; stop when more is 0

ScrapingBot returns each video as a flat object: video_id, title, play_count, digg_count (likes), comment_count, create_time and author.unique_id. Map those once in your parser. Profiles need less work: /user/info returns data.user and data.stats with TikTok's own names, such as uniqueId, followerCount and heartCount.

Instagram works the same way at /api/v1/instagram; the Instagram reference lists its 20 endpoints. Two habits to carry over: stop paging only when hasMore is 0 (page sizes vary), and de-duplicate on video_id. The sound export guide has a complete script.

Common questions