Best ZenRows Alternatives in 2026: 7 Tools Compared
Last updated: November 11, 2026. Benchmark figures come from the October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark. Pricing was checked against ZenRows' published pages on October 27, 2026, and the other vendors' on November 11, 2026.
What is the best ZenRows alternative?
String is the best ZenRows alternative for bot-protected websites. As of the October 30, 2026 benchmark run, on the 57 targets ZenRows' API answered, String passed 99.3% of attempts and ZenRows 73.3%. Pick Scrapfly for the next-highest benchmark result on a plan that lands at $100, Oxylabs for a large proxy network with published per-domain rates, Firecrawl for crawl-to-content on easy pages, ScraperAPI to price each URL before you scrape it, and Crawl4AI for free self-hosting.
String is a web access API for developers and AI agents. One HTTP call fetches any URL, and String handles proxy rotation, anti-bot checks, captcha solving and JavaScript rendering behind it. Source for the benchmark figures: the October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark. ZenRows' API closed the connection on every attempt on the other 43 targets, so across all 100 targets the scores are 98.6% and 41.8%. This page compares all seven tools, ZenRows included, on benchmark success, latency, pricing at $100 a month, and MCP support.
The full leaderboard and per-site results are in the October 2026 benchmark post and the public repository.
String was also faster: a 4.24 second latency score against ZenRows' 21.91 in the October 30, 2026 run. ZenRows' Launch L2 plan is $99 a month for 500,000 credits, per its docs plan table, checked October 27, 2026. As of October 2026, String Growth is $99 and bills $0.16 per 1,000 successful plain fetches, up to $3.25 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. Source: October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark; prices checked October 27, 2026; String as of October 2026.
- String, when protected pages have to return content reliably.
- Scrapfly, for the highest benchmark result here after String, on a plan that lands exactly at $100.
- Oxylabs, for a large proxy network with per-domain rates you can read before you buy.
- Firecrawl, for crawl-to-content, change monitoring, or document parsing on easy pages.
- ScraperAPI, for a URL priced before you scrape it, on a 30-credit bypass tier.
- Crawl4AI, when you want free software and will run proxies and anti-bot infrastructure yourself.
- ZenRows remains a reasonable fit for fashion, news, and travel pages at moderate protection levels, which is where its results on the targets its API answered are concentrated.
TL;DR
Source: October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark; prices from each vendor's pricing page, checked October 27, 2026; String as of October 2026.
- On the 57 targets its API answered, ZenRows passed 209 of 285 attempts, 73.3% (as of the October 2026 benchmark run), where String passed 283 of 285, 99.3%. Its API closed the connection on all 215 attempts at the last 43 targets, as it did on the last 42 in September, so its full-run score is 41.8%, fifteenth of seventeen. It bills only successful requests, and 404 and 410 responses count as billable usable results.
- As of the October 2026 benchmark run, String passed 98.6%, or 493 of 500, the highest of the 17 web scraping APIs tested. It bills only when content comes back, includes 20,000 free standard fetches, and credits roll over.
- ZenRows returned nothing on 53 of 100 sites, 43 of them inside the API failure. String returned something on all 100.
- Outside the failure, ZenRows shut out 10 sites, and two of those are pages the other sixteen providers averaged 70% or better on: Bloomberg and Instagram.
- On ZenRows, a protected page costs 25 credits against a standard page's 1, so the sticker rate and the real rate are 25 times apart.
- ZenRows' Launch L2 is $99 a month for 500,000 credits: $0.20 per 1,000 standard pages and $4.95 per 1,000 protected ones. Scrapfly Pro sits exactly at $100, and String Growth matches ZenRows at $99.
- Every benchmark number comes from a public harness that anyone can rerun with their own API keys.
