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cdpfleet vs Scrapfly
Scrapfly's Cloud Browser (one patched Chromium over CDP, sessions up to 30 minutes, credits per 30 s and per MB) and its Scrape, Screenshot and Crawler APIs, against twelve real browsers on flat threads and cdpfleet Functions. Prices, limits and features side by side.
Scrapfly sells web scraping as APIs paid in credits from one monthly balance: a Scrape API (fetch a URL, optionally rendered in a browser, through datacenter or residential proxies, with "Unblocker" anti-bot bypass, browser actions and AI extraction), Screenshot and Crawler APIs built on it, and a Cloud Browser — a patched Chromium ("Scrapium") you attach Playwright, Puppeteer or Selenium to over CDP. This page compares the Cloud Browser with cdpfleet sessions, and Scrapfly's APIs with cdpfleet Functions (one HTTP call per task, plus jobs and monitors). cdpfleet is a fleet of twelve real desktop browsers — Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, Naver Whale, Yandex Browser, Chromium, Patchright, Rebrowser, Camoufox, Firefox and WebKit — launched with one HTTPS call and driven over the Playwright protocol or CDP from five languages, through any proxy you choose, on threads you buy.
| cdpfleet | Scrapfly | |
|---|---|---|
| Browsers | 12 — Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, Naver Whale, Yandex Browser, Chromium, Patchright, Rebrowser, Camoufox, Firefox, WebKit. Chrome with stable, beta and dev channels and pinned previous majors; headful by default. | One: Scrapium, a patched Chromium fork (scrapium-156 when checked) with extra CDP domains. Fingerprint options make it present as Chrome, Edge, Brave or Opera on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iPhone or iPad. |
| How you connect | Playwright protocol (connect(wsUrl), client 1.60) from Node.js, Python, Java, C# and Go — or "cdp": true for a cdpUrl (Puppeteer, connectOverCDP). SDKs for Node.js, Python and Go (C# and Java build from source). | A CDP WebSocket (wss://browser.scrapfly.io?api_key=…) with options as query parameters, for Puppeteer, Playwright or Selenium; integrations for Browser Use and Stagehand. |
| Session length | Up to 24 h (shared threads: also capped by your remaining daily minutes). Idle timeout 120 s by default, up to 10 min on shared threads and 24 h on dedicated. | Default 15 minutes, at most 30 minutes, then closed even if connected. The browser closes on disconnect unless auto_close=false. |
| Browser time | Free Community plan: 2 threads, 60 browser-minutes per thread a day, 15-minute sessions, proxies included. Per second, as thread-seconds. Shared: $0.02–$0.05 per browser-hour at full use; dedicated $0.01/hour ($8.50/month for a browser around the clock). A headful session takes 2 threads. | 1 credit per 30 seconds, rounded up, at least 5 credits per browser. Credits cost $0.00015 (Discovery, $30 for 200,000) to about $0.00009 (Enterprise, $500 for 5.5 million), so time alone is about $0.011–$0.018 per browser-hour (our arithmetic from the published prices). Live VNC or WebRTC viewing adds 5 credits per session. |
| Traffic | Free through your own proxies — HTTP, HTTPS or SOCKS5, single, pools or per-host rules, with live swap. | Billed per MB through Scrapfly's proxies: datacenter 7–10 credits/MB, residential 52–78 credits/MB depending on the plan; cached resources 1 credit/MB. That is about $0.73–$1.05/GB datacenter and $5.91–$7.80/GB residential (our arithmetic). Using your own proxy isn't documented. |
| Proxies | Bring your own HTTP, HTTPS or SOCKS5 proxies — single, pool, or per-host rules (proxy_rules) — swap a running session's proxy live, see traffic per destination host and per rule; traffic through them is free. Or the cdpfleet residential proxy: 4 tiers from $0.50 to $5/GB from one prepaid balance ($5 free credit), mixable per host — e.g. Tier 4 for CDN assets, Tier 1 for pages. A launch without a proxy uses the free Community proxy — best effort, no guarantees. | Datacenter or residential pools (proxy_pool), country targeting by ISO code. |
| Plans | Free Community plan: 2 threads, 60 browser-minutes per thread a day, 15-minute sessions, proxies included. Paid from $7.50/month (5 shared threads, 60–480 browser-minutes a day per thread); dedicated threads for 24/7 use at $8.50/thread/month. Pricing. | Free: 1,000 credits, 5 concurrent, no card. Discovery $30/month (200,000 credits, 5 concurrent), Pro $100 (1 million, 20), Startup $250 (2.5 million, 50), Enterprise $500 (5.5 million, 100), Custom from $1,200. Extra credits $5 down to $1.20 per 10,000. No contractual SLA published. |
| Concurrency | The threads you buy: 5 to 10,000 (more on request), 2 on the free Community plan; each session takes 1–4 threads by type. | 5 to 100 concurrent requests by plan; Cloud Browser concurrency isn't stated separately. |
