8 best ZenRows alternatives in 2026 (pricing, benchmarks)

ZenRows is a scraping API with a good free tier, a $19 entry plan and a credit table that turns a 45,000-credit month into 1,800 requests the moment you switch on JavaScript rendering and premium proxies together. That gap between the headline and the invoice is the reason most people search for an alternative. The second reason is that ZenRows sits in the middle of the market. Some other tool beats it on price per plain request, on success against protected sites, and on how clean the text is when it reaches a model.

Here are eight tools people move to, compared the same way. I run Spider Cloud, so weigh the Spider section accordingly. For each tool you get the pricing ladder as it stood on September 2, 2026, the cost of a 100,000-page month, where it beats ZenRows, where it does not, and who should pick it.

Key takeaways

ZenRows bills 1 credit for a plain request, 5 with JavaScript rendering, 10 with premium proxies and 25 for both, so a $99 Launch plan covers 500,000 plain pages or 20,000 hard ones. Spider Cloud has no multipliers: JavaScript rendering rolls into compute at $0.001 a minute, bandwidth is $1 per GB, and a 100,000-page smart-mode month runs about $8 to $15. ScrapingBee and ScraperAPI are the closest like-for-like APIs and their multipliers are steeper, 75 credits for ScrapingBee stealth and 75 for ScraperAPI ultra-premium rendering. Scrapfly and Zyte are the cheapest at 100,000 plain pages, at $30 and $13. Firecrawl is the pick if the output matters more than the block rate. Bright Data and Oxylabs are the picks when the block rate is the whole problem and the budget is enterprise. On the one independent test that covered them, Scrapeway’s August 2026 run, ZenRows scored 15% success and Scrapfly 98%.

What ZenRows is and why teams look elsewhere

ZenRows is a hosted scraping API. Its Universal Scraper API takes a URL and flags for rendering, proxy class, output format and autoparse, and returns HTML, markdown, plain text, a screenshot or JSON. Around that sit Browser Sessions (a remote browser billed per minute and per GB), a Batch API in beta that accepts up to 100,000 URLs per job with a webhook, and a hosted MCP server at mcp.zenrows.com with a TypeScript MIT repo. SDKs cover Python, Node and Go.

The plan ladder was reorganized in 2026. As of September 2026 the docs list Free ($0, 5,000 credits a month, 5 concurrent), Build at $19, $29 or $39 for 45,000, 80,000 or 120,000 credits (20 concurrent), Launch at $69, $99 or $129 for 250,000, 500,000 or 700,000 credits (50 concurrent), Growth at $199, $279 or $399 for 1.2, 2 or 3 million credits (100 concurrent), Scale at $549, $749 or $999 for 5, 8 or 12.5 million credits (200 concurrent), and Enterprise beyond that. The pricing page shows figures about 17% lower with a “save 17%” label, which I read as the annual-billing equivalent. Only successful requests spend credits, and 404 and 410 count as successful. Paid credits roll over one month; top-ups are limited to four per period.

The credit table is the crux. A standard request is 1 credit, JavaScript rendering is 5, premium proxies are 10, and rendering plus premium is 25. Residential traffic is a flat 25,000 credits per GB on every plan, which is $10.56 per GB on the $19 Build plan and $2 per GB on the top Scale plan. Adaptive stealth mode tries configurations in turn and bills for the one that worked, so a request you priced at 1 credit may bill at 25 once the site pushes back.

Three things send teams elsewhere.

The multipliers make the plan floors misleading. The 5,000 free credits are 200 hard requests. Build B1’s 45,000 credits are 1,800. A team that budgets on the headline number reaches the cap in the first week, buys top-ups, hits the four-top-up limit and upgrades a tier. That is the pattern in most of the ZenRows reviews I have read, and it matches the arithmetic.

The success rate on protected sites is contested. Scrapeway’s August 2026 test, the one independent benchmark that covers ZenRows, measured 15% success at a 2.1-second average, eighth of nine tools. One benchmark is not the whole story and their corpus is deliberately hostile, but 15% is a long way from the marketing.

The output is HTML first. Markdown and plain text exist as formats, and autoparse returns JSON for known sites, but ZenRows was built as a fetch-and-return API and it shows when you feed the result to a model. Tools built for that job return cleaner text with less post-processing.

