Backfire compared with ScrapingBee

Which one you actually need

Need a rendered DOM, an unblocked page or a residential exit IP? That is ScrapingBee, and Backfire will not do it. Calling an API you are allowed to call, where the risk is the URL rather than the bot wall? Then a browser and a proxy pool are wasted latency and cost — that is the relay.

Side by side

# ScrapingBee: a browser and a proxy pool, driven by parameters
GET https://app.scrapingbee.com/api/v1/?api_key=$KEY&url=$TARGET&render_js=true

# Backfire: one call, guarded before it is dialled, answered as an envelope
POST https://backfireapi.base44.app/functions/forward
{ "url": "https://api.partner.example/v1/orders", "method": "GET", "timeout_ms": 8000 }

# The relay refuses 169.254.169.254, 10/8, 127/8 and friends before dialling,
# and returns 3xx instead of following a redirect to somewhere private.

Where the other one wins

• If a target is behind Cloudflare, needs a real browser, or blocks datacentre ranges, Backfire will fail and ScrapingBee is the correct tool. Buying a relay to solve a bot wall is a wasted invoice.
• Scraping a site you do not own raises terms-of-service and copyright questions that no proxy answers. Backfire is built for endpoints you are entitled to call: partner APIs, your own services, webhooks you subscribed to.
• A relayed request comes from relay infrastructure under your key, recorded in your activity log. That is the opposite of anonymity — if you need to look like someone else, this is not the product.
• Backfire cannot render, cannot solve a challenge and cannot rotate an identity. It can prove afterwards exactly which address it dialled and what came back.

What Backfire will not do

• No rendering, no proxy rotation, no CAPTCHA handling — a JS-heavy or defended page is out of scope.
• No geo-targeting: requests leave from relay infrastructure, whatever region that is.
• A target that only accepts residential IPs will refuse the relay, correctly.
• Backfire does not scrape for you; it forwards the request you compose and returns the bytes.

Other comparisons