| Stealth | Real browsers by default (genuine Chrome, Edge, Brave…), headful by default, and three stealth builds — Patchright, Rebrowser, Camoufox (compare them). | The patched Chromium with an anti-bot CDP domain; resource stubbing (images, fonts, media) "without blocking detection"; Unblocker on the Scrape API. |
| Captcha solving | Not built in. Hand over to a person with live view, or use your own solver through Playwright. Warmup never solves a CAPTCHA — it leaves and comes back later. | solve_captcha=true on the Cloud Browser: Turnstile, DataDome, reCAPTCHA, GeeTest and PerimeterX are listed. |
| Watching and keeping sessions | Live view with human takeover — Watch / Take control in the dashboard, or a link from the API — and Launch interactive: open any browser on a start page straight into live view from the dashboard's code generator (start_url over the API). Session recordings as MP4 (480p free, 720p or 1080p on a plan), and JPEG frames to your code with page.screencast. Persistent profiles keep cookies, local storage and IndexedDB between sessions (paid plans); Playwright storageState; keep_alive to reconnect to the same browser on dedicated threads. | Live VNC or WebRTC (5 credits a session), a debug mode with video recording, human-in-the-loop control. Session resume keeps cookies, storage, proxy and fingerprint between connections — but only within the session's 30-minute life. |
| Scraping in one call | Functions: screenshot, PDF, Markdown, scrape (HTML, Markdown, text, links, screenshot, XHR calls, cookies; wait_for, actions, extract by CSS selector), map, geo compare and a live tab — in a pooled browser, or in a browser and device of your choice on paid plans. Billed like a session (one thread while the call runs, one per country for geo compare); the Community proxy and your own proxies cost nothing extra. Free tools at /functions. | The Scrape API: 1 credit per request on datacenter, 25 on residential, +5 with browser rendering — so 1,000 rendered pages cost about $0.55–$0.90 (datacenter) or $2.73–$4.50 (residential), our arithmetic. Formats: raw, clean HTML, JSON, Markdown, text; js_scenario actions, wait_for_selector, screenshots, AI or template extraction, sessions, caching, webhooks; Unblocker retries may switch the proxy pool and raise the cost. |
| Crawling and bulk | Jobs on paid plans: batch (any number of URLs), crawl and map, with no size or time limit — runs continue past the 24-hour session limit by themselves; results as JSON lines or a zip archive, kept 14 days; stop and resume; signed webhooks. Plus watch (live XHR/WebSocket/DOM events), warmup and monitors (scheduled change detection with diffs). | The Crawler API: a job per call, up to 3 hours (default 15 minutes), depth and page limits, sitemaps optional, robots.txt respected by default; output as HTML, Markdown, text, JSON, extracted data, WARC or HAR; webhooks. Billed as the sum of the Scrape API calls it makes. |
| Screenshots and PDFs | Screenshot (PNG/JPEG, viewport or full page) and PDF Functions — a text PDF from a Chromium-based browser. | The Screenshot API: JPG, PNG, WebP or GIF, viewport, full page or element, 60–120 s timeout. PDF isn't among its formats. |
| Agent tooling | A hosted MCP server at cdpfleet.com/mcp — add it in Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini and sign in with OAuth — or npx cdpfleet-mcp; SDKs for Node.js, Python and Go. | MCP support and integrations for Browser Use and Stagehand. |
| Examples | 89 cases run on production in five languages, all on GitHub with their output. | Docs guides per API with code in several languages. |
Scrapfly facts from its public pricing page and documentation, checked on 3 November 2026; list prices in USD. Tell us if something is out of date.
Which one, when
Pick Scrapfly if…
- You want unblocking, proxies and CAPTCHA solving bundled, and mostly fetch pages through an API rather than drive a browser.
- Your browser sessions are short (under 30 minutes) and light, where per-30-seconds and per-MB credits stay cheap.
- You want AI extraction, WARC/HAR crawl archives or many proxy countries from one credit balance.
Pick cdpfleet if…
- You bring your own proxies — traffic through them is free here, while every MB through Scrapfly is billed.
- Sessions or jobs last longer than 30 minutes: logins kept warm, long crawls, a warmup browser for days, or a browser around the clock on a flat-priced dedicated thread.
- The site must see a specific real browser or version — Chrome channels, Edge, Brave, Firefox, WebKit, Camoufox — not one Chromium presenting as others.
- You need persistent profiles across sessions, recordings, a shareable live tab, or the Playwright protocol from Java, C# or Go.
- You want to start free — the Community plan includes proxies — and try a browser in live view before writing any code.
Try it
The quickstart is one HTTPS call and five lines of Playwright; the code builder writes the launch for any browser and option set in your language.