HPT vs Spider Cloud

Side-by-side comparison of features, pricing, and ratings

Analysis reviewed Live tool data as of 2026-09-01
Cross-checked through our multi-step verification ·
Saved

At a glance

DimensionHPTSpider Cloud
PricingFree (open-source)Freemium, pay-as-you-go (~$0.03/1k pages)
Best ForDevelopers building on-device multimodal AI appsAI agents needing real-time web data for RAG
Core StrengthMultimodal understanding on edge/cloudFast web crawling/scraping for AI pipelines
Open SourceYes, weights on Hugging Face, code on GitHubOpen-source core available on GitHub
Key Feature4B and 8B multimodal LLMs (text, images, video)Rust engine, AI Studio, Browser AI commands
IntegrationsHugging Face, GitHubLangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, S3, GCS, etc.

Choose HPT if you need a free, open-source multimodal LLM for on-device or cloud inference that processes text, images, and video. Choose Spider Cloud if you need a fast, pay-as-you-go web scraping API with AI extraction and browser automation for powering AI agents and RAG pipelines. They serve entirely different use cases.

Try HPTTry Spider Cloud
HPT
HPT

Open-source multimodal LLM for edge, mobile, and cloud—text, images, video understanding

Visit Website
Spider Cloud
Spider Cloud

AI web scraping API: crawl, scrape, search any site into markdown or JSON at 10k req/min.

Visit Website
Pricing
Free
Freemium
Plans
$0
$1/GB + $0.001/min compute
$40/mo (2 concurrency)
$6/mo
Popularity
2 views
7.5k views
Skill Level
Advanced
Intermediate
API Available
Platforms
CLI
WebAPICLI
Categories
⚛️ Foundation Models & LLM APIs👁️ Computer Vision
🌐 Web Scraping & Search APIs🖱️ Browser & Computer-Use Agents
Features
Multimodal understanding (text, images, video)
Visual question answering
Image captioning
Document understanding
Chart reading
Code generation from visual inputs
HPT 1.5 Edge: ~4B edge-optimized model
HPT 1.5 Air: 8B cloud-optimized model (Llama 3 backbone)
Open-source weights on Hugging Face
GitHub repository with inference code
Supports downstream fine-tuning
Efficient inference on edge devices
Optimized for mobile and IoT deployment
Research on multimodal diffusion models
Scrape any website into markdown, JSON, or raw HTML
Full-site crawling at 100K+ pages/sec
10,000 core API requests per minute default
Web Search API: SERP + scraping + extraction in one call
/ai/search endpoint with relevance gate to skip irrelevant pages
Silk AI model: HTML-to-structured data and captcha solving on GPUs
Browser Cloud: full browser sessions over CDP
AI commands (Act, Extract, Observe) via WebSocket with AI Studio
Multiple output formats: HTML, raw, plain text, markdown, JSON, JSONL, CSV, XML
Stealth browser layer and Unblocker for anti-bot sites
Proxy pool with 215M+ residential and ISP IPs across 199+ countries
Robots.txt compliance on by default, disable per-request
data_connectors parameter: pipe results to S3, GCS, Google Sheets, Azure Blob, Supabase
extraction_schema parameter: AI output conforms to JSON schema
1,000+ ready-made scraper examples across 32 categories
Integrations
LangChain
LlamaIndex
CrewAI
FlowiseAI
AutoGen
Agno

What real users say: HPT vs Spider Cloud

Not marketing copy and not our opinion — a structured sweep of public discussion (reviews, forums, communities and video comments), showing what people praise and what they complain about for each tool.

HPT

27 mentions across 3 sources · 33% positive — critical

Reddit, Hacker News, Lemmy

What users praise

  • • Open-source multimodal LLM with 4B edge and 8B cloud models.
  • • Claims state-of-the-art performance at small parameter counts.
  • • Supports text, image, and video input processing.
  • • Designed for efficient inference on smartphones and IoT devices.

What frustrates them

  • • Negligible community feedback or user reviews available.
  • • No official hosted API, requiring self-deployment.
  • • Unclear documentation quality for beginners.
  • • Lacks integration with popular platforms like Slack or Zapier.

Researched Jul 3, 2026

Spider Cloud

41 mentions across 2 sources · 0% positive — critical

YouTube, Lemmy

What users praise

  • • Competitive pay-as-you-go pricing at $1/GB with no expiry.
  • • Default rate limit of 10,000 requests per minute is generous.
  • • Broad output formats (HTML, markdown, JSON, CSV) cover diverse needs.
  • • Integrated Web Search API bundles SERP and extraction for AI agents.

