Diffbot alternative: ReefAPI vs Diffbot
Diffbot alternative: ReefAPI is a Diffbot alternative when your target maps to a supported engine and you want predictable per-source JSON. Diffbot is the better choice when you need automatic AI extraction across arbitrary pages or its knowledge graph of entities.
ReefAPI vs Diffbot
| Dimension | ReefAPI | Diffbot | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Product model | Ready-made, source-specific endpoints that return parsed data. | Automatic AI extraction that classifies and structures arbitrary pages (article, product, discussion), plus a large knowledge graph of entities. | Depends |
| Extraction approach | Each engine parses a known source to a stable, predictable schema. | Point Diffbot at any URL and it infers a structured record, without a per-site parser. | Alternative |
| Knowledge graph | No entity knowledge graph; engines return live source data. | A large, queryable knowledge graph of organizations, people and relationships. | Alternative |
| Pricing model | One shared credit pool across every engine. | Credit-and-call based plans covering extraction and knowledge-graph queries. Verify current limits on Diffbot. | ReefAPI |
| Failed or blocked calls | Not charged — failed or blocked ReefAPI calls are not charged, except verified SHEIN NOT_FOUND on product/detail and price (4 credits). | Billed per call against your plan's credits. | ReefAPI |
| Best fit | Supported sources you want as predictable JSON. | Automatic extraction across arbitrary URLs and entity graph queries. | Alternative |
What each side actually charges
Both columns are published prices, not quotes. Ours are generated from the same plan file the checkout charges against, so they cannot drift from what you would pay. Diffbot’s were read off Diffbot’s own pricing page on and are reproduced with their plan names and their units. Prices change; check the linked page before you commit.
Both sides call the unit a credit and they still are not the same thing. A Diffbot credit is one extracted page, one search or one short document — but a knowledge-graph operation costs 25 to 100 credits each, so a plan sized in credits can mean wildly different volumes depending on what you do with it. Crawling is free at 0 credits and you pay on extraction. Our credit is one call to a parsed endpoint that often returns dozens of rows.
| Plan | Price | Included | Per 1,000 credits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 1,000 credits at signup, no card | — |
| Pro | $15 / mo | 10,000 credits / mo | $1.50 |
| Ultra | $50 / mo | 50,000 credits / mo | $1.00 |
| Mega | $100 / mo | 125,000 credits / mo | $0.80 |
| Enterprise | $200 / mo | 300,000 credits / mo | $0.67 |
| Plan | Price | Included |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 10,000 credits per month at $0, recurring, rate-limited to 5 requests per minute. No credit card required — payment details are only needed on upgrade. |
| Startup | $299 / mo | 250,000 credits / mo — $1.20 per 1,000 credits; overage at $0.001 per credit; 5 requests per second |
| Plus | $899 / mo | 1,000,000 credits / mo — $0.90 per 1,000 credits; overage at $0.0009 per credit; 25 requests per second, 3 seats, 25 active crawls |
| Enterprise | Not published | Custom credit allotment, 100+ active crawls |
| What one credit buys | 1 credit | Extract one page; one Natural Language document up to 10,000 characters; one web search — extraction through a datacenter proxy is 2 credits; crawling itself is 0 |
| Knowledge-graph operations | 25 to 100 credits each | Export or enhance one entity record is 25; a facet-query record or an enhance-with-refresh is 100 |
$0.67–$1.50 / 1,000 credits on monthly billing, or $0.33–$0.75 / 1,000 credits paid yearly (−50%). Credits roll over and never expire, and every engine draws from the same balance. Failed calls are free except verified SHEIN NOT_FOUND on product/detail and price (4 credits). Credits are not requests: measured across 1,124 catalog actions on 2026-08-25, 67% cost one credit, 18% cost two and 5% cost three.
Not stated on the pricing page. Their published overage policy is that usage beyond the monthly credits is billed pro rata at the plan's per-credit rate and nothing more. On our side a failed or blocked call is not charged except verified SHEIN NOT_FOUND on product/detail and price (4 credits).
Their free tier is 10,000 credits EVERY MONTH with no card — ten times our one-off 1,000 and the largest recurring free allowance of any vendor compared on this site. Their Plus rate of $0.90 per 1,000 credits also undercuts every ReefAPI monthly plan except Enterprise. And the product does two things we cannot do at all: automatic structured extraction from an arbitrary URL with no per-site parser, and a queryable knowledge graph of organisations, people and relationships.
Diffbot prices read from diffbot.com/pricing on . ReefAPI prices from reefapi.com/pricing, generated at build time.
When ReefAPI is the better fit
- Your target is a supported engine and you want predictable, normalized JSON per source.
- You want one shared credit pool across many APIs, with timeout and blocked calls free.
