6 Best Open-Source Instagram Scrapers in 2026
A ranked comparison of the six best open-source Instagram scrapers in 2026 with honest notes on auth model, ban risk, and maintenance status.
requests / month
pass rate
data / month
enterprises
Pick the tool. We handle the rest: proxies, fingerprints, retries, billing.
Web Scraping API
Cloud Browser
Screenshot API
Extraction API
Crawler API
AI Browser Agent
MCP Server
Web Scraping API
The unblocker. Fetch any URL with anti-bot bypass, proxy rotation, and JS rendering toggle. Clean HTML or markdown, stable JSON.
POST https://api.scrapfly.io/scrape
Cloud Browser
Drive a real stealth Chromium over CDP. Full Playwright / Puppeteer compatibility. Hosted, scaled, undetected.
wss://browser.scrapfly.io/cdp?key=...
Screenshot API
Full-page, viewport, or element screenshots. PNG / JPEG / WebP. Ad-block, cookie-banner dismiss, custom viewport.
POST https://api.scrapfly.io/screenshot
Extraction API
Turn HTML into typed data with a prompt or a JSON schema. LLM-powered, built-in templates for products, articles, reviews, jobs.
POST https://api.scrapfly.io/extraction
Crawler API
Traverse entire sites with depth limits, follow rules, rate control. Streams URLs as discovered; every page runs through the Web Scraping API.
POST https://api.scrapfly.io/crawler
AI Browser Agent
Stealth Chromium tuned for autonomous agent loops. Browser Use, Stagehand, and Vibium compatible. Pay only for the actions that succeed.
POST https://api.scrapfly.io/agent
MCP Server
Connect any MCP client (Claude, Cursor, Cline, Windsurf, ChatGPT) to scrape, screenshot, extract, and crawl with one API key.
mcp.scrapfly.io
One parameter. Every anti-bot vendor. No per-target configuration.
Success rate, throughput, latency.
Your API call. Our stack. From clean JSON all the way down to the exit IP.
One API key. Stable JSON envelope. Seven endpoints for scrapers, browsers, and AI agents.
Two proprietary engines, auto-routed per target. Byte-perfect Chrome on the wire and in the DOM.
Global proxy mesh across 190+ countries. Geo-aligned DNS, Accept-Language, and client-hints coherence on every request.
Plug Scrapfly into your favorite AI agents, workflow automations, and first-class SDKs.
What you get with us versus what you get with the rest of the category.
98% on blocked sites, measured weekly by the Scrapeway benchmark.
Failed requests are free. You only pay for successful scrapes.
Credits scale with the actual complexity of each target.
One API key covers scraping, browser automation, screenshots, extraction, crawling, agents, and MCP.
Owns the entire stack: in-house proxy mesh, stealth HTTP engine (Curlium), and stealth browser (Scrapium).
Often well below 60% on the same targets.
Failed requests still consume credits.
Tiered pricing with premium-domain surcharges and rigid plans.
Most cover scraping only. Browser or extraction usually means a second vendor.
Resells someone else's stack.
Teams pick Scrapfly after testing the alternatives. Here is why they stay.
Love using scrapfly, would highly recommend it. Their scraper set up is easily superior to something like firecrawl (firecrawl gets blocked often and is easy to replicate).
Takes the pain out of dealing with anti-bot protections and lets us focus on what we actually want to do with the data rather than fighting to access it.
Ran a 74k URL scraping job without major issues. Good value with the 200k credits on Discovery plan.
Same API key across every Scrapfly product. Pick a credit budget, every product shares the pool. No per-product lock-in, no surprise line items.
Full plan details on the pricing page. No annual contract required, upgrade or downgrade anytime.
From price monitoring to AI training corpora. One API, every vertical.
New tutorials and bypass guides every week.
A ranked comparison of the six best open-source Instagram scrapers in 2026 with honest notes on auth model, ban risk, and maintenance status.
Compare five MCP servers by the work they can actually do: protected-site scraping, browser control, debugging, static fetching, and cross-browser automation.
Six modern command-line tools that fix specific curl and wget pain points, from HTTPie's readable JSON output to aria2's segmented downloads and a managed fetch tool for the fetches that keep getting blocked.
Cloudflare offers one of the most popular anti scraping service, so in this article we'll take a look how it works and how to bypass it.
Tutorial on how to scrape instagram.com user and post data using pure Python. How to scrape instagram without loging in or being blocked.
