Zyte alternative: Web Scraper vs Zyte
Zyte API prices each successful response by how hard the target is, against a monthly commitment. Web Scraper Cloud runs selector-based sitemaps on a plan priced by concurrent scraping capacity, with unlimited URL credits whatever the target.
Reviewed October 2026 Every claim below links to a current vendor page.
You want a predictable monthly fee and structured rows without writing a spider or modeling per-target rates.
You run Scrapy in production, want per-request control, and can model spend across website difficulty tiers.
Web Scraper vs Zyte: features and pricing
Compare how Web Scraper and Zyte handle setup, Cloud automation, integrations, proxies, and scaling. Web Scraper Scale is compared with Zyte Standard with commitment, the highest self-service plan each vendor prices publicly.
| CAPABILITY | Web Scraper Scale, $200 per month | Zyte Standard with commitment, $500 per month |
|---|---|---|
| Setup and creation | ||
| Where scrapers are built | Visual sitemap builder in a browser extension Free extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, with no code or desktop application required. | API calls or Scrapy spiders Requests come from your own code, or from spiders hosted on Scrapy Cloud. |
| Time to a working scraper | Faster than writing code Point at the data on the live page, or let the AI Sitemap Wizard map it, then check the result in the data preview. | Spider code, or automatic extraction Custom spiders are written and tested in Python; automatic extraction returns fields for supported page types. |
| Skills needed | Browser skills No programming language or HTML parsing to learn. | Programming Python and Scrapy for spiders, or HTTP requests to Zyte API. |
| AI-assisted setup | AI Sitemap Wizard Maps repeated listing data, detects pagination and infinite scrolling, and follows item links to collect fields from detail pages. | Automatic extraction You choose a data type such as product, article, or job posting, and AI returns its fields. |
| Manual selector control | Advanced Sitemap Builder Point and click, AI selector generation for listing and detail pages, and 10+ selector types for data, navigation, and clicks. | Your own spider Extraction logic lives in Scrapy or your own code, with automatic extraction available per request. |
| Logins and site setup | Website State Setup Signs in or sets location, language, or currency before scraping, only when that state is missing, with passwords encrypted in Cloud. | Browser actions and sessions via API Your code types credentials and clicks; sessions reuse cookies and location settings. |
| Ready-made starting points | Sitemap Marketplace Ready-made sitemaps maintained by Web Scraper, available at no additional cost. | Scrapy spider templates Projects start from open-source Scrapy code you deploy to Scrapy Cloud. |
| When a website changes | Update a selector Fix the sitemap by point and click and sync it to Cloud, with nothing to redeploy. | Patch your spider Selector changes go through your spider code and a redeploy; automatic extraction adapts on its own. |
| Cloud automation | ||
| Cloud execution | Web Scraper Cloud Runs sitemaps created in the Web Scraper extension remotely after sync or import. | Zyte API and Scrapy Cloud Requests run on Zyte infrastructure; Scrapy Cloud hosts spiders. |
| Queue, link following, and storage | Built into every job Cloud queues URLs, follows links and pagination, retries failed pages, and keeps results for 60 days. | Scrapy code and Scrapy Cloud Scrapy queues and follows links in your spider code, and Scrapy Cloud, a separate product, stores items for 7 days free or 120 days on paid units. |
| Scheduling | Daily, interval, and custom CRON Intervals as short as 1 minute, with a selectable time zone and driver, proxy, and priority set per schedule. | Periodic jobs on Scrapy Cloud Spiders hosted on Scrapy Cloud, a separate subscription, can run on a schedule; Zyte API requests are scheduled from your own code. |
| Rendering and execution modes | Full JS and Fast drivers Full JS loads pages in a full browser environment; Fast skips page JavaScript to scrape faster. | Browser rendering per request Browser requests cost about 8 to 13 times a plain HTTP fetch in the same difficulty tier. |
| Retry behavior | Automatic retries of empty or failed pages Retries use a different proxy IP and browser fingerprint, and do not consume URL credits. CAPTCHAs and bot check pages are solved automatically. | Charged on success only Failed responses are not billed. |
| Concurrency model | Concurrent scrapers Starts at 2 concurrent scrapers and scales with no set ceiling; add capacity at any time. A single job can expand to up to 5 concurrent scrapers. | Rate limited per minute 3,000 requests per minute by default, with unlimited concurrency. |
| Data and integrations | ||
