Last updated: August 21, 2026. Benchmark figures come from the August 11, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark. Pricing was checked against each vendor's published pages on August 21, 2026.
The best ZenRows alternatives in 2026 are String, Scrapfly, Oxylabs, Firecrawl, ScraperAPI, and Crawl4AI. String is the best web scraping API for difficult, bot-protected websites: it passed 97.0% of requests across 99 real targets in the August 2026 Web Data Frontier Benchmark, against ZenRows' 34.3%. Scrapfly is the closest rival on success rate. Oxylabs is best when you want a large proxy network with published per-domain rates. Firecrawl is best for crawl-to-content on easy pages. ScraperAPI is best for cheap volume on easy pages. Crawl4AI is best for free self-hosting. This page compares all seven tools, ZenRows included, on benchmark success, latency, pricing at $100 a month, and MCP support.
ZenRows sells itself on getting through anti-bot walls, and it does clear some of them. The benchmark result is still the lowest of the six hosted APIs on this page. ZenRows returned no content at all on 58 of 99 sites, including LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, Airbnb, GitHub, and Ticketmaster. String returned content on 56 of those same 58. The full leaderboard and per-site results are in the August 2026 benchmark post and the public repository.
String was also faster: a 9.98 second latency score against ZenRows' 17.60. ZenRows has no plan at $100 a month; its Launch plan is $57 and its Growth plan is $165. String Growth is $100 and bills $0.20 per 1,000 successful plain fetches, up to $4.00 per 1,000 for browser requests on premium proxies. Pricing models differ enough across these vendors that no single number ranks them, and the pricing section below explains why.
The right alternative still depends on the job:
| Provider | Best for | Benchmark success | Latency score | What $100 a month buys (per 1,000) | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | Hard, bot-protected targets that have to return content reliably | 97.0% | 9.98s | Growth, $100: $0.20 for a plain fetch; $1.00 to $2.00 with a browser or a premium proxy; $4.00 with both. Blocked requests are free | No crawl-to-content endpoint and no self-hosting |
| ZenRows | Retail, marketplace, and news pages at moderate protection levels | 34.3% | 17.60s | No plan at $100. Launch, $57: $0.23 for a standard page, $5.70 for a protected one. Growth, $165: $0.14 and $3.44 | A protected page costs 25 credits against a standard page's 1, and SOC 2, ISO 27001, and a DPA are Enterprise-tier items |
| Scrapfly | The second-highest benchmark result with predictable credit weights | 82.0% | 18.35s | Pro, $100: $0.10 for an HTTP scrape, $0.50 with ASP or JS, $2.50 with residential proxies | Credits do not roll over, and a full-page screenshot costs 60 credits |
| Firecrawl | Crawl-to-content, change monitoring, and document parsing on easy pages | 78.6% | 9.21s | Standard, $99 billed monthly: 100,000 credits, or $0.99 per 1,000 pages at full use, easy or protected alike | Credits are charged on 403 and 404 responses, and self-serve credits do not roll over |
| Oxylabs | A large proxy network with per-domain rates published before you buy | 76.8% | 14.67s | Starter, $99: $1.10 per 1,000 results, $1.30 with JavaScript rendering, $0.45 for Amazon and $0.90 for Google | Returned nothing on 18 of 99 sites, clustered in ticketing, reviews, and real estate |
| ScraperAPI | Cheap volume on easy targets | 64.2% | 13.65s | No $100 tier. Hobby, $49: $0.49 per 1,000 standard pages; Startup, $149: $0.15. On Hobby, a Cloudflare-protected page is $5.39 and LinkedIn is $14.70 | Per-site credit multipliers reach 30x, and anti-bot bypass adds 10 credits per request |
| Crawl4AI | Free, self-hosted crawling when you can run your own proxy and anti-bot infrastructure | Not tested; it is a library rather than a hosted provider | Not tested | $0 for the software; you pay for proxies, servers, captcha solving, and engineering time | You own the anti-bot problem |
Benchmark figures come from the August 11, 2026 Web Data Frontier Benchmark run, with 495 requests per provider. The latency score is failure-aware: per target, the p75 of a provider's successful attempts; a provider with no successful attempt on a target inherits the p75 of the providers that succeeded. Pricing comes from each vendor's published pages, checked August 21, 2026, at the plan closest to $100 per month billed monthly.
ZenRows is a competent product with a clear shape: one endpoint, four primitives, 55 million residential IPs across 190+ countries, an official MCP server, and an Adaptive Stealth Mode that picks the cheapest configuration that works. The documentation is good.
