Bright Data vs Zyte(2026)
Bright Data is better for teams that need largest and most reliable proxy network. Zyte is the stronger choice if built by the creators of scrapy. Bright Data is paid (from from $1.50/1K requests) and Zyte is paid (from from $0.13/1K requests).
Full feature breakdown, pricing details, and pros & cons below.
By Bikram NathLast updated
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Bright Data
Bright Data is an enterprise-grade web data platform offering one of the largest proxy networks (residential, datacenter, ISP, and mobile), plus Web Scraper APIs, a Web Unlocker, SERP API, and ready-made datasets. It is built for high-volume, compliance-conscious data collection.
Starting at from $1.50/1K requests
Visit Bright DataZyte
Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub) is a web scraping platform from the team behind the open-source Scrapy framework. Its Zyte API unifies proxies, headless browser rendering, and anti-ban handling with usage-based, per-successful-response pricing tiered by site difficulty.
Starting at from $0.13/1K requests
Visit ZyteHow Do Bright Data and Zyte Compare on Features?
| Feature | Bright Data | Zyte |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | paid | paid |
| Starting price | from $1.50/1K requests | from $0.13/1K requests |
| Residential, datacenter, ISP and mobile proxies | ✓ | — |
| Web Scraper API | ✓ | — |
| Web Unlocker (anti-bot bypass) | ✓ | — |
| SERP API | ✓ | — |
| Ready-made datasets | ✓ | — |
| Proxy Manager | ✓ | — |
| Compliance and KYC controls | ✓ | — |
| Zyte API (proxies + browser + anti-ban) | — | ✓ |
| Smart proxy management | — | ✓ |
| Headless browser rendering | — | ✓ |
| Automatic ban detection | — | ✓ |
| Scrapy Cloud hosting | — | ✓ |
| Per-successful-response billing | — | ✓ |
| Difficulty-tiered pricing | — | ✓ |
Bright Data Pros and Cons vs Zyte
Bright Data
Zyte
Deep dive: Bright Data
When to choose Bright Data
Bright Data is the right choice when proxy reliability and geographic coverage are the primary requirements, not the scraping framework itself. It operates the largest proxy network in the industry with over 72 million residential IPs across every country, making it the go-to for enterprise teams that need to access geo-restricted content, SERP data, or e-commerce prices from specific regions reliably. The Web Unlocker product handles anti-bot bypass automatically, including CAPTCHA solving, browser fingerprinting, and cookie management, so the team can focus on data extraction rather than evasion engineering. Choose Bright Data when the targets are heavily protected sites like Amazon, Google, LinkedIn, or airline booking engines that block most scraping attempts. It is also the right pick for compliance-sensitive operations: Bright Data has a published compliance program and KYC verification that some enterprise procurement teams require. Avoid Bright Data when the scraping target is lightly protected, when budget is the primary constraint, or when the team wants an all-in-one platform with built-in scheduling and data storage like Apify.
Real-world use case
An enterprise competitive intelligence team uses Bright Data's Web Unlocker to collect pricing data from 200 competitor product pages across 8 countries daily. Each request is routed through residential proxies in the target country to get localized pricing. The team's existing Python scripts make HTTP requests through Bright Data's proxy endpoint, parse the HTML with BeautifulSoup, and store the results in a PostgreSQL database. The Web Unlocker handles everything between the HTTP request and the target site: proxy selection, retry logic, CAPTCHA solving, and header management. The team processes about 200,000 requests per month. The tradeoff: the monthly bill is approximately , which is significantly more than Apify or ScrapingBee for the same volume. The team pays the premium because the success rate on these heavily protected sites is above 99 percent, compared to 60 to 70 percent with cheaper alternatives.
Hidden gotchas
Pricing tiers are complex and product-specific. Bright Data offers multiple products, datacenter proxies, residential proxies, ISP proxies, mobile proxies, Web Unlocker, SERP API, and ready-made datasets, each with different billing models. A team that starts with datacenter proxies and later switches to Web Unlocker for better success rates may see their costs increase 5 to 10x per request. The KYC verification process required for residential and mobile proxy access can take 1 to 3 business days, blocking time-sensitive projects. Bandwidth is metered on residential proxies, and a single image-heavy page can consume 2 to 5 MB per request, meaning a scraping job that processes pages with product images burns through bandwidth much faster than expected. The self-service dashboard shows real-time usage but does not provide projected billing for the current period, making cost management reactive rather than proactive. The Proxy Manager open-source tool, which manages proxy rotation locally, requires Docker and has a non-trivial setup process. Ready-made datasets are pre-scraped data sold by volume, but the freshness guarantee varies by dataset, and some datasets are refreshed weekly rather than daily, which may not meet real-time pricing use cases.
