MapsScraper vs Scrap.io Chrome Extension: Honest Comparison (2026)

The short version: Scrap.io is the more powerful tool. MapsScraper is roughly 5 times cheaper. Whether that trade is worth it depends on whether you need country-scale scraping and AI-agent integration, or just a steady stream of clean Google Maps leads for outbound.

We make MapsScraper, so we’ll flag the bias up front and document Scrap.io’s real advantages — country-level coverage, polygon search, MCP support for Claude/ChatGPT agents — without sanding off the edges. If those features fit your work, the price gap is justified.

This guide compares both tools on public pricing checked September 2026, then ends with a decision matrix.

Quick comparison

Feature	MapsScraper	Scrap.io
Free tier	50 leads/month (renewable)	100 leads / 7 days (trial)
Cheapest paid plan	$9.90/mo	$49/mo, or $35/mo billed yearly (Basic)
Annual unlimited	$79/yr	None; Basic is $420/yr for 10,000 credits/mo
Format	Chrome extension (sideloaded)	Cloud SaaS dashboard
API	❌ No	✅ REST API
MCP server (AI agents)	❌ No	✅ Built-in (Claude/ChatGPT)
Country-level scrape	❌ No	✅ All 195 countries (Company plan only)
Polygon / radius search	❌ Manual queries	✅ Custom area on map (Company plan only)
Business categories supported	Whatever Maps shows	4,000+ pre-mapped
Email scraping	✅ Built-in (Premium)	✅ Built-in
WhatsApp click-to-chat links	✅ Built-in (Premium)	❌ Not generated
Setup	Sideload, developer mode	Web signup, dashboard
UI languages	10 (EN, ES, PT, DE, FR, TR, IT, PL, JA, KO)	App: English and French; website in ~18 languages

If your eye stopped on “country-level scrape” and “MCP server,” Scrap.io is the right tool for you and you can stop reading. Those two features alone have no equivalent at MapsScraper’s price point. The rest of this guide is for everyone else.

Pricing breakdown

Scrap.io math

Scrap.io is plan-based. Per Scrap.io’s pricing page (checked September 2026), the Basic plan is $49/mo billed monthly or $35/mo billed yearly, with 10,000 export credits a month that don’t roll over. Higher tiers add credits and features, but whole-country and polygon search are only on the Company plan: $350/mo billed yearly, $499/mo billed monthly. There’s a 7-day trial, up to 100 leads, to test the dashboard before committing.

A rough year of Scrap.io looks like:

• Basic plan, 12 months: $420/yr billed yearly ($588 billed monthly)
• Company plan with whole-country + polygon search: $4,200/yr billed yearly
• Pay annually: about 30% off the monthly price on Basic and Company

These are subscription costs with a monthly export-credit allowance (10,000 on Basic) rather than per-record billing. That’s a real upside if your volume is predictable and fits the allowance.

MapsScraper math

Two prices, unlimited usage on either:

• Free forever: 50 renewable leads/mo
• Premium monthly: $9.90/mo
• Premium yearly: $79/yr ($6.58/mo equivalent)

Premium gets you unlimited leads, email scraping, social media links, WhatsApp click-to-chat generation, and Excel export. You can compare MapsScraper’s plans on our homepage.

Side by side

Scenario	MapsScraper	Scrap.io
12 months	$79 (unlimited)	$420 (Basic billed yearly, 10,000 credits/mo)
6 months trial run	$9.90 × 6 = $59.40	$49 × 6 = $294
One-time 5,000-lead scrape	$9.90 (one month)	$49 (one month)

At entry-tier prices, MapsScraper is roughly 4.9× cheaper monthly and 5.3× cheaper annually — MapsScraper’s $79/year plan against $420 for Scrap.io’s Basic plan billed yearly. That gap funds an entire freelancer’s tool stack.

Scrap.io is not overpriced for what it does — it’s a different category of product. We’re a single-purpose browser extension, they’re a full cloud platform. Whether you pay 5× for the platform features depends on whether you use them.

Feature comparison

Country-level scraping. Scrap.io’s headline feature, available on its Company plan: pick “Germany” or “Brazil” or “Indonesia,” pick a category, and pull every matching listing across the whole country. MapsScraper does not do this — you’d need to run separate city-level scrapes and dedupe. If you’re running a country-wide market study or building a national leads database, Scrap.io is doing two days of work in one click.

Polygon and radius search. Draw a polygon on a map, scrape every business inside it (Company plan only). Or pick a point and a radius. Useful for franchise mapping, route planning, or precise neighborhood targeting that doesn’t follow administrative boundaries. MapsScraper handles this by chaining manual queries — workable for one city, painful for ten.

MCP server. Scrap.io exposes a Model Context Protocol server so AI agents like Claude or ChatGPT can call their scraping API directly from a conversation. If you’re building agent-driven workflows (“find me all dentists in Berlin with 4+ stars and email them”), this is genuinely novel. MapsScraper has no agent integration — it’s user-driven only.

Pre-mapped categories. Scrap.io claims 4,000+ business categories pre-mapped to Google’s taxonomy, which makes targeting faster on the dashboard. MapsScraper uses whatever Google’s category filter shows in your browser at scrape time. Functionally similar; UX advantage to Scrap.io.

Email scraping. Both tools do this built-in. No add-on fees on either side.

