Jina Reader
Shares rank 3 of 4 web scraping APIs by recommenders
People recommend it as a quick way to turn web pages into clean Markdown for AI agents and LLM pipelines, cutting token counts sharply. Critics say it struggles with JavaScript-heavy pages.
People recommend it as a quick way to turn web pages into clean Markdown for AI agents and LLM pipelines, cutting token counts sharply. Critics say it struggles with JavaScript-heavy pages.
6 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 5
- criticize it
- 1
- approval share
- 83%
Recommended in 3 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 5 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 3 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, not met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Cuts tokens when feeding AI agents
“stripping to markdown with Jina Reader or Trafilatura before passing to the agent cuts that 68k down to ~3-5k for most Wikipedia pages”
Comment from 11 Jul 2026 in “One Wikipedia page costs your AI agent 68,000 tokens” “Firecrawl and Jina Reader are better on token count but they convert to markdown”
Comment from 17 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: PageMap – MCP server that compresses web pages from 100K to 2-5K tokens” Strips pages to clean Markdown
“stripping to markdown with Jina Reader or Trafilatura before passing to the agent cuts that 68k down to ~3-5k for most Wikipedia pages”
Comment from 11 Jul 2026 in “One Wikipedia page costs your AI agent 68,000 tokens” “Firecrawl and Jina Reader are better on token count but they convert to markdown”
Comment from 17 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: PageMap – MCP server that compresses web pages from 100K to 2-5K tokens”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Weak on JavaScript-heavy pages
“It's pretty good, until you hit JS heavy pages.”
Comment from 8 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: Readability API – Unrender” Converts to Markdown, not raw text
“Firecrawl and Jina Reader are better on token count but they convert to markdown”
Comment from 17 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: PageMap – MCP server that compresses web pages from 100K to 2-5K tokens”
Other web scraping APIs people recommend
The three most recommended other web scraping APIs, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Firecrawl | 17 | 10 | 63% | 10 | — | — |
| Bright Data | 10 | 32 | 24% | 5 | — | — |
| Jina ReaderThis page | 5 | 1 | 83% | 3 | — | — |
| Apify | 5 | 0 | 100% | 3 | — | — |
What people said
All 6 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“the additional value prop is the bypassing blockers. ideally op should just use jina on top of whatever they are building”
“stripping to markdown with Jina Reader or Trafilatura before passing to the agent cuts that 68k down to ~3-5k for most Wikipedia pages”
“to replace Jina with Readability”
“Firecrawl and Jina Reader are better on token count but they convert to markdown”
“It's pretty good, until you hit JS heavy pages.”
“I usually put r.jina.ai/ before URLs”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.