| Data cleaning | Parser, with no code Regex, replace, HTML stripping, virtual columns, and timestamp conversion, previewed on sample records and applied in Cloud. | LLM normalization via API Custom attributes reshape values from a schema in each request, billed per token. |
| Data quality checks | Thresholds on every job Minimum records, maximum failed or empty pages, and minimum filled fields, with suggested values from a previous run. | Not in Zyte API Checks are Python code written with Spidermon, an open-source Scrapy extension. |
| API | Cloud API with an OpenAPI description Manage sitemaps, jobs, and schedules, and download results, with code examples for every programming language. | The product is the API A single endpoint returns the page, with automatic extraction available. |
| Webhooks | Job status webhooks Sent when a job finishes, stops, or fails, with job and sitemap IDs and an optional custom ID, and retried if your endpoint does not respond. | None No webhooks are documented. |
| Data export formats | CSV, XLSX, JSON Each scraping job's data can be downloaded in all three formats. | HTML and JSON Zyte API returns raw or browser-rendered HTML and extracted data as JSON; Scrapy Cloud, a separate product, downloads items as CSV, JSON, JSON Lines, or XML. |
| Export integrations | Google Sheets, Google Drive, Dropbox, S3, Google Cloud, Azure The complete dataset is sent after each job finishes. | None for Zyte API Scrapy feed exports, set in code or spider settings, send items to S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure, Google Sheets, Google Drive, Dropbox, FTP, or BigQuery. |
| Notifications | Email and in-app alerts Alerts when a job fails or misses its data quality thresholds, with email and in-app channels set per alert type. | Spending alerts Emails when spend passes a threshold for the account, a domain, or an API key; no job alerts are documented for Zyte API. |
| Image and file handling | Image export Downloads images during the scraping job using the Image selector and delivers the files to Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage. | Through Scrapy, set up in code Scrapy's Images Pipeline can store images in S3 or Google Cloud Storage; Zyte API returns one file per request. |
| Scale and pricing | ||
| Plan compared | Scale, $200 per month $2,000 per year billed annually, $167 per month. | Standard with commitment, $500 per month The highest published monthly commitment, with a $2,500 spending limit. |
| What the plan fee buys | Unlimited URL credits The fee buys concurrent scraping capacity, and page volume does not change it. | A spend commitment The fee is a floor you draw down, not an allowance of pages. |
| Cost per 1,000 URLs no JS, DC proxies | From $0.03 Fast driver on the included datacenter proxies; two scrapers at $200 per month cover about 4.3M URLs. | $0.06 Plain HTTP responses on the easiest of Zyte's five difficulty tiers; the hardest costs $0.61. |
| Cost per 1,000 URLs JS, DC proxies | From $0.05 Full JS driver on the included datacenter proxies; two scrapers at $200 per month cover about 2.2M URLs. | $0.48 Browser-rendered responses on the easiest tier; harder websites move up to pricier tiers. |
| Cost per 1,000 URLs JS, Residential proxies | From $0.681 Full JS driver plus residential traffic, sold separately at $2.50 per GB. | $7.68 Browser-rendered responses on the hardest tier, where protected websites land; Zyte picks the proxy type itself and includes it in the price. |
| Unused capacity | No credit ceiling Unlimited URL credits leave no balance to forfeit at the end of a cycle. | Commitment is not refunded Spending less than the committed amount does not carry forward. |
| Included datacenter proxies | US, GB, and DE datacenter proxies Included at no additional cost. | Included in the request price Proxy selection is handled by the API. |
| Residential proxies | Available at $2.50 per GB In 47 locations, billed on bandwidth used. | Included in the tier price Zyte uses residential IPs when a website needs them, within the tier price; requesting them yourself has its own rates plus per-GB costs and needs business verification. |
| Third-party fees | Marketplace sitemaps at no extra cost They run on your own plan, with no separate per-result charge. | None published No marketplace or third-party fees. |
| Cloud data retention | 60 days Scraped data stays available to download from Cloud for that period. | Not confirmed in public docs No retention period is published for API responses. |
1 Proxy traffic is sold separately, so the price is calculated based on a 250 KB page size.
Reasons to choose Web Scraper
No parser to write or maintain
Selectors are defined visually on the live page, or generated by the AI Sitemap Wizard, and return named columns, so nothing downstream has to turn HTML into a table.
