Zyte (Scrapy Cloud) Alternatives — Better Web Scraping Platform

Zyte has been a fixture in web scraping since the Scrapy framework days. Their Scrapy Cloud platform and Zyte API offer enterprise-grade infrastructure — ban handling, headless browsers, proxy rotation — but the pricing model is complex and per-request costs climb quickly as you add features.

If you're evaluating Zyte alternatives, you likely need simpler pricing, better developer experience, or more competitive rates for AI-ready content extraction.

Key Takeaways

• Zyte charges $0.06-$1.27 per 1,000 HTTP responses depending on commitment level and target site difficulty
• Browser rendering pushes costs to $0.48-$16.08 per 1,000 responses — expensive for AI pipelines
• Several alternatives offer simpler per-page pricing with markdown output built-in
• SearchHive ScrapeForge delivers LLM-optimized output at roughly 60% lower cost than Zyte with rendering
• Open-source Scrapy remains viable if you manage your own infrastructure

1. SearchHive ScrapeForge

Best for: AI teams that need clean markdown output without per-feature cost stacking.

Zyte's pricing tiers depend on the target website's difficulty, and adding browser rendering roughly 10x the cost. SearchHive's ScrapeForge includes rendering, proxy rotation, and anti-detection in a single per-page price.

Pricing: Starts at $0.001/page including JavaScript rendering. At 500K pages/month, volume pricing drops below $0.0005/page.

Compare that to Zyte: 500K pages with rendering at their lowest tier ($500 commitment) costs $240-$768 — and that's before proxy costs, which Zyte adds on top. SearchHive includes everything in one price.

import requests

API_KEY = "your-searchhive-key"

# Scrape a product page for an AI dataset
result = requests.post(
    "https://api.searchhive.dev/v1/scrape",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {API_KEY}"},
    json={
        "url": "https://store.example.com/product/12345",
        "format": "markdown",
        "remove_boilerplate": True,
        "wait_for": ".product-price"  # Wait for dynamic content
    }
)

data = result.json()
# Clean markdown with product info, no nav/footer noise
print(data["content"])

/blog/searchhive-scrapeforge-api-guide

2. Apify Web Scraper + Crawlee

Best for: Teams wanting a managed Scrapy-like experience without Zyte lock-in.

Apify provides a cloud platform for running crawlers. Their Web Scraper actor handles rendering, scheduling, and data storage. Crawlee (open-source) is their Scrapy alternative for local development.

Pricing: Free: $5/month compute credit. Paid plans from $49/month. Costs vary by actor complexity — typically $0.001-0.005 per page.

The actor marketplace is a strength — pre-built scrapers for common sites. But the shared credit model makes cost prediction harder than simple per-page pricing. Output is typically JSON, not markdown.

3. ScraperAPI

Best for: Simple HTML fetching with proxy and CAPTCHA handling.

ScraperAPI rotates proxies and handles CAPTCHAs for you. Send a request, get HTML back. Minimal abstraction.

Pricing: Free: 1,000 requests. Startup: $49/month for 100,000 requests. Business: $149/month for 500,000 requests. Enterprise: custom.

Simple and effective for raw HTML extraction. No markdown conversion, no LLM optimization. You pay per request regardless of success, which can waste budget on blocked or error pages.

4. ScrapingBee

Best for: Moderate-volume scraping with built-in proxy management.

ScrapingBee provides headless Chrome rendering with proxy rotation. Returns raw HTML.

Pricing: Free: 1,000 credits. Startup: $49/month for 150,000 credits. Business: $99/month for 500,000 credits.

Per-credit costs are reasonable, but like ScraperAPI, you're paying per request (not per successful extraction) and handling output parsing yourself. Premium proxies cost extra credits.

5. Firecrawl

Best for: Markdown-first scraping with a credit-based model.

Firecrawl converts pages to markdown and offers crawl + map + extract endpoints. Open-source core with managed cloud.

Pricing: Free: 500 credits (one-time). Hobby: $16/month for 3,000 credits. Standard: $83/month for 100,000 credits. Growth: $333/month for 500,000 credits.

Better output format for AI than Zyte but the credit system and mid-tier concurrency limits (50 requests on Standard) can bottleneck production pipelines.

6. Oxylabs Web Scraper API

Best for: Enterprise-scale scraping with compliance features.

Oxylabs provides a full scraping infrastructure including proxies, rendering, and data parsing. SOC 2 compliant with GDPR features.

Pricing: Pay-as-you-go or monthly commitments. Pricing varies by target — typically $0.50-$3.00 per 1,000 requests for standard pages. Real-time Crawler with rendering is significantly more.

Enterprise-focused with strong compliance. But pricing is opaque — you need to contact sales for specific rates. Overkill for small-to-mid teams.

7. Colly + Custom Infrastructure

Best for: Go developers who want full control with zero vendor lock-in.

Colly is a Go framework for web scraping. Pair it with your own proxy provider and rendering pipeline.

Pricing: Colly itself is free (MIT licensed). You pay for proxies ($1-5/GB residential) and hosting.

Maximum control, minimum abstraction. You handle everything — rendering, parsing, markdown conversion, proxy management. Fast and efficient in Go, but significant engineering investment to match what managed APIs provide out of the box.

Comparison Table

Recommendation

Zyte's strength is enterprise compliance and Scrapy ecosystem integration. If you're already running Scrapy spiders at scale and need SOC 2 certification, Zyte is a reasonable choice.

For most teams building AI applications, Zyte's per-feature cost stacking (rendering + proxies + CAPTCHA = separate charges) makes budgeting unpredictable. SearchHive ScrapeForge bundles everything into one per-page price and delivers markdown output ready for embeddings — no parsing pipeline required. At scale, the cost difference is significant.

Start with the free tier and compare output quality on your own target sites before committing.

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Last updated: April 2026. Pricing verified from competitor websites.