url metadata api comparison

MetaScrape vs Diffbot

Diffbot is an enterprise AI-powered web intelligence platform — knowledge graphs, article extraction, product data, and more. If you need URL metadata for link previews, it starts at $299/mo. MetaScrape does the metadata job for $9/mo.

FeatureMetaScrapeDiffbot
OG tags (title, description, image)YesYes
Twitter Card tagsYesPartial
Favicon extractionYesNo
Canonical URL + language detectionYesPartial
JSON-LD structured dataYesYes
Full article body extractionNoYes
Product data extractionNoYes
Knowledge graph / entity extractionNoYes
Node.js + Python SDKsYesYes
Available on RapidAPIYesNo
Free tier100 req/moTrial only
Entry paid plan$9/mo (1K req)$299/mo (Startup)
Mid-tier plan$29/mo (10K req)$899/mo (Plus)
Simple one-endpoint metadata APIYesNo (complex multi-API)

Pricing comparison

MetaScrape
  • Free $0 — 100 req/mo
  • Hobby $9/mo — 1,000 req
  • Growth $29/mo — 10,000 req
  • Business $79/mo — 100,000 req
Diffbot
  • Trial Limited trial access
  • Startup $299/mo
  • Plus $899/mo
  • Enterprise Custom pricing

Pricing verified February 2026. Check vendor sites for current rates.

Why choose MetaScrape

Right-sized for metadata

Diffbot is a remarkable engineering product — AI-powered extraction, knowledge graphs, full article parsing, product intelligence. But if your use case is link previews, OG tags, and social card metadata, you are paying $299/mo for a platform 95% of which you will never use. MetaScrape does exactly what you need — nothing more, nothing less — at $9/mo.

Simpler integration

Diffbot's API surface covers articles, products, discussions, images, videos, entities, and more. That flexibility requires learning a complex query model. MetaScrape has one endpoint: pass a URL, receive structured metadata. No API schema to learn, no endpoint selection, no result types to parse. Most developers have a working integration in under ten minutes.

33x lower cost

Diffbot's entry plan is $299/mo. MetaScrape's Hobby plan is $9/mo. For metadata extraction alone, that is a 33x cost difference with no loss of functionality for your use case. If you are building a SaaS product, a content tool, or a developer utility that extracts URL metadata, that cost difference compounds into real margin at scale.

The API is one call

No AI models to configure. No extraction type to select. Pass a URL, get back every metadata field your link preview needs — in a single, consistent JSON response:

MetaScrape — one call
const res = await fetch(
  'https://api.shanecode.org/v1/extract' +
  '?url=https://github.com',
  { headers: { 'X-API-Key': 'msk_your_key' } }
);
const { data } = await res.json();

// Everything you need:
data.title        // "GitHub: Let's build from here"
data.og.image     // "https://..."
data.favicon      // "https://github.com/favicon.ico"
data.twitter.card // "summary_large_image"
data.language     // "en"
data.structured_data // JSON-LD array
JSON response
{
  "data": {
    "url": "https://github.com",
    "domain": "github.com",
    "title": "GitHub: Let's build from here",
    "description": "GitHub is where over 100...",
    "canonical_url": "https://github.com",
    "favicon": "https://github.com/favicon.ico",
    "language": "en",
    "og": { "title": "...", "image": "...",
            "type": "website" },
    "twitter": { "card": "summary_large_image",
                 "site": "@github" },
    "structured_data": [...],
    "response_time_ms": 245
  }
}

When Diffbot is the right choice

Diffbot is genuinely impressive and worth the investment in specific scenarios. If any of the following describe your project, Diffbot may be the right tool — MetaScrape is not a replacement for what Diffbot does at the enterprise level:

  • You need full article body extraction with author, date, and content parsed from arbitrary news sites
  • You are building a product intelligence tool that needs price, SKU, and availability from e-commerce pages
  • You need entity extraction and knowledge graph construction at scale
  • You are at a funded company or enterprise where the $299/mo starting price is appropriate for your budget and use case

If your use case is link previews, metadata enrichment, or social card rendering — and not full content extraction or knowledge graph construction — MetaScrape gives you what you need at a fraction of the price.

The bottom line

Diffbot is a powerful, AI-driven web intelligence platform built for enterprise-scale content extraction and knowledge graph construction. If you need URL metadata for link previews — OG tags, Twitter Cards, favicons, canonical URLs, language, and JSON-LD — you do not need a $299/mo AI scraping platform to do it. MetaScrape is purpose-built for metadata extraction, returns a clean structured response in a single API call, and starts at $9/mo. Use the right tool for the job. Free tier, no credit card, API key in 30 seconds.

Start free — no credit card required

Free tier: 100 requests/month. Hobby plan from $9/mo.