Spider

Spider is a web data infrastructure and API that crawls, scrapes, and searches public websites for AI agents and RAG pipelines.

Spider provides infrastructure for reading the public web by combining a scraping API, a browser engine, and a proxy network. It renders pages, executes scripts, loads lazy images, and handles protected pages using residential and ISP addresses rotated per request. Users can fetch a page, crawl a site, or search the web, receiving clean markdown or JSON in order as pages finish. The platform is designed for AI agents, RAG pipelines, and developers who need to turn websites into datasets. It supports multiple markdown formats, HTML, raw text, JSON, JSONL, CSV, and XML, and integrates with tools like Claude Code, Codex, and MCP clients.

Spider at a glance

Best for: Software engineer
Runs on: Web, API, CLI
Pricing: Pay as you go from $1/GB; Unlimited from $40/mo for 2 concurrency up to $19,994/mo; failed requests cost $0
Released: January 2018
Category: AI search engine
Website: spider.cloud

Key features

Scrape, crawl, and search via one API
Stream pages as markdown or JSON in order
Load protected pages with a native browser engine
Rotate residential and ISP proxy addresses per request
Run scripts, lazy images, and infinite scroll
Connect via SDKs, CLI, or MCP clients

Use it for

Feed clean web data into RAG pipelines
Connect web search and scraping tools to AI agents
Crawl whole websites and stream results as markdown
Extract content from protected web pages

Companions

Tools that articles about Spider recommend using with it, each with its job.

n8n — Self-hostable automation with code allowed in any step
Claude Code — Terminal-first agent that handles multi-hour refactors and migrations
Cursor — Same MCP server, registered with one command.
Pinecone — Official template ingests scraped pages into Pinecone.
Qdrant — Self-hostable index for crawled docs.

Alternatives to Spider

Crawl4AI — Turns any URL into clean Markdown or typed JSON for AI models.
Scrape Anything by Context.dev — Extracts clean Markdown, HTML, and structured data with built-in proxies and JS rendering.
Scrapling — It uses adaptive element tracking to maintain scrapers when websites change.
Firecrawl — Provides direct web data access for AI agents with open source flexibility.
Huntsman — It runs fast and light on a single Go binary and container without Redis or Playwright.
Crawlee — Handles blocking, crawling, proxies, and browsers for JavaScript and Python.
Markdownee — Extracts main web content cleanly using Trafilatura Core and Crawlee.
Jina — It provides reliable reader and search APIs optimized for LLMs and RAG systems.
ScrapeGraphAI — Extracts structured data via natural language prompts with no selectors or proxies.
CrawlForge MCP — Provides 31 MCP-native web scraping tools with transparent credit pricing.
Anakin — Zero-touch keyless start lets agents make unauthenticated HTTP calls immediately.
Outcrawl — Runs real cloud browsers with persistent sessions and high benchmark pass rates.

All Spider alternatives