5 Best Zyte Alternatives in 2026, Priced Per Result

The best Zyte alternatives in 2026 are Scrape.ly, Apify, ScraperAPI, ScrapingBee and Firecrawl. Of these Zyte alternatives, Scrape.ly is the one we recommend: you pay a fixed price per result from 570+ ready-made scrapers, with proxies and browsers already inside that price, and your own Scrapy spiders run on the same account with no units to reserve.

Zyte is a serious company. It maintains Scrapy, the popular open-source Python scraping framework, and its Zyte API handles unblocking and rendering in one call. The reasons teams look elsewhere are about how it bills and how much of the job is still left to you. Below: those reasons, sourced from Zyte's own pages, the criteria that matter, how five alternatives compare, a real run with its exact cost, and how to move a Scrapy project over. Every competitor price was checked on the vendor's own page on 27 October 2026.

Why teams look for Zyte alternatives

Zyte sells two products: Zyte API for fetching pages, and Scrapy Cloud for hosting your spiders. Per its pricing page and Scrapy Cloud page:

• The price depends on the site. "Websites are priced in five tiers." Without a commitment, an HTTP response costs $0.13 per 1,000 on tier 1 (Simple) and $1.27 on tier 5 (Advanced). A browser-rendered response costs $1.01 to $16.08 per 1,000. The hardest browser page costs over 120 times the easiest HTTP one, and you learn a site's tier by entering its URL in Zyte's calculator.
• Lower rates need a monthly commitment. Commitments of $100, $200 and $500 a month bring the rates down, to $0.06 to $0.61 per 1,000 HTTP responses on the $500 commitment.
• Some features cost extra. The pricing page notes that "some advanced features may incur additional usage-based costs."
• The free credit is one-time. New accounts get $5 of Zyte API credit to use within 30 days.
• Hosting is a separate bill. Scrapy Cloud's free Starter plan runs jobs for up to 1 hour, one at a time, and keeps data for 7 days. Professional costs $9 per unit per month, where a unit is 1 GB of memory, 2.5 GB of disk and one concurrent job.
• You still write the scraper. Zyte API returns the page. Turning it into product rows, places or job listings is your spider's work, and keeping that spider working when the site changes is too.

If you'd rather pay for finished rows than for responses, or want hosting, proxies and browsers on one balance, that's where the alternatives come in.

What to look for in Zyte alternatives

1. A price you can read before you run. A fixed price per result, shown on the scraper's page, beats a rate that depends on a tier assigned to each site.
2. Ready-made scrapers for the big sites. Amazon, Google, Google Maps and LinkedIn are where most projects start. A maintained scraper saves you the parsing and the upkeep.
3. A home for your own code. Scrapy, Crawlee or Playwright projects should deploy as they are, with proxies and a browser one setting away.
4. No commitment to get a fair rate. Small and uneven workloads shouldn't pay for a plan sized for their busiest month.
5. A spending cap per job. A maximum charge per run stops a runaway crawl before it becomes a bill.
6. Access for AI agents over MCP, so Claude, Cursor or ChatGPT can run the same scrapers.

Zyte alternatives compared

The sources for every competitor cell are the pricing pages linked in each section below.

1. Scrape.ly: ready-made scrapers priced per result

Scrape.ly is a web data platform with a Store of 570+ ready-made scrapers called Actors, a cloud runtime for your own code, an API with Python and JavaScript clients, managed proxies, a hosted anti-bot browser and an MCP server for AI agents.

What it does better than Zyte for most teams:

