**NEW**

**Crustdata now works inside Claude**

**Give Claude real-time people and company data with MCP.**

The Best Bright Data Alternative with Real-time Search APIs

Bright Data provides scraping infrastructure, proxy networks, SERP APIs, and large-scale web datasets, while Crustdata is built to deliver real-time, structured B2B intelligence. Discover why Crustdata is the perfect Bright Data alternative for products and AI agents that need real-time data.

## Why people choose Crustdata over Bright Data

Bright Data offers SERP APIs, scraping APIs, and pre-built datasets, but does not provide real-time people or company search APIs or native entity-level monitoring.

### Real-time APIs vs dataset delivery

Bright Data offers people and company datasets collected from the web, as well as enrichment APIs. In addition to live enrichment, some of their datasets are updated on a periodic schedule.

Crustdata provides structured people and company profiles enriched across multiple verified sources and retrieved in real time through API calls.

For teams building applications that require continuously refreshed entity data via API, Crustdata is designed to operate as a real-time structured data layer rather than a periodically refreshed dataset source.

| Feature | Crustdata | Bright Data |
| --- | --- | --- |
| People profiles | 1B+ | 620M |
| Company profiles | 60M+ | 56M |
| Real-time B2B search APIs | ✅ Yes | ❌ No |
| Post data | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| Post reactor data | ✅ Yes | ❌ No |
| Website traffic data | ✅ Yes | ❌ No |
| Technographic data | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| Job posting data | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| Product review data | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| Employee review data | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| News data | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| Proxy & scraping infrastructure | ❌ No | ✅ Yes |

### People API feature coverage

Bright Data offers people datasets and scraping infrastructure, but structured historical career depth and enriched professional fields may require additional customer-side processing.

Crustdata’s People API is structured to provide full historical career timelines, enriched education data, certifications, languages, and contact signals.

## Better discovery and list building capabilities

With webhooks, you can track custom events to identify new opportunities as soon as they appear. Bright Data provides infrastructure and datasets, but list automation, event tracking, and entity-level monitoring must be implemented by the customer.

With Crustdata’s real-time search APIs, you receive profiles that match your criteria now, not profiles discovered during dataset refresh cycles or past scraping runs.

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### Live Data vs Periodic Datasets

Bright Data offers both a live enrichment API and datasets that are updated periodically (quarterly). Crustdata provides real-time structured discovery and enrichment APIs that retrieve and structure entity data on demand, across people, companies, and posts.

Rather than relying on periodic dataset refresh cycles, Crustdata is built to support workflows that require continuously updated structured intelligence and live entity retrieval.

| Feature | Crustdata | Bright Data |
| --- | --- | --- |
| People profiles | 1B+ | 620M |
| Company profiles | 60M+ | 56M |
| New profile discovery | Real-time & within minutes of request | Dataset refresh or manual scraping |

## Crustdata is real-time

Bright Data’s data freshness depends on dataset update schedules or how often customers scrape and maintain their own pipelines, and on-demand entity enrichment doesn’t satisfy the users’ needs. Crustdata retrieves data at the moment of request by spawning live crawlers and enriching profiles in real time.

| Feature | Crustdata | Bright Data |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Update frequency | Real-time (all profiles) | Dataset refreshes quarterly & on demand scraping via API |
| Real-time monitoring webhooks | ✅ Yes | ❌ No |
| Custom event tracking | ✅ Yes | ❌ No |

## Crustdata is built for AI agents & tools

Bright Data provides the ability to collect raw data and access large datasets, but does not provide the real-time intelligence layer required by modern AI systems.

Our APIs are built for products that require live data to function. From real-time enrichment to discovery and event tracking, Crustdata is the infrastructure layer designed for AI agents and platforms that must respond to changes as they happen.

### Complete in-depth profiles with 350+ datapoints

All Crustdata company and people profiles are enriched with more than **350+ datapoints**, including granular information such as job start and end dates, education history, job descriptions, skills, company growth signals, and public web presence.

### Social media monitoring

Use filters to discover companies and people and build lists that auto-update in real time. With Crustdata’s real-time search APIs, you get profiles that match your criteria today instead of those discovered during dataset refreshes. With webhooks, you can track custom events to identify changes as they happen.

### Web Search API

Crustdata’s Web Search API converts live search results into structured, machine-readable JSON. Bright Data provides SERP APIs that return structured search results in JSON format.

Both platforms enable applications to retrieve normalized search data including titles, URLs, snippets, ranking position, result type, and source.

This allows developers to power AI workflows, RAG pipelines, enrichment processes, and web monitoring without maintaining their own scraping infrastructure.