The benchmark is where the problem shows. ZenRows passed 170 of 495 requests, 34.3%, thirteenth of fifteen providers, and returned nothing on 58 of 99 sites across five attempts each.
The failures are not confined to the hardest corners of the web. ZenRows returned nothing on GitHub, arXiv, Bing, CoinMarketCap, TradingView, Rightmove, and YouTube, nor on any of the eight social platforms, the four ticketing sites, or the three developer and research sites in the suite. Its worst named anti-bot column is Cloudflare at 29.3%, the protection its own marketing addresses most often. The section on which sites ZenRows fails on has the full comparison against the field.
ZenRows bills only successful requests, and that is a genuinely good rule. Failed attempts are not charged. The cost problem is elsewhere.
A standard request costs 1 credit. Adding JavaScript rendering costs 5. Adding premium proxies costs 10. Doing both, which is what a protected page needs, costs 25. ZenRows' own troubleshooting guide tells you to enable both flags when a page is blocked, so the 25-credit path is the prescribed answer to the case you bought the product for.
That makes the plan headline hard to translate. Launch is $57 for 250,000 credits, which reads as $0.23 per 1,000 pages. On protected pages it is $5.70 per 1,000. Growth is $165 for 1.2 million credits, or $0.14 and $3.44 for the same two cases.
There is no plan at $100. Launch is $57 and Growth is $165, so a team at that budget either underbuys or nearly doubles it. ZenRows' pricing page and its docs also disagree on the first paid tier: the pricing page lists Build at $16 a month, and the Fetch reference says $19. We quote the pricing page.
The August Web Data Frontier Benchmark covered 99 real sites, 15 providers, five attempts per site, and 7,425 live requests. Targets included Amazon, Walmart, Zillow, Ticketmaster, and other websites protected by major anti-bot systems.
Every provider ran through a public adapter using its strongest general anti-bot mode. A request passed only when the response included a marker from the real page. A captcha interstitial returning HTTP 200 still counted as a failure.
For ZenRows that meant premium_proxy: true and js_render: true, its 25-credit configuration and the same pair its own troubleshooting guide prescribes for a blocked page. The adapter is public. It does not use Adaptive Stealth Mode, which starts cheaper and escalates to that same pair, so mode=auto would change what a run costs rather than the ceiling on what it can reach.
Disclosure: String built the benchmark and sells the product that ranked first.
The harness, targets, pass criteria, and provider configurations are public on GitHub. Providers can inspect their adapters, contest results, or submit changes. Firecrawl did exactly that: one of its engineers opened a pull request, the change was merged, and the August results use the subsequent rerun. The original benchmark post explains the pass criteria and why the latency score is failure-aware.
String's Web Access API makes one HTTP call against any URL. Proxy rotation, anti-bot handling, captcha solving, and JavaScript rendering happen behind the endpoint. There is no proxy pool to configure and no credit weight to reason about before you send a request.
Pricing. Growth costs $100 per month. Plain fetches on a standard proxy cost $0.20 per 1,000. Premium-proxy fetches cost $2.00, browser requests on a standard proxy cost $1.00, and browser requests on a premium proxy cost $4.00. Starter costs $20 per month and bills $0.30, $3.00, $1.50, and $6.00 for those four paths. The first 5,000 requests are free, blocked requests are not billed, and credits roll over.
Benchmark success. String passed 480 of 495 requests, or 97.0%, the highest result among fifteen providers. It passed 100% against Cloudflare, Kasada, and Fastly; 98.0% against Akamai; 97.9% against DataDome; 96.7% against AWS WAF; and 88.9% against PerimeterX. It returned content on all five attempts for 92 sites, partial content for five, and no content for two.
Latency. 9.98 seconds, second in the benchmark, against ZenRows' 17.60 seconds.
Strengths.
Weaknesses.
String's MCP server is listed on the official registry as ai.usestring/web-access. It is available at https://mcp.usestring.ai/v1/mcp or locally through npm i @usestring/mcp, authenticated with STRING_AI_API_KEY. It exposes fetch, search, and sitemap tools using the same infrastructure and pricing as direct API calls.
ZenRows also publishes an official MCP server, hosted at https://mcp.zenrows.com/mcp and locally through @zenrows/mcp. It is open source and free to connect, and it exposes browser tools that String's does not. MCP support is not the deciding difference here.