Web Scraper extensionScheduling and delivery are built in
Daily, interval, and custom CRON schedules run in Cloud, the finished dataset goes to Google Sheets, Google Drive, Dropbox, S3, Google Cloud, or Azure, and webhooks report when each job ends.
SchedulerOne plan, one line item
Scraping, scheduling, datacenter proxies, parsing, and delivery sit inside the Cloud plan, with no separate proxy bill, no per-request multiplier, and no charge for retrying failed pages.
Web Scraper pricingWeb Scraper Scale vs Zyte Standard with commitment
Each side is shown at its highest self-service plan with published pricing.
Web Scraper Cloud · Scale
$200 per month
Or $2,000 per year billed annually, $167 per month
- Capacity
- Unlimited URL credits
- Concurrency
- Starts at 2 concurrent scrapers, scales with no set ceiling; a single job can use up to 5
- Proxies
- US, GB, and DE datacenter proxies included; residential in 47 locations at $2.50 per GB
- Plan limitation
- Capacity grows by adding concurrent scrapers, at a lower price per scraper as you add more; residential proxy traffic is billed on usage
- Cost per 1,000 URLs no JS, DC proxies
- From $0.03
- Cost per 1,000 URLs JS, DC proxies
- From $0.05
- Cost per 1,000 URLs JS, Residential proxies
- From $0.681
Zyte · Standard with commitment
$500 per month
Billed monthly; usage above the commitment is charged at the same rates up to a $2,500 spending limit.
- Capacity
- A spend commitment drawn down per successful response
- Concurrency
- 3,000 requests per minute by default, unlimited concurrency
- Proxies
- Included in the per-request price
- Plan limitation
- The rate per request depends on website difficulty, and unspent commitment is not returned
- Cost per 1,000 URLs no JS, DC proxies
- $0.06
- Cost per 1,000 URLs JS, DC proxies
- $0.48
- Cost per 1,000 URLs JS, Residential proxies
- $7.68
The two prices do not buy the same unit
Zyte prices each successful response by website difficulty across five tiers, so the same volume costs very differently depending on the target, and browser rendering costs several times a plain fetch. Web Scraper charges for concurrent scraping capacity, with unlimited URL credits regardless of target.
- The Zyte figures are for the compared commitment: the easiest difficulty tier for plain and rendered pages, and the hardest tier for pages that need residential proxies.
- Zyte returns page content or automatic extraction, so parser work is not counted in either figure.
- 1 Proxy traffic is sold separately, so the price is calculated based on a 250 KB page size.
Zyte comes from the team behind Scrapy, so a Python team already writing spiders can host them in Scrapy Cloud and send requests through Zyte API, which bills per successful response.
Switching from Zyte
Do we still write a spider?
No. A sitemap is built in the browser extension and returns named columns, so there is no crawler code to deploy or maintain.
How does the bill change?
A per-request rate that varies by target difficulty, against a monthly commitment, is replaced by a fixed capacity plan with unlimited URL credits.
Are we billed for failures?
Retries of empty or failed pages use a different proxy IP and browser fingerprint, and consume no URL credits on Web Scraper Cloud.
How does data reach our systems?
Results are retrieved through the API or delivered to Google Sheets, Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure after each job. Webhook notifications report job status and identifiers.
See it applied to your use case
Compare Web Scraper with other tools
Most teams shortlist two or three tools. These pages cover the same capabilities and plan tiers.
Try it on the website you want to scrape
Use the 7-day free trial, with no credit card required, to run Web Scraper Cloud on the website you need data from.
This comparison reflects publicly available information and our understanding of the products as of October 2026. Features, pricing, and other details may change over time, so we recommend verifying current information directly with each provider before making a decision. All product names, trademarks, logos, and brands belong to their respective owners and are referenced solely for identification and comparison purposes. No affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement is implied.