Zyte vs ScrapingBee(2026)
Zyte is better for teams that need built by the creators of scrapy. ScrapingBee is the stronger choice if very simple api — fast to integrate. Zyte is paid (from from $0.13/1K requests) and ScrapingBee is paid (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 ZyteScrapingBee
ScrapingBee is a developer-focused web scraping API that handles headless browsers, proxy rotation, and CAPTCHA avoidance behind a single endpoint. You send a URL and get back rendered HTML or extracted data — no infrastructure to manage.
Starting at $49/month
Visit ScrapingBeeHow Do Zyte and ScrapingBee Compare on Features?
| Feature | Zyte | ScrapingBee |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | paid | paid |
| 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 API endpoint | — | ✓ |
| JavaScript rendering (headless Chrome) | — | ✓ |
| Automatic proxy rotation | — | ✓ |
| Premium + residential proxies | — | ✓ |
| Google search API | — | ✓ |
| AI-powered data extraction | — | ✓ |
| No-block guarantee on credits | — | ✓ |
Zyte Pros and Cons vs ScrapingBee
Zyte
ScrapingBee
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: ScrapingBee
When to choose ScrapingBee
ScrapingBee is the right choice when the team wants the simplest possible scraping API: a single endpoint that accepts a URL and returns rendered HTML, with proxy rotation and JavaScript execution handled automatically. It fits teams that do not want to manage browser infrastructure, proxy pools, or anti-bot logic, and where the scraping volume is moderate, roughly 10,000 to 500,000 pages per month. The API is stateless and requires no SDK: a simple HTTP GET with the URL and API key returns the page content. This makes it the fastest to integrate into existing codebases. The credit-based pricing is predictable: each request costs 1 credit for basic HTML, 5 credits for JavaScript rendering, and 10 to 25 credits for premium proxies. Choose ScrapingBee when the team needs a drop-in scraping API that works immediately. Avoid it when the volume exceeds 500,000 pages per month where per-credit pricing becomes expensive, or when the team needs scheduling, data storage, or workflow orchestration built into the scraping platform.
Real-world use case
A marketing team at a SaaS startup uses ScrapingBee to monitor competitor pricing pages. A daily cron job in a Next.js API route sends 50 URLs to ScrapingBee's API with JavaScript rendering enabled, parses the returned HTML for pricing table data using Cheerio, and stores the results in Supabase. The entire setup is 40 lines of TypeScript. Each request consumes 5 credits for JS rendering, so the daily cost is 250 credits. On the Freelancer plan at per month with 150,000 credits, the team has ample headroom for growth. The tradeoff: ScrapingBee returns raw HTML, so the team must write and maintain their own parsing logic. Apify or Firecrawl would extract structured data automatically. Additionally, if a competitor site changes its HTML structure, the parsing breaks silently, and the team only discovers the issue when they notice stale data.
Hidden gotchas
Credit consumption varies dramatically based on options selected per request. A basic HTML request costs 1 credit, but enabling JavaScript rendering increases it to 5. Enabling premium proxies on top of JS rendering costs 10 to 25 credits per request. A team that enables both options on all requests will burn through their credit allocation 10 to 25 times faster than one using basic HTML only. The AI data extraction feature, which uses an LLM to extract structured data from HTML, costs additional credits per field extracted. There is no free tier: the trial includes a limited number of credits, and after they are exhausted, a paid plan is required. The Google Search API endpoint costs 5 credits per search and returns SERP results in JSON, but the results are not always identical to what a real browser session returns due to proxy geolocation differences. Rate limiting on the API is not clearly documented for lower-tier plans, and teams that send concurrent requests above the plan limit receive 429 errors without a retry-after header.
Pricing breakdown
The Freelancer plan at per month includes 150,000 credits. The Business plan at per month includes 1,000,000 credits. A team making 10,000 basic HTML requests and 5,000 JavaScript-rendered requests per month consumes 10,000 plus 25,000 equals 35,000 credits, fitting comfortably on the Freelancer plan. The same volume on Apify would cost roughly to in compute units for HTTP-based crawling, making Apify significantly cheaper for high-volume, simple scraping.
Should You Use Zyte or ScrapingBee?
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 ScrapingBee instead if very simple api — fast 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 very simple api — fast 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 ScrapingBee if…
- •Very simple API — fast to integrate
- •Handles JS rendering automatically
- •Good documentation