POST https://request.usestring.ai/v1/fetch
{"url":"https://www.example.com/the-page-that-blocks-you"}
Markdown returns by default. The first 5,000 requests are free, and blocked requests are not billed. Point it at the list that ZenRows is failing on and compare the two.
Scrapfly runs one API key across five products, with an asp=True flag that turns on anti-scraping protection bypass and manages browsers, proxies, and retries behind it.
Pricing. Pro costs $100 a month for 1,000,000 credits, or $0.10 per 1,000 credits. An HTTP scrape on a datacenter IP is 1 credit, so $0.10 per 1,000 pages. Adding JS rendering or ASP mode costs 5 credits, or $0.50. Adding residential proxies costs 25 credits, or $2.50. Failed requests are never charged. Credits do not roll over, and Pro adds pay-as-you-go overflow at $3.50 per 10,000.
Benchmark success. 406 of 495, or 82.0%, second of fifteen. Its adapter ran with asp: true and render_js: false, so that number is an ASP result without browser rendering. Returned nothing on 8 sites.
Latency. 18.35 seconds, slightly slower than ZenRows.
Strengths. Second-highest benchmark result, 47.7 points above ZenRows. A plan at exactly $100, which makes the comparison arithmetic honest. SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and GDPR on every plan rather than at Enterprise only. 1,000 free credits on signup, no card, no time limit. An MCP server and SDKs for Python, TypeScript, Go, and Rust.
Weaknesses. Credit weights reach the same 25x for residential proxies that ZenRows charges, so protected pages are not cheap, and a full-page screenshot costs 60 credits. Credits do not roll over. 15 points behind String, with an Akamai column of 71.0% against String's 98.0%.
Oxylabs sells a Web Scraper API on top of a large proxy network, with per-domain rates published on the pricing page rather than derived from credit weights.
Pricing. Starter is $99 a month for up to 220,000 results. Other domains cost $1.10 per 1,000 results, $1.30 with JavaScript rendering, Amazon $0.45, and Google $0.90. Micro is $49 for up to 98,000 results at $1.15 and $1.35. Billing is success-based, and the free trial gives 2,000 results with no card.
Benchmark success. 380 of 495, or 76.8%, sixth of fifteen. Returned nothing on 18 sites, clustered in ticketing at 25%, reviews at 55%, and real estate at 62.9%.
Latency. 14.67 seconds.
Strengths. 42.5 points above ZenRows, with the strongest PerimeterX column in the run at 97.8%. Per-domain rates published before you commit. ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified products, and an official MCP server under MIT.
Weaknesses. Vertical-shaped coverage gaps, where whole categories fail rather than individual pages. 0% on Fastly and 50% on AWS WAF. The harness runs one general adapter per provider, so Oxylabs' 0/5 on amazon.com reflects the general Web Scraper API path, not its dedicated Amazon endpoint, which is priced separately at $0.45 per 1,000.
Firecrawl turns a URL into markdown, and crawls a site into markdown. It is a different product shape from ZenRows, and worth considering only if crawl-to-content is what you actually needed.
Pricing. Standard is $99 a month billed monthly for 100,000 credits, or $0.99 per 1,000 pages at full use, easy or protected alike. Scrape costs 1 credit per page and JSON output adds 4. The free plan gives 1,000 credits a month with no card. Credits do not roll over on self-serve plans, and the billing page states that a credit is charged even when the target returns a 403 or 404. Firecrawl's own pricing FAQ says the opposite; we quote the billing page, which is the more specific source.
Benchmark success. 389 of 495, or 78.6%, fourth of fifteen. Returned nothing on 16 sites.
Latency. 9.21 seconds, the fastest in the benchmark.
Strengths. 44.3 points above ZenRows, and 100% against Cloudflare where ZenRows scored 29.3%. Fastest latency score in the run. Crawl-to-content, change monitoring, document parsing, and search, none of which ZenRows sells as a first-class primitive. A hosted MCP server and an AGPL-licensed core.
Weaknesses. A credit is charged on 403 and 404 responses, so a blocked page still costs money, where ZenRows does not charge for failed attempts. 59.2% on the proprietary and other anti-bot column, the weakest of the four hosted alternatives above ZenRows. Self-serve credits do not roll over. More detail is on our Firecrawl alternatives page.
ScraperAPI is the closest match to ZenRows on price positioning, and it has the same structural problem: the headline rate is not the rate you pay on hard targets. We compare the two head to head, with ScrapingBee as the third option, on our ScraperAPI vs ZenRows vs ScrapingBee page.
