SearchHive vs Crawlbase -- Web Scraping Compared (2025)

Crawlbase (formerly ProxyCrawl) and SearchHive are both developer-focused web scraping APIs, but they take very different approaches to pricing, product scope, and API design. If you're evaluating which to use for your next scraping project, this comparison covers everything that matters.

Key Takeaways

• Crawlbase uses complexity-based pricing that varies by target website, making costs unpredictable for diverse scraping needs
• SearchHive uses a flat credit system (1 credit = $0.0001) across all API types -- search, scrape, and extract
• SearchHive includes SERP search capabilities; Crawlbase is scraping-only
• Crawlbase offers 1,000 free requests; SearchHive offers 500 free credits
• SearchHive is significantly cheaper at scale: $49/mo for 100K credits vs Crawlbase's variable per-request pricing

Comparison Table

Feature-by-Feature Comparison

Search Capabilities

SearchHive includes a full SERP API (SwiftSearch) that returns structured search results from Google, Bing, and other engines. This is integrated into the same API key and credit system as the scraping tools.

Crawlbase does not offer a search API. If you need SERP data alongside your scraping, you'll need a separate provider like SerpAPI or Serper.dev, which adds another API key and another bill.

Winner: SearchHive -- one API for both search and scraping.

Pricing Transparency

SearchHive prices are published and predictable. Every API call costs a known number of credits. The $49/mo Builder plan gives you 100,000 credits regardless of what you're scraping.

Crawlbase uses a complexity-based pricing calculator. Costs vary depending on the target website -- a simple static page costs less than a JavaScript-heavy e-commerce site. While this sounds fair in theory, it makes budgeting unpredictable. You can't know your costs until you've tested each target site.

Winner: SearchHive -- flat, predictable pricing.

Scraping Quality

Both services handle JavaScript rendering, proxy rotation, and CAPTCHA solving. Crawlbase uses AI-powered proxy selection, which they position as an advantage. SearchHive takes a simpler approach with automatic proxy rotation that works reliably across most target sites.

In practice, both handle common scraping targets (e-commerce, news sites, social media public pages) well. Crawlbase may have a slight edge on extremely difficult targets due to their larger proxy pool, but SearchHive covers the vast majority of use cases.

Winner: Tie -- both are reliable for standard scraping tasks.

Structured Data Extraction

SearchHive offers DeepDive, which extracts specific data fields (prices, titles, descriptions, reviews) from any page into structured JSON. You specify what you want, and the API returns clean data.

Crawlbase offers a Scraper API with pre-built scrapers for specific sites (Google, Amazon, LinkedIn), but custom extraction requires more manual work.

Winner: SearchHive -- more flexible structured extraction.

Developer Experience

SearchHive provides a clean REST API with consistent response formats across all endpoints. Documentation is straightforward, and the single credit system means no mental math about different billing rates.

Crawlbase also offers REST APIs with SDKs for Python, Node.js, PHP, and Ruby. Documentation is thorough but the complexity-based pricing adds friction to the developer experience -- you're constantly wondering how much each request costs.

Winner: SearchHive -- simpler mental model.

Pricing Deep Dive

Crawlbase Pricing

Crawlbase doesn't publish fixed price tiers. Instead, you use their pricing calculator:

• Enter target websites (e.g., amazon.com)
• Select volume (10K, 100K, 1M, 10M+)
• Get a quote based on site complexity (Regular vs JavaScript)

Regular pages cost less per request. JavaScript-rendered pages cost more. Based on their published comparison data, they claim to be "2.6x cheaper than competitors" for regular page requests.

The free tier gives 1,000 requests with no credit card. Rate limit is 20 requests/second.

SearchHive Pricing

• Free: $0 -- 500 credits
• Starter: $9/mo -- 5,000 credits
• Builder: $49/mo -- 100,000 credits ($0.00049/request)
• Unicorn: $199/mo -- 500,000 credits ($0.000398/request)

At the Builder plan, you're paying roughly $0.50 per 1,000 requests for any type of operation -- search, scrape, or extract. That's competitive with or cheaper than Crawlbase for most workloads, with the added benefit of including SERP search.

Code Examples

SearchHive: Scrape a Product Page

import requests

# Scrape product data with JS rendering
response = requests.get(
    "https://api.searchhive.dev/v1/scrape",
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"},
    params={
        "url": "https://example.com/product/12345",
        "render_js": "true",
        "format": "json"
    }
)

data = response.json()
print(f"Title: {data['title']}")
print(f"Price: {data.get('price', 'N/A')}")
print(f"Content length: {len(data['content'])} chars")

Crawlbase: Scrape a Product Page

import requests

# Crawlbase uses token-based auth in the URL
TOKEN = "YOUR_CRAWLBASE_TOKEN"
TARGET_URL = "https://example.com/product/12345"

response = requests.get(
    f"https://api.crawlbase.com/?token={TOKEN}&url={TARGET_URL}",
    timeout=90  # Crawlbase recommends 90 second timeout
)

data = response.json()
if data.get("status_code") == 200:
    print(f"Content length: {len(data['body'])} chars")
else:
    print(f"Failed: {data.get('status_code')}")

Note the key differences: Crawlbase puts the token in the URL (less secure), requires a longer timeout, and returns raw HTML in the response body rather than structured data.

SearchHive: Extract Structured Data

import requests

# Extract specific fields from any page
response = requests.post(
    "https://api.searchhive.dev/v1/deep",
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"},
    json={
        "url": "https://example.com/product/12345",
        "extract": ["title", "price", "rating", "availability"],
        "format": "json"
    }
)

data = response.json()
print(f"{data['title']} - ${data['price']} - {data['rating']}/5 stars")

This type of structured extraction isn't available in Crawlbase's standard Crawling API -- you'd need to parse the raw HTML yourself or use their site-specific Scrapers.

Verdict

Choose SearchHive if:

• You need both search and scraping in one API
• You want predictable, flat pricing
• You need structured data extraction without writing parsers
• You're working at any scale from prototype to production

Choose Crawlbase if:

• You only need web scraping (no SERP/search)
• You're scraping a small number of well-known sites and want AI-powered proxy optimization
• You need a free tier with more requests (1,000 vs 500)

For most developers building data pipelines, AI applications, or monitoring tools, SearchHive offers a more complete and cost-effective solution. The combination of search, scraping, and extraction in a single API with predictable pricing eliminates the need to juggle multiple providers.

SearchHive Docs | Free API Key | /compare/firecrawl | /blog/complete-guide-to-api-for-web-scraping