WhatsApp click-to-chat links. MapsScraper Premium generates wa.me/<E.164> links from the phone numbers in the scrape. Useful for outbound in markets where WhatsApp is the dominant business channel (LATAM, MENA, Southeast Asia, Türkiye). Scrap.io provides the phone number but not the formatted link.

API. Scrap.io has a REST API on all paid plans. If you’re integrating scraping into a custom pipeline, this is non-optional. MapsScraper doesn’t offer one — the extension runs in the browser and exports files.

Language support. MapsScraper UI in 10 languages. Scrap.io’s web app can be switched between English and French, and its website is translated into about 18 languages (checked September 2026). If your team needs the tool itself in another language, check Scrap.io’s app before you buy.

Setup experience

Scrap.io:

1. scrap.io → sign up (email or Google SSO)
2. Confirm, log in, land on dashboard
3. Pick a country, category, optionally draw polygon
4. Click Extract, wait, download CSV/Excel

About 5 minutes from zero to a finished scrape.

MapsScraper:

1. mapsscraper.shop/install → download ZIP
2. Unzip somewhere permanent
3. chrome://extensions → toggle Developer Mode
4. “Load unpacked,” select folder
5. Pin extension, open Maps, click icon

About 10 minutes the first time, then it’s “click the pinned icon.”

Honest comparison: Scrap.io is faster to start. The web-based pattern beats sideload installation. Our trade-off — distributing directly without Chrome Web Store review — buys us the ability to ship features quickly and keep the code unobfuscated for inspection. It costs us the first-impression speed advantage.

For ongoing use, the friction is roughly equal: log in to a dashboard vs. click an extension icon. But Scrap.io owns the first 10 minutes. If you’re still deciding between the two formats in general, our guide to browser extension vs cloud scraper covers where each one fits.

Scrap.io’s Chrome extension (Maps Connect) vs MapsScraper

Scrap.io also has a Chrome extension, Scrap.io Maps Connect. According to its Chrome Web Store listing (checked September 2026: 10,000 users, 4.6/5 from 22 ratings), it adds business emails and social profiles (website, email, phone, contact page, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube) to listings as you browse Google Maps, and makes them clickable so you can call, email or message in one click. The same listing points to the Scrap.io web platform for building prospect lists at scale.

The difference in practice: Maps Connect enriches the listing you are looking at, while MapsScraper runs the whole scan itself — it scrolls the results, opens each business, collects the data and exports it to CSV or Excel from the extension. If you prospect one business at a time inside Google Maps, Maps Connect fits that workflow; if you want a spreadsheet of every result for a search, that is what MapsScraper is built for.

Who should use which

Pick Scrap.io if:

• You need country-level scraping (whole-country lead databases)
• Your workflow needs polygon or radius targeting on a map
• You’re integrating with AI agents via MCP (Claude/ChatGPT calling scraping tools)
• You have an API-driven pipeline and need REST endpoints
• You’re at agency scale: multiple clients, multiple countries, shared dashboard
• Budget supports $49/mo or $420+/yr for tooling, and $350+/mo if you need whole-country or polygon search

Pick MapsScraper if:

• You’re a solo founder, freelancer, or 2–5 person team
• You’re prospecting at city / neighborhood scale, not country scale
• Budget is tight: $79/yr is non-negotiable, $420/yr is not
• You need WhatsApp click-to-chat workflow built in
• Your team needs the tool in a language other than English or French (10 languages supported)
• You want data to stay in your browser, not a vendor’s cloud
• You can tolerate a 10-minute first install for roughly 5× lower cost

The “agency scale” line is the real fork. If you’re running scraping as a service for clients across multiple countries and want a single dashboard with API hooks, Scrap.io is the right product. If you’re doing your own outbound for your own business, MapsScraper covers it at a fraction of the price.

The pipeline matters more than the tool

Either tool can hand you 1,000 clean leads. What happens after that determines whether you make money from them. We wrote a Google Maps lead generation playbook covering targeting, enrichment, outreach, and deliverability — applicable to either tool.

If you’re picking based on cost-per-lead alone, also worth checking our notes on avoiding rate limits. Both Scrap.io and MapsScraper handle this internally, but understanding the underlying constraints helps you spec scrapes that actually finish.

Conclusion

Scrap.io is a more capable product. It charges more, but it does more — country scale, polygon search, AI agent integration, REST API. If those features map to your work, the price gap is fair.

MapsScraper trades platform features for a roughly 5× lower price and built-in WhatsApp workflow. It fits solo founders, freelancers, and small teams doing focused city-level prospecting on a budget.

If you’re not sure, the free tiers are honest tests:

• Scrap.io: 100 leads, 7 days, full dashboard access
• MapsScraper: 50 leads/month, renewable indefinitely, no credit card

Run both, compare outputs, pick the one whose UX matches how you work.

For a wider view including Outscraper, G Maps Extractor, and Leads Sniper, see our 5-tool comparison. If you specifically need REST API access, MapsScraper vs Outscraper covers that trade-off in detail.

Comparing other tools?

For Chrome-extension head-to-heads in the same category:

• MapsScraper vs G Maps Extractor — the closest extension competitor, with a 1,000-lead free tier
• MapsScraper vs MapLeadScraper — same price band as us, less public documentation