Botasaurus
Best untuned score in the test — from its HTTP layer alone.
Botasaurus markets itself as an all-in-one anti-blocking scraping framework. We tested its lighter path first: the Request API (botasaurus.request, browser-like fingerprinting without a browser), version 4.0.97, against the 21-site corpus, no proxy.
It passed 6 of 21 — Amazon, Target, Rightmove, Yahoo Finance, Reddit, Wikipedia — the best result of anything we ran untuned that day, headless browsers included. Reddit is the standout: every other non-browser tool got a verification wall there, and Yahoo's consent redirect stopped all the browsers. Its fingerprinting layer is clearly doing real work.
Elsewhere it hit the same wall as every unproxied client: 403s from eBay, Tripadvisor, Yelp, Trustpilot, Craigslist; 429s from Expedia and Realtor; captchas from Walmart, Airbnb, Zillow, Indeed, CoinMarketCap, YouTube; a marker miss on AliExpress; Booking's 202. Note we have not yet tested its headline browser Driver with anti-detection — that's the queued follow-up.
Test conditions
21 real public sites (public-tough-v1), 2026-05-24, no proxy, single residential IP, Linux. Deterministic validators: expected status code plus required and forbidden content markers. Pass rates measure the tool and the network position together. Without a proxy, results reflect how each site's protections treat one plain residential connection as much as the tool itself.
What worked
- +6/21 untuned — top score of the day, beating stock and stealth headless browsers.
- +Only non-browser tool to pass Reddit; also reached Yahoo Finance directly.
- +Request API keeps HTTP-client speed — most attempts resolved in well under a second.
What failed
- −The standard unproxied wall: 15 targets still refused with 403/429/captcha responses.
- −Its browser Driver — the feature the project is actually known for — is untested by us so far.
- −Heavier, more opinionated framework surface than a plain client; you buy the whole toolbox.
When to use it
When you want the best odds a pure request layer can give you without paid infrastructure, and you're open to adopting its framework conventions. Watch this space for the browser Driver test.
The request layer over-delivered; the browser claims are next on the bench.
Run evidence
Every attempt below is backed by saved artifacts: request/response metadata, body content, and (for browsers) screenshots. Raw JSON and artifacts live in the runner data directory.
Run data not available in this build.