- You want MCP-ready endpoints for AI agents without per-source glue code.
When the alternative is better
- You need automatic AI extraction across arbitrary pages not covered by a ReefAPI engine.
- You need a knowledge graph of entities and relationships.
Real ReefAPI snapshot
ReefAPI captured this live web-extract example on . It is committed in the SEO snapshot store and used as page evidence, not generated copy.
{
"method": "POST",
"url": "https://api.reefapi.com/web-extract/v1/scrape",
"headers": {
"x-api-key": "$REEF_KEY",
"content-type": "application/json"
},
"body": {
"url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping",
"formats": [
"markdown",
"metadata"
]
}
}{
"ok": true,
"meta": {
"api": "web-extract",
"endpoint": "scrape",
"mode": "live",
"latency_ms": 580.8,
"record_count": 1,
"bytes": 235941,
"cache_hit": false,
"browserless": true,
"ssrf_guarded": true,
"final_url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping",
"formats": [
"markdown",
"metadata"
],
"extraction_method": "trafilatura"
},
"data": {
"final_url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping",
"url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping",
"title": "Web scraping - Wikipedia",
"metadata": {
"title": "Web scraping - Wikipedia",
"description": null,
"canonical": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping",
"lang": "en",
"site_name": "Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.",
"author": "Contributors to Wikimedia projects",
"published_at": "2005-09-17T18:57:30Z",
"modified_at": null,
"section": null,
"keywords": [],
"favicon": "https://en.wikipedia.org/static/apple-touch/wikipedia.png",
"og": {
"title": "Web scraping - Wikipedia",
"type": "website"
}
},
"extraction": {
"method": "trafilatura",
"rendered": false,
"confidence": "high",
"content_chars": 25849
},
"markdown": "**Web scraping**, **web harvesting**, or **web data extraction** is [data scraping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_scraping) used for [extracting data](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_extraction) from [websites](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website).<sup>[\\[1\\]](https://en.wikipedia.org#cite_note-1)</sup> Web scraping software may directly access the [World Wide Web](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web) using the [Hypertext Transfer Protocol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol) or a web browser. While web scraping can be done manually by a software user,"
}
}What we found when we called our own endpoints
Every comparison page on the internet will tell you its own product is good. These are numbers we got by calling ReefAPI and writing down what came back, including where the answer went against us. Each one is dated and each one is repeatable against the same endpoint.
The spend field is a band, not money
Across a nineteen-ad page the only cost values that appeared were 0, 1 and 2. It is a coarse spend bucket the source publishes in place of a currency amount, and summing or averaging it produces a number that means nothing. Click-through rate on the same page ran from 0.01 to 0.19 and is a percentage rather than a ratio, so 0.19 means 0.19 percent and not nineteen. Automatic extraction cannot tell you either of those things; it will happily hand you a well-formed number that is not money.
There is no salary field, at any depth
salary, salary_min and salary_max were absent on every row, and turning on include_detail did not add them — the detailed rows carried description, employment type, seniority, industries and job function, and still no pay. The salary_min search filter exists and does narrow the result set, but the number it filtered on never comes back in the payload. If you need pay figures this is the wrong engine, and we point you at three others on its own page.
condition is the seller's own string, and a third of rows have none
Measured across three categories: condition was filled on 176 of 200 console rows, 12 of 20 laptop rows and 13 of 20 filtered rows — and where present it is whatever the seller typed. One row read 2-DAY Shipping, 1-Year Warranty, Top Quality and another was a bare part number. The condition FILTER works properly; the returned string is untrusted seller text and should not be parsed as an enum.
Questions developers ask before switching
Is ReefAPI a Diffbot alternative?
When your target maps to a supported engine, yes: ReefAPI returns predictable per-source JSON. Diffbot is the better fit when you need automatic extraction of arbitrary pages or its entity knowledge graph.
Does ReefAPI extract any URL automatically like Diffbot?
ReefAPI's Web Extract engine handles general pages, but it does not classify and structure any arbitrary URL the way Diffbot's automatic AI extraction does. For broad, unknown targets, that inference is Diffbot's core strength.
Does ReefAPI have a knowledge graph?
No. ReefAPI returns live data from source engines; it does not maintain a queryable knowledge graph of entities and relationships. If you need that graph, Diffbot is purpose-built for it.
Source notes and hedges
Competitor pricing, quotas, free tiers and feature limits change. This page uses official public pages for product-positioning claims and keeps unstable commercial details general.
- Diffbot homepage: Used for automatic AI extraction and knowledge-graph positioning.
- Diffbot pricing: Used for the credit-and-call model; exact prices are not repeated.
Try the relevant ReefAPI endpoints with 1,000 free credits, or open the docs to inspect params, examples and live proof before wiring them into production.