Bright Data vs Captain Data

Bright Data has a free tier with 5,000 monthly credits or requests, plus allowances such as 5,000 Scraper API records and 1 GB of Browser API use. Pay as you go lists $1.50 per 1,000 Web Unlocker, SERP or Crawl requests, $0.75 per 1,000 Scraper API records and $8 per Browser API GB. Its Scale plan is $499/month; overages include $1.30 per 1,000 additional API requests and $7/GB for Browser API or Residential Proxies. Captain Data’s console offers 100 free credits. Its Silver plan shows 20,000 monthly credits, but the vendor does not publish its price in USD; the page shows a monthly estimate in EUR. Growth, Enterprise and Titanium use credit or volume pricing, with no USD prices listed. Ask Captain Data for a quote before forecasting paid usage.

Bright Data is a managed web-data platform with Scraper APIs and web-access APIs for Unlocker, SERP, Browser and Crawl tasks. Its homepage also names a dataset marketplace, AI Scraper Studio, API and webhook delivery, and an MCP Server. That gives a codebase several integration paths, from API requests to structured feeds; the exact interface depends on the product. Captain Data exposes a REST API at https://api.captaindata.com/v1 and authenticates requests with an X-API-KEY header. Its seven endpoints cover people and company enrichment, search and lookup. Requests can use a LinkedIn URL, name or domain. People search costs one credit per request plus one per result; other listed calls use one or two credits. Neither product page names language-specific SDKs or a CLI. Captain Data’s page includes endpoint descriptions and request examples; Bright Data’s homepage names its APIs and integration options. Confirm SDK availability and language support with each vendor before choosing a client library.

Neither vendor states an open-source licence or self-hosting option on its product page, so treat both as hosted services rather than components you can deploy inside your own infrastructure. Bright Data combines APIs, proxies, datasets and managed browsing; replacing it could mean rebuilding several collection paths and moving jobs to another provider. Its homepage names API and webhook delivery for data feeds, but does not describe a general-purpose export or migration process. Captain Data returns structured people and company data through its REST API, which gives application code a clear HTTP boundary. It lists database export as a custom-priced add-on, so ask what formats, fields and delivery mechanisms that covers before depending on it. In either case, keep provider-specific calls behind an internal adapter and retain the records your product needs. Ask about retention, deletion, schema changes and migration support before committing production workloads.