What frustrates them

  • • No community feedback to confirm reliability or performance.
  • • Self-reported metrics lack independent verification.
  • • Stealth browser success may vary across real sites.
  • • Potential legal risks from scraping; compliance is user's responsibility.

Researched Aug 26, 2026

Who should pick which

  • Developer building an on-device visual assistant
    Pick: HPT

    HPT's 4B Edge model is designed for mobile and edge devices, offering multimodal understanding without cloud dependencies.

  • AI agent developer needing real-time web data for RAG
    Pick: Spider Cloud

    Spider Cloud's fast Rust engine, AI extraction, and Browser AI commands are purpose-built for feeding web data into AI pipelines.

  • Researcher comparing lightweight vision-language models
    Pick: HPT

    HPT's open-source nature and benchmark performance make it easy to evaluate and fine-tune for research.

  • Team scraping large e-commerce sites for price monitoring
    Pick: Spider Cloud

    Spider Cloud's unblocker, rotating proxies, and structured output handle anti-bot measures at scale.

  • Hobbyist experimenting with multimodal AI on a budget
    Pick: HPT

    HPT is free and runs on consumer hardware, making it accessible for personal projects.

Frequently Asked Questions

HPT vs Spider Cloud: which should you choose?

Choose HPT if you need a free, open-source multimodal LLM for on-device or cloud inference that processes text, images, and video. Choose Spider Cloud if you need a fast, pay-as-you-go web scraping API with AI extraction and browser automation for powering AI agents and RAG pipelines. They serve entirely different use cases.

Can HPT be used for web scraping?

No, HPT is a multimodal LLM for understanding images and text, not for scraping web content.

Does Spider Cloud have an open-source version?

Yes, Spider Cloud's core engine is available on GitHub, but the cloud version provides additional features like AI Studio and Browser AI.

Which tool is better for privacy?

HPT, because it runs locally—no data leaves your device. Spider Cloud sends data to its API.

Can Spider Cloud extract data from dynamic JavaScript pages?

Yes, Spider Cloud's Browser AI commands and browser cloud support JavaScript rendering and interaction.

Does HPT support video understanding?

Yes, HPT processes text, images, and video for tasks like visual question answering.

What integrations does Spider Cloud support?

Spider Cloud integrates with LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, FlowiseAI, AutoGen, Agno, Dify, S3, GCS, Supabase, and more.

Is there a free tier for Spider Cloud?

Yes, Spider Cloud offers a free tier with limited usage—details on their pricing page.

Which tool is easier for non-technical users?

Spider Cloud, because it provides a hosted API with AI Studio for natural language crawling, no coding required. HPT requires technical setup.

More HPT or Spider Cloud comparisons

Vercel vs Spider Cloud comparison

Choose Vercel if you need to deploy full-stack apps or AI agents with sandboxed execution, global CDN, and rich framework integrations. Choose Spider Cloud if your primary need is fast, reliable web s

Power BI vs Spider Cloud comparison

If your stack lives inside Microsoft 365 and you need governed, interactive dashboards, Power BI is the natural choice with unmatched ecosystem integration. But if you're building AI agents or RAG pip

LM Studio vs Spider Cloud comparison

If you need to run LLMs locally for privacy and agentic workflows, LM Studio is the free, polished choice with recent updates like multi-GPU tensor parallelism and MTP speculative decoding. If your pr

Tableau vs Spider Cloud comparison

Tableau and Spider Cloud serve entirely different purposes: Tableau is a full-featured BI platform for human analysts building interactive dashboards, while Spider Cloud is a purpose-built scraping AP

Amplitude vs Spider Cloud comparison

Spider Cloud and Amplitude solve entirely different problems. Choose Spider Cloud if you need high-volume, low-cost web data extraction for AI agents and RAG pipelines—it’s purpose-built for that. Cho

Looker vs Spider Cloud comparison

Choose Spider Cloud if you need a fast, low-cost web scraping API for feeding real-time data into AI agents and RAG pipelines. Choose Looker if you're an enterprise on Google Cloud needing governed, A

Explore each tool further

HPT
View HPT reviewHPT alternatives
Spider Cloud
View Spider Cloud reviewSpider Cloud alternatives

Browse these categories

Best AI Foundation Models & LLM APIs toolsBest AI Web Scraping & Search APIs toolsBest AI Computer Vision toolsBest AI Browser & Computer-Use Agents tools
Still deciding? Get the weekly AI tools brief

One email a week — new tools, honest comparisons, no spam.

Last reviewed: July 3, 2026