• You buy results, not responses. The Amazon Product Scraper charges $1.06 per 1,000 product rows, and the Google Search Scraper $3.30 per 1,000 results pages, both with compute, proxy and browser included. The price is on the Store page before you run, and it doesn't change with how hard the site is to reach.
• Parsing is done. Each Actor returns structured fields (ASIN, price, rating and review count for Amazon; positions, People Also Ask and related searches for Google), and its publisher maintains the parser, not you.
• Your Scrapy project runs too. In a folder with scrapy.cfg, scrapely init adds a main.py wrapper that runs your spiders inside an Actor and pushes every item to a dataset. Crawlee and Apify SDK code runs as well, and most Apify Actors run unchanged.
• Proxies and a browser on the same balance. Runs get managed residential and datacenter proxies with no credentials to manage, and the Scrape.ly browser for sites that block headless Chrome: a hosted Chromium with anti-bot fingerprints and Cloudflare Turnstile solving that Playwright and Puppeteer code connects to without changes.
• A cap on every run. Set a maximum charge and the run stops when it reaches it, Store fees, compute, proxy and browser time included.
• No commitment. The Free plan gives you $5 of credit every month without a card. Starter costs $19 every four weeks, and all of it comes back as usage credit.
• Agents included. The hosted MCP server at https://mcp.scrape.ly lets Claude, Cursor, VS Code and ChatGPT search the Store, run Actors and read results.

Best for: teams that want finished data from popular sites at a fixed price per row, and a place to run their own Scrapy or Crawlee code next to it. The full Scrape.ly vs Zyte comparison covers every feature.

A real run: five Amazon products for under a cent

We reused a run of the Amazon Product Scraper from 26 October 2026: one Amazon search URL for "usb c cable", up to 5 products, no product detail pages.

{
  "categoryOrProductUrls": [{ "url": "https://www.amazon.com/s?k=usb+c+cable" }],
  "maxItemsPerStartUrl": 5,
  "maxSearchPagesPerStartUrl": 1,
  "scrapeProductDetails": false
}

It saved 5 products in 5.5 seconds. Four of them:

The log lines that matter:

2026-10-26T14:33:32.650Z [scrapely.actor] INFO  Starting 1 URL(s), up to 5 results each, without product pages.
2026-10-26T14:33:35.232Z [scrapely.actor] INFO  [Status message]: Finished 1 URL(s): 5 products saved.
2026-10-26T14:33:35.314Z [scrapely.actor] INFO  Run finished in 2.82s of actor code.

At list price the run cost 5 × $0.00106 + $0.0004 per run start = $0.0057. Our account was charged $0.00456 because its plan has a Store discount. The run used datacenter proxy traffic and compute, and both were already inside that price. There was no tier to look up and no parser to write.

2. Apify

Apify is the original Actor platform. Its plans include their price as prepaid usage: Free $5, Starter $19, Scale $199 and Business $999 a month. Store Actors are mostly priced per event, and your own Actors pay for compute units ($0.13 to $0.20 per CU) and proxies. Residential proxy traffic costs $8 per GB on Free and Starter, $7.50 on Scale and $7 on Business, and unused usage credit expires at the end of the billing cycle.

Best for: teams already invested in the Apify Store. Scrape.ly uses the same Actor model and runs most Apify Actors unchanged, so you can bring them with you; see Apify alternatives for the migration.

3. ScraperAPI

ScraperAPI is a scraping API billed in monthly credit plans: Hobby $49 for 100,000 credits, Startup $149 for 1,000,000 and Business $299 for 3,000,000. A standard page costs 1 credit, but "Amazon costs 5, Google and Bing (including their subdomains) cost 25, and LinkedIn costs 30", and sites behind Cloudflare, DataDome or PerimeterX add 10 credits per request. Geotargeting on Hobby and Startup is US and EU only, and the credit balance resets when the subscription renews.

Best for: teams that send steady, high volumes of plain page requests every month. If your work centres on Google or Amazon, check the per-domain credit costs first; our ScraperAPI pricing guide works through them.

4. ScrapingBee

ScrapingBee is a scraping API with monthly plans from Hobby ($19 for 75,000 credits) and Freelance ($49 for 250,000) up to enterprise tiers. Requests start at 1 credit, a request with JavaScript rendering costs 5, and premium proxies cost 10 or 25 depending on rendering. Credits are valid for one month and don't roll over. It also has dedicated APIs for Google, Amazon, Walmart and YouTube.

Best for: fetching known URLs with rendering and screenshots through one simple API. For full crawls or site-specific data at a fixed price per row, a scraper platform does more of the work; see ScrapingBee alternatives.

