← Back to directory

Bright Data

The web's data, unlocked

Visit Bright Data

Bright Data describes itself as the world's #1 web data platform, combining a large proxy network (400M+ IPs), scraper/unlocking APIs (Web Unlocker, SERP API, Browser API, Crawl API), and ready-made datasets so businesses and AI agents can reliably collect public web data at scale.

Vendor's own claim
data/enrichmentorchestration/agent runtimeinfrastructure

Core capabilities

Vendor's own claim
  • Proxy infrastructure: residential, datacenter, ISP, and mobile proxies across 400M+ IPs
  • Web Unlocker API: automatic CAPTCHA solving and anti-bot bypass for scraping any site
  • SERP API: structured search-engine results in JSON or HTML
  • Scraping Browser: remote browser with built-in unlocking, compatible with Puppeteer/Playwright
  • Web Scraper APIs / Scraping Functions: pre-built and custom scraper templates
  • Dataset Marketplace: pre-collected, ready-to-download datasets across 250+ domains
  • Web Archive: petabyte-scale historical web data
  • MCP server for AI agents to access live web data through Claude, Cursor, and other MCP clients

API & agent surface

From official docs
Authentication
API key sent as a Bearer token in the "Authorization" header (Authorization: Bearer <token>); keys can be scoped to permission levels (Admin, Finance, Ops, Limit, User) and given expiration dates
Base URL
https://api.brightdata.com
Rate limits
Datacenter/ISP zones use a separate fair-use allowance rather than a hard QPS cap.
Notable endpoints
  • POST /request - the core proxy/unlocking request endpoint
  • SERP API - structured search-engine results (separate OpenAPI spec: serp-rest-api.json)
  • Browser API - remote browser control (separate spec: browser-api.json)
  • Async API - asynchronous scraping jobs (separate spec: async-api-reference.json)
  • Proxy REST API - proxy zone management (separate spec: proxy-rest-api.json)
MCP tools exposed
search_enginesearch_engine_batchscrape_as_markdownscrape_batchdiscoverscraping_browser_snapshotscraping_browser_click_refscraping_browser_screenshotweb_data_amazon_productweb_data_walmart_productweb_data_google_shoppingweb_data_linkedin_postsweb_data_tiktok_postsweb_data_youtube_videosweb_data_yahoo_finance_businessweb_data_crunchbase_companyweb_data_zoominfo_company_profileweb_data_zillow_properties_listingweb_data_github_repository_fileweb_data_reuter_newsweb_data_google_play_storeweb_data_apple_app_storeweb_data_booking_hotel_listingsweb_data_chatgpt_ai_insightsweb_data_grok_ai_insightsweb_data_perplexity_ai_insightsweb_data_npm_packageweb_data_pypi_packageextractscrape_as_html
Machine-readable spec
OpenAPI spec retrieved

Official skills & repos

From official docs

Published by the vendor themselves — not community forks.

  • brightdata-mcp2600 stars

    Official Bright Data MCP server exposing search, scrape, and structured web-data extraction tools (search_engine, scrape_as_markdown, web_data_* dataset tools, extract, and more), linked from Bright Data's own MCP docs.

Pricing

From official docs
PlanPriceIncludedNotable
Web Unlocker — Free$0/mo5,000 requests/monthNo credit card required, Expert support
Web Unlocker — Pay as you go$1.5/1K requestsNo included quota; consumption-basedPay only for success, Monthly spend limits, Unlimited concurrency
Web Unlocker — Scale$499/mo383,000 requests included, then $1.3/1K additionalUnlimited concurrency, Cancellable anytime, Expert support
Web Unlocker — EnterpriseCustomCustom quotaVolume discounts, Dedicated account manager, Premium SLA

Checked 2026-07-31 against their pricing page. Vendors change pricing without notice.

What is Bright Data

Vendor's own claim

Bright Data is web-data infrastructure covering the full stack from raw proxies to fully unblocked scraping APIs to pre-built datasets.

Ideal customer profile

Vendor's own claim

Companies that need public web data at scale and can't rely on target sites having APIs: AI/ML teams training or grounding models on web data, eCommerce and market-research teams tracking competitor pricing, ad-tech and brand-protection teams, and developers building agents that need live search/scrape access via MCP.

Who should look elsewhere

Our read

Pricing is consumption-based and fragmented across products (Web Unlocker, SERP API, proxies, datasets each have separate pricing pages), so a team wanting one predictable monthly bill for mixed usage has to piece it together themselves; the Scale plan example ($499/mo for 383K Web Unlocker requests) can get expensive fast at high volume before Enterprise custom pricing kicks in. The MCP server's free tier is a single shared 5,000-requests/month pool across the whole account, not per-project, so teams running multiple agents or projects off one Bright Data account will exhaust it quickly and need to fund the account for real usage.

Bright Data alternatives

Our read

Infrastructure for fetching web pages at scale — proxies, headless browsers, and crawl-to-markdown services that agents can call directly.

Category: Scraping and browser infrastructure. Membership is decided by 3 stated tests, not by category tags — see them and the full comparison.

Bright Data FAQ

Does Bright Data publish a documented API spec?

Yes.

From official docs
How does the API authenticate requests?

Via a Bearer token in the Authorization header (Authorization: Bearer <token>); API keys are auto-generated on account creation and can be scoped by permission level (Admin, Finance, Ops, Limit, User) with optional expiration.

From official docs
Is there a free tier?

Yes for the Web Unlocker product specifically: 5,000 requests/month with no credit card required. The MCP server draws 5,000 free requests/month from the same account-level pool.

From official docs
How is Bright Data priced?

Per-product, consumption-based pricing rather than one unified plan - e.g. Web Unlocker has a Free tier (5K requests/mo), Pay-as-you-go ($1.5/1K requests), Scale ($499/mo for 383K requests, then $1.3/1K), and custom Enterprise. Other products (SERP API, datasets, proxies) have their own separate pricing pages.

From official docs
What are the API rate limits?

They vary by product. The SERP API is capped at 100 requests/second for funded accounts (a global limit effective January 2026) and 1,000 requests/minute for unfunded accounts; other zones use fair-use allowances instead of a hard cap.

From official docs
What kind of proxies does Bright Data offer?

Residential, datacenter, ISP, and mobile proxies across a claimed 400M+ IP network, sold both directly and as the infrastructure behind the Web Unlocker, SERP API, and Scraping Browser products.

Vendor's own claim

Verify before you buy

  • A single unified pricing page - pricing is fragmented per product, and only Web Unlocker's plans were confirmed in full detail
  • SERP API and dataset pricing figures beyond what the SERP/marketplace pricing doc pages summarize
  • LinkedIn/X/YouTube follower counts, and whether Bright Data has an official X/Twitter account

Need help setting it up?

This page tells you whether Bright Data fits. Cheetah builds and runs the system it goes into — enrichment, sequencing, CRM and the joins between them.

Book a call →

The directory stays free. There is nothing gated behind this.