Pricing breakdown
Datacenter proxies start at /bin/zsh.10 per GB with no per-request fee. Residential proxies start at .04 per GB with per-request pricing varying by volume. Web Unlocker starts at .50 per 1,000 requests for simple pages and .00 per 1,000 for JavaScript-rendered pages. SERP API starts at .50 per 1,000 searches. A team making 200,000 Web Unlocker requests per month for simple HTML pages would pay approximately per month. Adding JavaScript rendering on 30 percent of requests pushes the total to approximately per month. The minimum commitment on most products is for annual plans with a discount, or pay-as-you-go with no minimum.
Deep dive: Zyte
When to choose Zyte
Zyte is the right choice when the team already uses Scrapy or has Python-based scraping infrastructure and wants managed proxy and anti-ban services without switching frameworks. Built by the creators of Scrapy, Zyte provides the Zyte API, which wraps proxy management, browser rendering, and anti-bot bypass into a single endpoint, and Scrapy Cloud, which hosts Scrapy spiders in the cloud with scheduling, monitoring, and log viewing. The pay-per-successful-response model is a genuine differentiator: the team only pays for requests that return a 200-status response, eliminating the billing risk of failed requests consuming credits. Choose Zyte when the team has existing Scrapy spiders and wants to scale them without managing server infrastructure, or when the target sites vary in difficulty and the team wants pricing that reflects actual difficulty rather than a flat per-request rate. Avoid it when the team does not use Python, when a no-code visual builder is required, or when the team needs structured output formats like Markdown for LLM ingestion.
Real-world use case
A data team at a price comparison startup runs 50 Scrapy spiders on Zyte's Scrapy Cloud platform. Each spider scrapes a different e-commerce site for product prices and availability, running on a configurable schedule from every 2 hours to daily depending on the site's update frequency. The spiders use the Zyte API for proxy management and anti-bot handling, with automatic escalation from datacenter to residential proxies when the target site's protection level requires it. The difficulty-tiered pricing means simple sites cost /bin/zsh.13 per 1,000 requests while heavily protected sites cost up to per 1,000 requests. The team processes approximately 2 million pages per month across all spiders, with an average cost of /bin/zsh.80 per 1,000 requests, totaling about ,600 per month. The tradeoff: the per-request cost is unpredictable until the spider has run against each target site long enough to establish the difficulty tier.
Hidden gotchas
The difficulty-tiered pricing model means costs can vary 30x between easy and hard sites. A spider that scrapes simple HTML pages might cost /bin/zsh.13 per 1,000 requests, while the same spider pointed at a Cloudflare-protected site could cost per 1,000 requests. The difficulty assessment is automatic and not transparent: teams cannot predict which tier a new target site will fall into without running test requests first. Scrapy Cloud uses a proprietary deployment format that requires the shub CLI tool and does not support standard Docker containers, locking the team into Zyte's deployment pipeline. Scrapy Cloud's job monitoring dashboard shows runtime metrics but does not provide cost breakdowns per spider per run, making cost attribution across spiders and projects manual. The Zyte API's browser rendering mode is significantly more expensive than HTTP-only mode, and some target sites that appear to require JavaScript actually serve the required data in the initial HTML response, so testing with HTTP-only first can save substantial costs. Spider-level concurrency and download delays must be tuned per target site, and the default settings can trigger rate limiting or bans on targets that expect slower request patterns.
Pricing breakdown
Zyte API pricing is per successful response, starting at /bin/zsh.13 per 1,000 for easy sites (simple HTML, no protection) and scaling to per 1,000 for the hardest tier (heavy anti-bot, browser rendering, residential proxies required). Scrapy Cloud is priced per compute unit, with the free tier including 1 concurrent spider and limited storage. The Professional plan at per month includes more concurrency and longer data retention. A team running 500,000 easy-tier requests and 100,000 hard-tier requests per month would pay approximately for easy requests plus for hard requests, totaling per month on the Zyte API alone, plus the Scrapy Cloud hosting fee.
Should You Use Bright Data or Zyte?
For most teams, Bright Data is the better default: it offers largest and most reliable proxy network and is paid (from from $1.50/1K requests). Choose Zyte instead if built by the creators of scrapy matters more than pricing is complex and can be expensive. There is no universal winner — the right pick depends on your budget, team size, and whether you value largest and most reliable proxy network or built by the creators of scrapy more.
Choose Bright Data if…
- •Largest and most reliable proxy network
- •High success rate on hard-to-scrape sites
- •Strong compliance and legal posture
Choose Zyte if…
- •Built by the creators of Scrapy
- •Pay only for successful responses
- •Very cheap entry tier for simple sites