Pricing. There is no $100 tier. Hobby is $49 for 100,000 credits, or $0.49 per 1,000 standard pages. Startup is $149 for 1,000,000, or $0.15. Multipliers apply per domain: Amazon 5 credits, Google and Bing 25, LinkedIn 30. Anti-bot bypass adds 10 credits per request, so a Cloudflare-protected page on Hobby is 11 credits, or $5.39 per 1,000. LinkedIn is $14.70. Successful requests and 404s are both billed.
Benchmark success. 318 of 495, or 64.2%, tenth of fifteen. Returned nothing on 29 sites.
Latency. 13.65 seconds.
Strengths. 29.9 points above ZenRows, and 85.0% against Akamai, its strongest column and better than Scrapfly's. A domain multiplier lookup and a cost API let you price a URL before you scrape it, and there is an official MCP server.
Weaknesses. 0% against Kasada and 50% against AWS WAF. Multipliers up to 30x put the effective rate on hard targets far above the headline. No plan near $100, so budgeting lands at $49 or $149.
Crawl4AI is an open-source, Playwright-based crawler with 78,000+ stars and an Apache 2.0 licence. It is not in the benchmark, because it is a library rather than a hosted provider, and its success rate depends entirely on the infrastructure you put under it.
Pricing. $0 for the software. You pay for proxies, servers, captcha solving, and the engineering time to keep all three working.
Benchmark success. Not tested; it is a library rather than a hosted provider.
Latency. Not tested.
Strengths. Free and self-hosted, with no per-request meter, MCP integration for AI tools, and full control over browser configuration and output.
Weaknesses. You own the anti-bot problem. The 58 sites ZenRows could not reach are harder with a bare Playwright stack, not easier, and proxy contracts, captcha solvers, and browser fleets become your line items.
Grouping the 99 targets by the protection they run gives a clearer picture than a single average.
| Provider | DataDome (19 sites) | Akamai (20) | Cloudflare (15) | PerimeterX (9) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | 97.9% | 98.0% | 100% | 88.9% |
| Scrapfly | 81.1% | 71.0% | 92.0% | 82.2% |
| Firecrawl | 89.5% | 72.0% | 100% | 84.4% |
| Oxylabs | 76.8% | 67.0% | 77.3% | 97.8% |
| ScraperAPI | 54.7% | 85.0% | 60.0% | 57.8% |
| ZenRows | 60.0% | 36.0% | 29.3% | 44.4% |
ZenRows leads none of these columns and places last in three. Its 29.3% on Cloudflare is worth sitting with, because Cloudflare bypass is the case its marketing addresses most. On the 26 sites running proprietary or in-house protection, ZenRows scored 10.0% and String scored 96.2%.
ZenRows returned no content on 58 of the 99 targets. The interesting part is not the count. It is which sites.
Of those 58 shutouts, 32 are on targets where the other fourteen providers averaged 70% or better. That is the highest such count in the run. The next two highest are 20 and 19, both from providers below ZenRows on the leaderboard, and every provider in the top half sits between 0 and 9. So ZenRows' misses are not concentrated on the hard frontier that separates good providers from great ones. They are spread across pages the rest of the field handles routinely.
| Target | Other 14 providers, average | ZenRows | String |
|---|---|---|---|
| coinmarketcap.com | 100% | 0/5 | 5/5 |
| tradingview.com | 98.6% | 0/5 | 5/5 |
| rightmove.co.uk | 92.9% | 0/5 | 5/5 |
| youtube.com | 92.9% | 0/5 | 5/5 |
| pinterest.com | 91.4% | 0/5 | 5/5 |
| airbnb.com | 90.0% | 0/5 | 5/5 |
| goat.com | 90.0% | 0/5 | 5/5 |
| github.com | 85.7% | 0/5 | 5/5 |
CoinMarketCap is the sharpest case in the whole run. Fourteen of the fourteen other providers passed all five attempts. ZenRows passed none.
The vertical cut says the same thing in a different shape. ZenRows scored 0% on social media (8 sites), 0% on tickets and events (4), 0% on developer and research (3), and 0% on the other category (6). It scored 57.8% on news and finance and 56.0% on marketplaces, which is where its working range sits.
This matters for planning more than for scoring. A provider that fails on the hardest 20% of the web is one you can route around. A provider whose failures include GitHub and CoinMarketCap is harder to plan for, because the difficulty of a target no longer predicts whether it will work.
