Zyte vs ScraperAPI(2026)
Zyte is better for teams that need built by the creators of scrapy. ScraperAPI is the stronger choice if simple to integrate. Zyte is paid (from from $0.13/1K requests) and ScraperAPI is freemium (from $49/month).
Full feature breakdown, pricing details, and pros & cons below.
By Bikram NathLast updated
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Zyte
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 ZyteScraperAPI
ScraperAPI is a web scraping API that manages proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so you can fetch any page with a single request. It rotates across millions of proxies, retries failed requests automatically, and offers structured data endpoints for search engines and e-commerce sites.
Starting at $49/month
Visit ScraperAPIHow Do Zyte and ScraperAPI Compare on Features?
| Feature | Zyte | ScraperAPI |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | paid | freemium |
| Starting price | from $0.13/1K requests | $49/month |
| 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 | ✓ | — |
| Single-endpoint scraping API | — | ✓ |
| Automatic proxy rotation (datacenter + residential) | — | ✓ |
| JavaScript rendering | — | ✓ |
| Automatic retries | — | ✓ |
| Geotargeting | — | ✓ |
| Structured data endpoints (Google, Amazon) | — | ✓ |
| Async scraping for large jobs | — | ✓ |
Zyte Pros and Cons vs ScraperAPI
Zyte
ScraperAPI
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.
Deep dive: ScraperAPI
When to choose ScraperAPI
ScraperAPI is the right choice when the team needs a simple, proxy-based scraping API with automatic retry logic and good success rates, and when the budget is moderate. It sits between ScrapingBee and Bright Data in both complexity and price: simpler than Bright Data's product suite, more capable than ScrapingBee's basic offering for structured data extraction. The auto-retry on failed requests is a genuine differentiator: ScraperAPI automatically retries requests with different proxies and configurations until it gets a successful response or exhausts the retry budget, which significantly improves success rates on moderately protected sites. The structured data endpoints for Google SERP, Amazon product pages, and e-commerce sites return JSON directly, eliminating the need to parse HTML. Choose ScraperAPI when the team wants a reliable scraping API with a free tier for prototyping and structured endpoints for common targets. Avoid it when the targets require premium residential proxies for every request or when the team needs a full scraping platform with scheduling, storage, and workflow orchestration.
Real-world use case
An SEO agency uses ScraperAPI to monitor search rankings for 200 client keywords daily. Each keyword triggers a request to the Google SERP endpoint, which returns structured JSON with the top 10 results including title, URL, and snippet. The agency's internal dashboard processes the JSON and tracks ranking changes over time. The daily workload is 200 requests, all using the structured SERP endpoint at 5 credits each, totaling 1,000 credits per day or 30,000 credits per month. On the Hobby plan at per month with 100,000 credits, the agency has room to scale to 600 keywords before needing to upgrade. The tradeoff: the SERP endpoint costs 5 credits per request compared to 1 credit for basic HTML scraping, so keyword monitoring is 5x more expensive per request than general page scraping.
Hidden gotchas
Credit costs vary by feature flag: a basic HTML request costs 1 credit, JavaScript rendering costs 5 credits, geotargeting costs 5 credits, and premium residential proxies cost 10 to 25 credits. Combining JavaScript rendering with premium proxies costs 25 credits per request, making high-volume scraping of JS-heavy sites unexpectedly expensive. The free tier includes 1,000 credits per month, which is enough for about 200 JS-rendered requests. This is generous for prototyping but misleading if the team assumes it scales linearly. The auto-retry feature is valuable but consumes credits for each retry attempt, and a request that eventually fails after 3 retries has consumed 3 credits, not zero. The async scraping mode for large batch jobs requires polling a status endpoint for completion, and the documentation does not clearly specify the retention period for completed results. Geotargeting is available for 15 countries on the basic plan and all countries on higher plans, and requests targeting unavailable countries silently fall back to a US-based proxy.
Pricing breakdown
The free plan includes 1,000 credits per month. The Hobby plan at per month includes 100,000 credits. The Startup plan at per month includes 250,000 credits. The Business plan at per month includes 1,000,000 credits. A team making 50,000 basic HTML requests and 10,000 JavaScript-rendered requests per month consumes 50,000 plus 50,000 equals 100,000 credits, fitting on the Hobby plan. Adding geotargeting to the JS requests increases consumption to 150,000 credits, requiring the Startup plan.
Should You Use Zyte or ScraperAPI?
For most teams, Zyte is the better default: it offers built by the creators of scrapy and is paid (from from $0.13/1K requests). Choose ScraperAPI instead if simple to integrate matters more than pricing varies a lot by site difficulty tier. There is no universal winner — the right pick depends on your budget, team size, and whether you value built by the creators of scrapy or simple to integrate more.
Choose Zyte if…
- •Built by the creators of Scrapy
- •Pay only for successful responses
- •Very cheap entry tier for simple sites
Choose ScraperAPI if…
- •Simple to integrate
- •Free tier with 1,000 credits/month
- •High success rate with auto-retries