Censys
vs
urlscan.io
Censys vs urlscan.io
Domain API comparison
Overview
Which of these two providers fits my workload?
Censys
Internet intelligence and attack surface platform
Censys delivers internet-wide scanning, certificate intelligence, and external attack surface discovery for security teams and researchers.
Free tier with limited searches and lookup API accessurlscan.io
URL scanning, phishing analysis, and brand monitoring API
urlscan.io is built for scanning web pages, indexing observed infrastructure, and detecting phishing or brand abuse from captured page data.
Free plan; 30-day commercial-plan trial availablePricing comparison
Watch out for: Credits, pages, requests, records, compute units, subscriptions, and browser-time blocks are not interchangeable.
| Pricing | Censys | urlscan.io |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Free tier with limited searches and lookup API access | Free plan; 30-day commercial-plan trial available |
| Paid plans | Prepaid credits from $100 | $5,000/year Automate plan |
| Enterprise | Core and Adversary Investigation are custom priced | $5,000/month or $50,000/year Ultimate plan |
| How usage is billed | Credits, pages, requests, records, compute units, subscriptions, and browser-time blocks are not interchangeable. | Credits, pages, requests, records, compute units, subscriptions, and browser-time blocks are not interchangeable. |
Feature comparison
| Feature | Censys | urlscan.io |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Limited | Included |
| API access | Included | Included |
| Bulk operations | Included | Limited |
| Real-time data | Included | Included |
| WHOIS data | Limited | Limited |
| DNS lookup | Included | Included |
| Domain valuation | Not included | Not included |
| Brand monitoring | Not included | Included |
| MCP/AI integration | Not included | Not included |
Which is better?
Choose Censys if you need
- Internet-wide scanning data
- Certificate and asset intelligence
- External attack surface discovery
Choose urlscan.io if you need
- Page scanning for phishing investigations
- Brand monitoring and search
- Helpful for URL-centric security operations
Consider DomScan instead
DomScan combines broad features with developer-friendly pricing.
- ✓ Free tier: 10,000 credits/month (no credit card)
- ✓ 1,100+ TLDs supported
- ✓ MCP integration for AI assistants
- ✓ Domain valuation, brand monitoring, OSINT
Sources
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