Seven reasons, and every one of them appears somewhere on this page.
Against ZenRows at this level, String is more expensive per protected page on Growth and cheaper on Launch: $2.00 per 1,000 premium fetches against ZenRows' $3.44 at $165, and against $5.70 at $57. On plain pages ZenRows Growth is cheaper than String Growth, $0.14 against $0.20. The comparison that decides it is not the rate. It is that 34.3% of ZenRows' attempts returned content in this run and 97.0% of String's did, so a thousand pages of intent is a very different number of pages of data.
Pick String when the pages that matter are protected, and a gap in the data costs more than the fetch. It has the highest benchmark result in the run, it returned content on 56 of the 58 sites ZenRows could not reach, and a blocked request costs nothing.
Pick Scrapfly when you want the second-best benchmark result, a plan that lands exactly at $100, and compliance paperwork on every tier rather than at Enterprise only.
Pick Oxylabs when you want a large proxy network and per-domain rates published before you commit, and your targets are not concentrated in ticketing, reviews, or real estate.
Pick Firecrawl when the job was actually crawl-to-content, change monitoring, or document parsing, and your targets are easy enough that a 78.6% pass rate is fine.
Pick ScraperAPI when your targets are easy, volume is the constraint, and you will use the domain multiplier lookup before committing to a list.
Pick Crawl4AI when you want free software, you have proxy and anti-bot infrastructure already, and engineering time is cheaper for you than a per-request meter.
Stay on ZenRows when your targets sit in retail, marketplaces, and news at moderate protection levels, where its results are concentrated, and you value success-only billing and a broad MCP surface that includes full browser control. If that describes your list, the honest recommendation is to run your own list through both and compare.
String. It passed 100% of requests on the 15 Cloudflare-protected sites in the August 2026 benchmark. ZenRows passed 29.3%. Firecrawl also passed 100% on that column, and Scrapfly passed 92.0%. On the broader run String passed 97.0% against ZenRows' 34.3%.
ZenRows returned no content on 58 of 99 benchmark targets. Thirty-two of those 58 are sites where the other fourteen providers averaged 70% or better, the highest such count in the run. Examples include CoinMarketCap, TradingView, GitHub, YouTube, Airbnb, Pinterest, and Rightmove. On CoinMarketCap, fourteen of fourteen other providers passed all five attempts and ZenRows passed none.
Crawl4AI is free and open source under Apache 2.0, but you supply proxies, browsers, and captcha solving, so the anti-bot problem becomes yours. For hosted options, String includes the first 5,000 requests free, Scrapfly gives 1,000 credits on signup with no time limit, Firecrawl gives 1,000 credits a month, and Oxylabs gives a 2,000-result trial. ZenRows' own free plan is 5,000 credits a month with no card, which is 200 protected pages at 25 credits each.
It depends on the page. On plain pages, Scrapfly Pro is cheapest at $0.10 per 1,000, then ZenRows Growth at $0.14, then String Growth at $0.20. On protected pages, String Growth is $2.00 per 1,000 premium fetches and Scrapfly Pro is $2.50, against ZenRows at $3.44 on Growth and $5.70 on Launch. Firecrawl is $0.99 flat but charges on 403 and 404 responses, and passed 78.6% of the benchmark.
All the hosted ones. String at mcp.usestring.ai/v1/mcp, Scrapfly, Oxylabs, Firecrawl, and ScraperAPI. Crawl4AI ships MCP integration in the library. ZenRows also has one, open source and free to connect, and its browser tool family is broader than String's.
Not on every page. On plain fetches ZenRows Growth is $0.14 per 1,000 against String Growth's $0.20. On protected pages String is cheaper: $2.00 per 1,000 premium fetches against ZenRows' $3.44 on Growth and $5.70 on Launch. Both bill only for requests that return content. The larger cost difference is the pass rate, since 97.0% against 34.3% changes how many requests you have to send to get the same dataset.
When your targets are retail, marketplace, and news pages at moderate protection levels, where its 41.3%, 56.0%, and 57.8% results are concentrated. When you want browser session tooling exposed through MCP. When Enterprise-tier SOC 2 and ISO 27001 matter and you are buying at that level. And it beat String on three targets in this run: Neiman Marcus, Allegro, and Booking.com.
Yes. The harness is public, including the target list, the pass criteria, and every provider adapter. Run it with your own API keys and your own site list. The August 2026 run and the live leaderboard carry the per-site results behind every figure on this page.