Comparison table

Cost at 100,000 pages is the cheapest plan whose included units cover 100,000 plain pages in one month, billed monthly, one unit per page, no add-ons. The cost of the same month with JavaScript rendering is given in each tool’s section because that is where the tools diverge. We read every price from the vendor’s own pricing page on September 2, 2026.

How we compared

Every price comes from the vendor’s pricing page or billing docs, fetched on September 2, 2026. Two vendors did not print everything: ScraperAPI’s pricing page returned only navigation on two fetches, so its plan prices come from Thunderbit’s April 2026 review cross-checked against Capterra and ScraperAPI’s own May 2026 release notes, and Firecrawl’s page printed only yearly rates, so the monthly figures are derived from the printed savings. ZenRows’ own pricing page and its docs disagree by 17%, and I have used the docs figures as the monthly price.

Performance figures come from our February 2026 crawl API benchmark (1,000 URLs, methodology published, our own benchmark and not independently verified) and from the Spider Browser dataset, which records a 100% pass rate on 999 URLs across 254 domains in February 2026, same caveat. The independent figures are Scrapeway’s August 14 to 28, 2026 API benchmark, which covers ZenRows, ScrapingBee, ScraperAPI, Scrapfly and Firecrawl, and Proxyway’s August 2026 Oxylabs review. Neither covers Spider, Zyte or Bright Data’s scraping products, so on those there is no third-party success number to quote.

What we could not verify: ZenRows’ top-up price per credit, its Scraper APIs product pricing (the page returned 404), and PDF output. ScraperAPI’s pay-as-you-go overage rate and rollover policy. ScrapingBee’s annual pricing and rollover. Oxylabs’ Starter rate limit. Zyte’s async endpoint and markdown output. None of those appear as facts below.

1. Spider Cloud

Spider Cloud is a research lab for web data quality that ships its work as an API. The scrape endpoint takes a URL and returns HTML, raw bytes, plain text, several markdown flavors or structured JSON; the crawl endpoint does the same for a whole site, sync or async, with webhooks and streaming. The crawler underneath is the MIT-licensed spider-rs/spider project in Rust.

Pricing as of September 2026. There is no credit table. Pay as you go is $1 per GB of content transferred plus $0.001 per CPU minute, bought as credits from $1 upward, and the credits never expire. Failed requests cost nothing. JavaScript rendering rolls into compute with no multiplier and standard proxy rotation is included; residential and ISP pools and AI extraction are priced separately. Our pricing guide puts 10,000 pages in HTTP mode at about $0.80 to $1.00, 100,000 pages in smart mode at about $8 to $15, and a million pages in chrome mode with markdown and metadata at about $80 to $160. Unlimited plans replace metering with concurrency: from 2 units at $40 a month up to 1,538 units, with the per-unit price falling from $20 to $13, and requests over your limit get a 429 with a Retry-After header instead of a charge. The default rate limit is 10,000 core API requests a minute. The pricing page has the calculator.

Where it shines. The absence of multipliers is the whole ZenRows argument in reverse. A rendered page costs the CPU minutes it used, and a page that needed three attempts to load costs the same as one that loaded first time, since failures are free. On throughput, our February 2026 crawl benchmark (our own benchmark, not independently verified) recorded 99.9% success and a corpus average of 74 pages per second on 1,000 URLs. The output is built for models: markdown variants, metadata extraction at $0.0001 a request, and a hosted MCP server that agents can call. Request modes http, smart and chrome let the service pick the cheapest mode that works, which is what ZenRows’ adaptive stealth mode does except that the cheaper mode here is cheaper by CPU seconds rather than by a 25x credit table.

Where it falls short. There are no monthly free credits, so you put at least $1 on the account before you can test, where ZenRows gives 5,000 credits a month indefinitely. Geo-targeting is not available on Unlimited plans yet, and Unlimited uses a smaller flat-rate proxy pool than pay as you go. The community is small; ZenRows has years of tutorials and Stack Overflow answers, Spider has its docs and a GitHub repo. And Spider has no autoparse for named sites, so a JSON schema for an e-commerce page is something you describe to the AI extraction add-on or write yourself.

