HPT vs Spider Cloud

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

Analysis reviewed Live tool data as of 2026-10-18
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At a glance

DimensionHPTSpider Cloud
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

HPT is an open-weight multimodal LLM family — HPT 1.5 Edge (~4B) and HPT 1.5 Air (8B on Llama 3) — for self-hosted vision-language

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Spider Cloud
Spider Cloud

Spider Cloud is a web scraping, crawling, and search API that streams live pages as markdown or JSON for AI agents and RAG pipelines.

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Pricing
Free
Freemium
Plans
$0
$1/GB + $0.0001/CPU-min
From $6/mo
From $40/mo
Custom
Popularity
5 views
7.5k views
Skill Level
Advanced
Intermediate
API Available
Platforms
CLI
WebAPIPluginCLIDesktop
Categories
⚛️ Foundation Models & LLM APIs👁️ Computer Vision
🌐 Web Scraping & Search APIs🖱️ Browser & Computer-Use Agents
Features
Multimodal understanding across text, images, and video
HPT 1.5 Edge: ~4B open-source multimodal LLM for edge and mobile devices
HPT 1.5 Air: 8B open-source multimodal LLM built on Llama 3
Visual question answering on images and video frames
Document understanding and OCR-style text extraction
Chart and figure reading for data-heavy inputs
Code generation from screenshots and visual references
Open weights downloadable from Hugging Face
GitHub inference code for self-hosted serving
Fine-tuning on custom and domain-specific datasets
Efficient inference for on-device and mobile deployment
No cloud API dependency, keeping data on-premises
Runs in air-gapped or on-premises environments
Roadmap: multimodal diffusion for photo and video generation
Scrape a single page into markdown, JSON, HTML, raw, or plain text
Crawl entire sites with each page streamed as one JSONL line in order as it finishes
Web search endpoint returns SERP results plus the scraped pages behind them
Custom browser renders like a user: scripts run, lazy images load, infinite scroll reaches the end
Load protected pages through a real browser engine with geo checks, returning a 200
Run full browser sessions over WebSocket with anti-detection and rotating exits
Send AI commands (Act, Extract, Observe) over the Browser API WebSocket
Send a prompt on a scrape or crawl request and get named fields back as JSON
Two-phase AI extraction: a fast model for most pages, a stronger model for complex layouts
Provider router sends scrape and crawl requests to outside providers on your own keys
Data connectors pipe crawl results into S3, GCS, Google Sheets, Azure Blob, or Supabase
Proxy network with 215M+ residential and ISP exits in 199 countries, rotated per request
MCP server at mcp.spider.cloud for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and Claude Desktop
1,000+ ready-made scraper examples across 32 categories, each with working code
API responses support JSON, JSONL, CSV, and XML; up to 10,000 core API requests per minute by default
Integrations
LangChain
LlamaIndex
CrewAI
FlowiseAI
Langflow
Dify
Agno
MCP
Claude Code
Codex
Cursor
Claude Desktop
Amazon S3
Google Cloud Storage
Google Sheets

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.

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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
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Last reviewed: July 3, 2026