5. Firecrawl

Firecrawl turns pages into Markdown and JSON for LLMs. Plans run from Free (1,000 credits a month) through Hobby ($19 for 5,000 credits) and Standard ($99 for 100,000) to Scale ($749 for 1,000,000). A scraped or crawled page costs 1 credit, JSON output adds 4 credits per page, and search costs 2 credits per 10 results. Hobby, Standard and Growth credits don't roll over, and a page that returns a 403 or 404 still costs 1 credit.

Best for: AI teams that want web pages as Markdown through fixed endpoints. For crawling to Markdown at a lower price per page, Scrape.ly's Website Content Crawler charges $0.50 per 1,000 pages plus platform usage.

How to switch from Zyte to Scrape.ly

1. Check the Store first. Search the Store for the sites your spiders cover. For Amazon, the Amazon scrapers hub lists the options; for Google results, the Google Search Scraper. Every Actor that fits is one spider you no longer maintain.

2. Move the rest of your Scrapy project. Install the CLI, log in with an API token from Settings → API & Integrations, then wrap and push the project:

npm install -g scrapely-cli
scrapely login
cd my-scrapy-project    # the folder with scrapy.cfg
scrapely init           # adds main.py and the SDK to requirements.txt
scrapely push

Add a Dockerfile if the project has none. The spiders' code stays the same, and their items land in the run's dataset.

3. Replace Zyte API calls with the managed proxy and the browser. Point HTTP requests at the managed residential or datacenter proxy, and turn on the Scrape.ly browser for the Actor if a site blocks headless browsers. The proxy docs show both.

4. Call Store Actors from your pipeline. With the Python client (pip install scrapely-client-python):

import os
from scrapely_client import ScrapelyClient

client = ScrapelyClient(os.environ["SCRAPELY_TOKEN"], api_url="https://api.scrape.ly")

run = client.actor("shelfbright/amazon-product-scraper").call(
    run_input={
        "categoryOrProductUrls": [{"url": "https://www.amazon.com/s?k=usb+c+cable"}],
        "maxItemsPerStartUrl": 5,
        "maxSearchPagesPerStartUrl": 1,
        "scrapeProductDetails": False,
    }
)
for product in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(product["asin"], product["price"]["value"], product["title"])

5. Schedule it and hand it to your agents. Save the input as a task and add a schedule, then add https://mcp.scrape.ly to Claude Code with claude mcp add --transport http scrapely https://mcp.scrape.ly. Your agent can now run the same Actors. Best MCP servers for web scraping covers the setup for other clients.

FAQ

What is the best Zyte alternative?

Scrape.ly. It sells finished data from 570+ ready-made scrapers at a fixed price per result, with proxies and browsers included, and runs your own Scrapy spiders on the same balance. Our five-product Amazon run cost $0.0057 at list price.

Is there a free alternative to Zyte?

Scrape.ly's Free plan gives you $5 of credit every month with no card, which covers about 4,700 Amazon product rows at $1.06 per 1,000. Zyte's $5 credit is a one-time trial that expires after 30 days. Scrapy itself is free and open source if you run it on your own servers.

How much does Zyte cost?

Zyte API costs $0.13 to $1.27 per 1,000 HTTP responses and $1.01 to $16.08 per 1,000 browser-rendered responses without a commitment, depending on the site's tier. Monthly commitments of $100, $200 or $500 lower those rates. Scrapy Cloud Professional costs $9 per unit per month.

Can I run Scrapy spiders on Scrape.ly?

Yes. Run scrapely init in a Scrapy project and it adds a main.py wrapper that runs your spiders inside an Actor and saves every item to the run's dataset. Push it with scrapely push and schedule it like any other Actor.

What do the Zyte alternatives have in common?

All five fetch pages for you and handle proxies. They differ in what you get back: Scrape.ly and Apify return finished rows from ready-made scrapers and host your code, ScraperAPI and ScrapingBee return pages from an API, and Firecrawl returns Markdown for LLMs. For more options, see our list of the best web scraping tools, and if proxy traffic is your biggest cost, our Decodo alternatives list.