Who it is for. Teams whose ZenRows bill is dominated by rendered or premium requests, and anyone whose next stop for the scraped page is a vector store or an agent. Our head to head is at Spider vs ZenRows.

2. ScrapingBee

ScrapingBee is the tool ZenRows is most often compared with because the two APIs look alike: one GET with query flags, HTML back, credits that multiply. The differences are in the ladder and the top multiplier.

Pricing as of September 2026. The pricing page lists monthly plans only: Hobby $19 (75,000 credits, 25 concurrent), Freelance $49 (250,000, 50), Startup $99 (1,000,000, 100), Business $249 (3,000,000, 200), Business+ $599 (8,000,000, 400). Hobby and Freelance list JavaScript rendering, premium proxies, geotargeting and screenshots as not included. The trial is 1,000 credits with no card. There is no overage. Only 200, 404 and 410 responses are charged.

Credits per request: 1 plain, 5 with JavaScript, 10 premium proxy, 25 premium plus JavaScript, 75 stealth proxy (JavaScript required). AI extraction adds 5. At 100,000 plain pages the fit is Freelance at $49. At 100,000 rendered pages it is Startup at $99, both because of the 500,000 credits and because the lower plans exclude rendering.

Where it shines. Hobby’s 75,000 plain credits for $19 beat ZenRows’ Build B1 at 45,000 for the same money. The SDKs (Python, Node, CLI) are MIT, there is a hosted MCP server, and outputs include markdown, text, JSON and screenshots. The API has been stable for years and the docs answer most questions.

Where it falls short. The 75-credit stealth tier is three times ZenRows’ 25-credit ceiling, so on the hardest sites ScrapingBee is the more expensive of the two. Rendering is only available from the $99 plan up. The API is synchronous only with no batch mode, where ZenRows has Batch in beta. Scrapeway’s August 2026 test measured 40% success against a 56.8% industry average, which is better than ZenRows’ 15% on the same corpus and still below half.

Who it is for. Teams that liked the ZenRows shape but want a cheaper plain-request tier and mostly scrape unprotected sites. Our head to head is at Spider vs ScrapingBee, and the alternatives hub is at best ScrapingBee alternatives.

3. ScraperAPI

ScraperAPI is the third member of the credit-multiplier family and the one with the most infrastructure around the single request: an async API that takes up to 50,000 URLs per batch, structured-data endpoints for Amazon, Google and Walmart, and DataPipeline for scheduled jobs.

Pricing as of September 2026. ScraperAPI’s pricing page did not render on two fetches, so plan prices here are from Thunderbit’s April 2026 review, cross-checked against Capterra and ScraperAPI’s own release notes; treat them as third-party. Free is 1,000 credits a month with 5 concurrent connections. Hobby $49 (100,000 credits, 20 threads), Startup $149 (1,000,000, 50), Business $299 (3,000,000, 100), Scaling $475 (5,000,000, 200), Professional $975 (10.5 million plus a 250,000 bonus, 300) and Advanced $1,975 (21.5 million plus 500,000, 500). Professional and Advanced were added in May 2026 and are vendor-confirmed. New accounts get 5,000 free requests for the first 7 days. Scaling and above can pay as you go past their quota at a rate the vendor does not print. There is a 7-day refund policy.

The credit table is the widest of the three: 1 for a normal domain, 5 for e-commerce sites, 25 for search engines, 30 for LinkedIn, 10 each for premium, rendering and screenshots, 30 for ultra-premium, 25 for premium plus rendering and 75 for ultra-premium plus rendering. Country, session, device type and output format are free. Only 200 and 404 are charged. At 100,000 plain pages the fit is Hobby at $49. At 100,000 rendered pages it is a million credits on Startup at $149, because rendering is 10 credits here rather than ZenRows’ 5.

Where it shines. ScraperAPI has the most plumbing for large jobs. The async API with webhooks and 72-hour result retention, a DataPipeline that since July 2026 is priced like the standard API, and SDKs for Python, Node, PHP, Ruby and Java. Output formats include text and markdown for LLM use, plus autoparse JSON. There is a remote MCP server and a local one, both Python MIT. The Free plan’s 1,000 monthly credits are usable for testing.