Scrape public Twitter (X.com) profiles and tweets with Python in 2026, and learn why guest tokens and doc_ids break DIY scrapers.
Complete guide to using playwright-stealth in Python and playwright-extra with stealth plugin in Node.js. Covers how detection works, evasion module breakdown, testing, limitations, and scaling to production with cloud browsers.
A neutral, benchmark-literate ranking of the best open-source stealth browsers for web scraping in 2026, with the success, speed, and maintenance tradeoffs.
A web scraping API is a service that fetches any URL with anti-bot bypass, proxy rotation, and JavaScript rendering on every request, without you maintaining headless browsers or proxy stacks. Scrapfly's Web Scraping API delivers this with one HTTP call returning HTML, markdown, plain text, or structured JSON. You only pay for successful requests.
98% on Cloudflare, 97% on Akamai, 96% on DataDome, Imperva, and AWS WAF, 95% on PerimeterX and F5, and 94% on Kasada. Tracked daily against production traffic. See Anti-Bot Bypass for current numbers.
Set asp=true on any request. Scrapfly detects which anti-bot system is active on the target and routes through the right engine: Curlium (byte-perfect Chrome HTTP layer for JA4 / HTTP/2 / QUIC fingerprinting) or Scrapium (stealth Chromium for JavaScript challenges, captchas, and behavioral biometrics). Both share the same Chrome identity so detection systems never see a fingerprint change mid-session. One parameter, every vendor, no per-target configuration.
Two managed options. Use Scrapfly's built-in pools: datacenter (1 credit per request) or residential (25 credits per request, 190+ countries) with auto-rotation, IP cooling, and optional session stickiness. Or bring your own provider via Proxy Saver, which plugs Bright Data, Oxylabs, Webshare, SmartProxy, DataImpulse, or any SOCKS5 / HTTP proxy into the same Web Scraping API endpoint. Either way, anti-bot bypass, JA3 / JA4 fingerprint coherence, and smart retry sit on top.
Yes. The MCP Server connects any MCP-compatible client (Claude, Cursor, Cline, Windsurf, ChatGPT, and others) to scrape, screenshot, extract, and crawl. The AI Browser Agent supports Browser Use, Stagehand, and Vibium agent loops on stealth Chromium. Native integrations also exist for LangChain, LlamaIndex, and CrewAI.
Multiple formats from a single API call: HTML (raw or sanitized), Markdown (with link / image stripping for LLM contexts), plain text, JSON (parsed or as the API envelope), screenshots in PNG / JPEG / WebP via the Screenshot API, structured JSON via the Extraction API using LLM prompts, CSS / XPath rules, or pre-trained models, and WARC archives for crawl jobs.
Bright Data and Oxylabs are proxy-first platforms with scrapers built on top: strong on proxy infrastructure and managed datasets, heavier configuration per target. Zyte is built around Scrapy and managed services for high-protection enterprise targets. Scrapfly is single-endpoint: one API call with asp=true handles anti-bot, proxy rotation, JavaScript rendering, and structured output across every vendor with no per-target setup. You pay only for successful requests. See per-vendor comparisons on the comparison hub.
Yes. Scrapfly holds SOC 2 Type I, SOC 2 Type II, and SOC 3 certifications, plus ISO 27001, HIPAA, and GDPR attestations. A HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA) is available to Custom-plan customers. See Compliance for the full list of attestations.
Yes. The Enterprise tier is $500 / month (5.5M credits, 100 concurrent requests, premium support, team management). Custom plans above 5.5M credits / month include MSA, DPA, BAA, and HIPAA, dedicated residential proxy pools, committed concurrency, premium support, and custom log retention. Contact sales@scrapfly.io. See pricing for the full grid.
You are not charged. Failed bypass attempts do not consume API credits. The API returns a structured error response with retry guidance. Transient failures on heavily blocked targets are automatically retried within the same request before returning an error.
Usage-based, priced per API credit. Free tier: 1,000 credits, no card, no time limit. Paid plans start at $30 / month (Discovery, 200k credits, 5 concurrent) and scale to $500 / month (Enterprise, 5.5M credits, 100 concurrent), with custom contracts above 5.5M credits / month. Credit cost per call scales with features used (1 credit for HTTP, +5 for JavaScript or anti-bot, +25 for residential, 60 for screenshot). Failed requests are free. See pricing for the full plan grid and credit matrix, or use the cost estimator to size your project.
Free account, 1,000 credits, no credit card. One key, every product.