Where it falls short. Rendering at 10 credits doubles ZenRows’ rate, and the category multipliers mean a Google search result page is 25 credits before you add anything. Hobby at $49 is more than twice ZenRows’ entry price for a similar credit count. Scrapeway’s August 2026 test measured 58% success and a 6.3-second average, fifth of nine. The pricing page itself could not be fetched, which is not a good sign for a page that should be the simplest on the site.

Who it is for. Teams that need scheduled, batched scraping of a known list of big-name sites and want parsed JSON from them. Our head to head is at Spider vs ScraperAPI.

4. Scrapfly

Scrapfly is a scraping API with a screenshot API, an extraction API, a crawler and a cloud browser on one credit pool, and it is the vendor with the best independent success number in this list.

Pricing as of September 2026. The pricing page lists Free ($0, 1,000 credits at signup, 5 concurrent), Discovery $30 (200,000 credits, 5 concurrent, hard-capped), Pro $100 (1,000,000, 20), Startup $250 (2,500,000, 50), Enterprise $500 (5,500,000, 100) and Custom from $1,200. Annual billing is two months free. Pro and above continue past the quota on pay as you go in 10,000-credit batches at the plan’s rate; Discovery and Free stop.

Credits: 1 for a datacenter request, 25 for a residential proxy, plus 5 for rendering, with country selection free. The first MB of bandwidth per request is free, then 3 credits per 100 KB on datacenter and 10 on residential. Anti-scraping protection is free when the request is not blocked but may escalate to residential and a browser; a cost_budget parameter caps the spend per request. Failures are not billed unless more than 30% of your traffic fails. At 100,000 plain pages the fit is Discovery at $30. At 100,000 rendered pages it is 600,000 credits on Pro at $100.

Where it shines. Scrapeway’s August 2026 benchmark ranked Scrapfly first of nine at 98% success, against ZenRows’ 15% on the same corpus. The cost budget parameter is the answer to the adaptive-stealth surprise bill: you tell it the most a request may cost and it stops there. The MCP server has nine tools and a hosted option, SDKs cover Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust and Scrapy, and the crawler can write WARC and HAR. Capterra has it at 4.9 of 5 across 238 reviews.

Where it falls short. The residential multiplier is 25, the same ceiling as ZenRows’ premium-plus-rendering, so hard sites cost the same order of magnitude. Discovery’s 5 concurrent requests are a bottleneck for a real crawl. Scrapeway’s 15.3-second average response was the slowest in the test; you trade time for success. Closed source, no self-hosting, and rollover is not stated.

Who it is for. Teams whose ZenRows problem was the block rate rather than the price, and who want a hard per-request spending cap. Our head to head is at Spider vs Scrapfly.

5. Zyte

Zyte, the company behind Scrapy, sells Zyte API on a pay-per-response model where a site’s difficulty tier sets the price. It is the opposite of the credit-multiplier approach: instead of you guessing which flags a site needs, Zyte prices the site.

Pricing as of September 2026. No subscription; $5 of credit in the first month. The pricing page gives rates per 1,000 successful responses by tier and commitment. Pay as you go: HTTP tier 1 $0.13, tier 3 $0.44, tier 5 $1.27; browser tier 1 $1.01, tier 3 $4.02, tier 5 $16.08. A $100 monthly commitment cuts tier 1 HTTP to $0.10, a $500 commitment to $0.06. Usage over the commitment bills at the discounted rate, usage under it is not refunded, and nothing rolls over. Tiers are assigned per site and reviewed quarterly with two weeks’ notice. Screenshots are $0.002 a request and automatic extraction is $0.0004 to $0.0016 per data type.

At 100,000 tier 1 HTTP responses the cost is $13 pay as you go, the lowest in this list. At 100,000 tier 3 browser responses it is $240 on a $200 commitment. Zyte has an estimator in the app so you can look up your sites before you commit.

Where it shines. Successful responses only, and a price you can read off a table for a given site. Scrapy is BSD-3 and scrapy-zyte-api turns an existing Scrapy project into a Zyte client with a settings change. There is no monthly floor on pay as you go and the self-serve ceiling is $2,500 a month before sales gets involved.

Where it falls short. No official MCP server, no official Node client, and markdown output could not be verified, so LLM pipelines need a conversion step. Tier 5 browser at $16.08 per 1,000 is 124 times tier 1 HTTP, and the tier is Zyte’s call. Python is the only first-class SDK.

Who it is for. Scrapy users, and volume scrapers of easy sites who want the lowest price per response. Our head to head is at Spider vs Zyte.

6. Firecrawl

Firecrawl is the tool to look at if the reason you are leaving ZenRows is what the page looks like when it comes back rather than what it costs. It returns markdown by default and its core is AGPL-3.0 TypeScript you can self-host.

Pricing as of September 2026. The pricing page prints yearly rates: Free ($0, 1,000 credits a month, no card), Hobby $16 (5,000 credits), Standard $83 (100,000), Growth $333 (500,000), Scale $599 (1,000,000), Enterprise custom. Monthly rates are not printed today; derived from the printed savings they are about $19, $99, $399 and $749. One credit per page for scrape and crawl, and stealth proxy requests are also 1 credit. JSON extraction adds 4 credits per page. Credits do not roll over by default. Overage reloads in $5 batches.

At 100,000 plain pages the fit is Standard at $83 yearly or about $99 monthly, which is more than ZenRows’ $39. There is no separate rendering charge, so at 100,000 rendered pages Firecrawl is still $83 to $99 where ZenRows is $99 and ScraperAPI is $149.

Where it shines. The output is the reason to pick it. Clean markdown, an MIT MCP server, SDKs in nine languages, async crawls with webhooks, and a self-host path. The free tier is 1,000 credits a month with no card. Stealth requests at 1 credit means the multiplier story does not exist here.

Where it falls short. The base price is higher. Hobby’s 5,000 credits do not cover a 10,000-page month, and Standard at $83 is double ZenRows’ price for 100,000 plain pages. The self-hosted build omits the anti-bot engine, so hard sites stay in the cloud. In our February 2026 benchmark (our own benchmark, not independently verified) Firecrawl finished at 95.3% success and 16 pages per second. Scrapeway’s August 2026 test measured 64%, fourth of nine.

Who it is for. Teams building for LLMs who want markdown and a self-host option and are under a million pages a month. Our head to head is at Spider vs Firecrawl, with the hub at best Firecrawl alternatives.

7. Bright Data

Bright Data sells scraping on top of the largest residential proxy network in the business. Web Unlocker is the product that lines up against ZenRows’ premium-proxy requests.

Pricing as of September 2026. Every managed product has a free tier of 5,000 units a month with no card, and a first deposit is matched up to $500. Web Unlocker is $1.50 per 1,000 requests pay as you go, or $499 a month for 383,000 requests with more at $1.30 per 1,000. You pay only for successes. Scraping Browser is $8 per GB pay as you go. Residential proxies are $8 per GB pay as you go, with committed plans at $499, $999 and $1,999 a month.

At 100,000 Web Unlocker requests the cost is $150, nearly four times ZenRows’ $39 for plain pages. Compare it with the hard end of ZenRows’ table instead: 100,000 rendered premium requests are 2.5 million credits, which needs a Growth G3 plan at $399. On that workload Bright Data is the cheaper of the two.

Where it shines. Bright Data gets through the hardest sites and only bills when it does. The network claims 400 million residential IPs in 195 countries. The MIT MCP server carries 69 tools and the same free 5,000 requests. Web Scraper API adds maintained scrapers for named sites, which ZenRows’ autoparse only partly covers.

Where it falls short. $1.50 per 1,000 is roughly ten times the cheapest hosted rates in this list for easy pages. Web Unlocker returns static content; a browser means the per-GB product. No open source core, no self-hosting, markdown not in the Unlocker docs, and the sales process is enterprise-shaped.

Who it is for. Teams whose ZenRows requests were all 25-credit requests anyway and whose targets are the ones ZenRows could not get through. Our head to head is at Spider vs Bright Data.

8. Oxylabs

Oxylabs offers a Web Scraper API billed per successful result, with parsers for Amazon and Google and a large residential pool.

Pricing as of September 2026. The Web Scraper API pricing page is monthly only. A free trial covers up to 2,000 results with no card. Micro is $49 a month for up to 98,000 results, Starter $99 for up to 220,000, Business $999 for up to 3.33 million, and Custom+ from $0.25 per 1,000. Per 1,000 on Micro: $0.50 Amazon, $1.00 Google, $1.15 other sites, $1.35 with JavaScript rendering, falling to $0.30, $0.60, $0.75 and $1.00 on Business. Results with 2xx or 4xx status are billed. Residential proxies start at $30 for 5 GB.

At 100,000 other-site results the fit is Starter at $99 plus an $11 top-up, so $110. Rendering adds about 17% rather than a multiple, which is the one place the model is friendlier than ZenRows’.

Where it shines. Predictable per-result pricing, ready-made parsers for the big targets, push-pull async with callbacks for batches, and a residential pool the vendor puts at 175 million IPs. Proxyway’s August 2026 review scored it 9.3 of 10 with 99.93% residential success. The MCP server is MIT with a hosted endpoint.

Where it falls short. The minimums hurt at low volume. Micro’s $49 covers $11.50 of usage at 10,000 pages, and Business’s $999 floor is above the $750 a million results would cost at its own rate. No open source, no self-hosting, SDKs only in Python and Go, screenshot output unverified, Starter’s rate limit unprinted. Per-1,000 rates are about ten times the cheapest APIs here.

Who it is for. E-commerce and search teams at a volume where a $999 floor does not matter and parsed JSON does. Our head to head is at Spider vs Oxylabs.

Reasons to consider a ZenRows alternative

Your requests are mostly rendered or premium. At 25 credits each, the $99 Launch L2 plan covers 20,000 of them. Spider bills rendering as CPU minutes, Firecrawl bills stealth at 1 credit, Zyte and Oxylabs price the site rather than the flags, and Bright Data bills per success. Compute the same month on each and the ZenRows number is usually the outlier.

You are hitting the top-up limit. Four top-ups per period and then a forced tier change is a growth tax. Spider credits are bought in any amount and never expire; Scrapfly Pro and ScraperAPI Scaling continue past quota on pay as you go; Zyte and Bright Data have no quota to hit.

The block rate is not what you were sold. Scrapeway’s August 2026 run is one test on one corpus, but 15% against Scrapfly’s 98% is the kind of gap that survives a change of methodology. Try your own hard URLs on two tools before you renew.

You are feeding an LLM. ZenRows returns markdown as a format option. Spider and Firecrawl return it as the product, with the metadata and the MCP server that go with it.

You want to read the crawler. ZenRows is closed. Spider’s crawler is MIT, Firecrawl’s core is AGPL, Scrapy is BSD-3.

How to choose by workload

Rendered pages at volume. Spider smart or chrome mode, where rendering costs CPU minutes, or Firecrawl, where it costs nothing extra. Check the crawl endpoint docs for the mode parameter and the 1,000-URL benchmark for what the two do on a mixed corpus.

Plain pages at volume. Zyte tier 1 at $13 per 100,000, Scrapfly Discovery at $30, ZenRows Build B3 at $39, ScrapingBee Freelance at $49, ScraperAPI Hobby at $49, Spider smart mode at about $8 to $15. These are within a factor of four of each other, so choose on output format and concurrency rather than price.

Protected sites. Scrapfly with a cost budget, Bright Data Web Unlocker, or Oxylabs. Spider’s unblocker and residential pools cover this too and are priced separately from the base rate. Whichever you pick, the independent success numbers are from one August 2026 test and your sites will differ.

Search engines and marketplaces. Oxylabs’ Amazon and Google parsers, ScraperAPI’s structured-data endpoints, or Bright Data’s Web Scraper API, all of which return JSON without a schema from you. Spider’s search endpoint covers general web search.

Batch jobs with webhooks. ScraperAPI’s async API at 50,000 URLs a batch, ZenRows’ own Batch beta at 100,000, Firecrawl crawls, or Spider’s async crawl with streaming.

Agents and MCP. Every tool here except Zyte ships an MCP server. Spider’s is at /mcp/; Bright Data’s has the most tools, Scrapfly’s has nine, Firecrawl’s and ScraperAPI’s are MIT.

ZenRows is a reasonable API for plain pages on a small budget, and an expensive one for rendered pages on protected sites, which is the workload most people grow into. If that is where you are, take 100 of your real URLs and run them through two tools from this list. The Spider playground will show you the markdown for any of them, and the compare page keeps the table above current as vendors move their ladders.