ZenRows and six alternatives at a glance
| 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 | 98.6% | 4.24s | Growth, $99: $0.16 for a plain fetch; $0.80 to $0.90 with a browser or a premium proxy; $3.25 with both. Blocked requests are free | No crawl-to-content endpoint and no self-hosting |
| ZenRows | Fashion, news, and travel pages at moderate protection levels | 41.8%, with an API failure on its last 43 targets | 21.91s | Launch L2, $99: $0.20 for a standard page, $4.95 for a protected one. Growth G1, $199: $0.17 and $4.15 | 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 highest benchmark result here after String, with predictable credit weights | 86.8% | 19.62s | Pro, $100: $0.10 for an HTTP scrape, $0.50 with Unblocker 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 | 81.2% | 8.87s | 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 do not roll over below annual Scale |
| Oxylabs | A large proxy network with per-domain rates published before you buy | 67.4% | 16.62s | Basic, $100: $0.90 per 1,000 results, $1.40 with JavaScript rendering, $0.45 for Amazon and $0.90 for Google | Returned nothing on 26 of 100 sites, clustered in ticketing, reviews, and real estate |
| ScraperAPI | A URL priced before you scrape it | 76.4% | 15.19s | 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, LinkedIn is $14.70, and the ultra_premium tier the benchmark used 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 |
Source: the October 30, 2026 Web Data Frontier Benchmark run, with 500 requests per provider; String figures as of October 2026, other prices from each vendor's pricing page, checked October 27, 2026. 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 is at the plan closest to $100 per month billed monthly.
Why people leave ZenRows
Source: ZenRows documentation, checked October 27, 2026, and the October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark.
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.
Hard sites
Source: October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark, per-target results in the public run file.
The benchmark is where the problem shows. ZenRows passed 209 of 500 requests, 41.8%, fifteenth of seventeen providers. Its API stopped answering for the last 43 targets, as it did for the last 42 in September, so the comparison that measures the product is the first 57: there it passed 73.3% (as of the October 2026 benchmark run) of attempts and returned nothing on 10 sites, where String passed 99.3% and was shut out nowhere.
Those 10 are not confined to the hardest corners of the web. Bloomberg and Instagram are among them, and so is Ticketmaster, which ten of the other sixteen providers returned on every attempt. The section on which sites ZenRows fails on has the full comparison against the field.
Pricing
Source: ZenRows docs plan table and pricing page, checked October 27, 2026.
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 L2 is $99 for 500,000 credits, which reads as $0.20 per 1,000 pages. On protected pages it is $4.95 per 1,000. Growth G1 is $199 (as of October 2026) for 1.2 million credits, or $0.17 and $4.15 for the same two cases.
Read the docs plan table, not the pricing page. The pricing page opens on annual billing and shows annual-equivalent prices as monthly: $16, $58 and $166 where the docs give $19, $69 and $199 billed monthly. The gap is the pay-for-ten-get-twelve annual discount in ZenRows' FAQ. We quote the monthly figures.
How we tested these web scraping APIs
Source: October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark and its public repository.
The October Web Data Frontier Benchmark covered 100 real sites, 17 providers, five attempts per site, and 8,500 live requests. Targets included Amazon, Walmart, Zillow, Ticketmaster, and other websites protected by major anti-bot systems.
Every provider ran through a public adapter sending the configuration its vendor documents for bot-protected pages. Before the September run, a harness change moved ScraperAPI, ScrapingBee, Scrapfly, Scrapingdog and Nimble to those settings. 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 and has not changed since July. 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.
The October run hit the same ZenRows API failure as September, and the harness does not separate it from site failures: every attempt on the last 43 targets ended with the connection closed and no response. This page leads with the 57 targets ZenRows' API answered and reports the full-run 41.8% beside it.
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 its adapter has stayed on Firecrawl's default path since. The original benchmark post explains the pass criteria and why the latency score is failure-aware.
Chart data
| Provider | Success rate | Passed | Latency score |
|---|---|---|---|
| String | 98.6% | 493/500 | 4.24s |
| Scrape.do | 94.0% | 470/500 | 5.08s |
| Context.dev | 93.0% | 465/500 | 10.96s |
| Scrapfly | 86.8% | 434/500 | 19.62s |
| ScrapingBee | 85.2% | 426/500 | 20.30s |
| Firecrawl | 81.2% | 406/500 | 8.87s |
| Zyte | 79.6% | 398/500 | 14.43s |
| Apify | 79.4% | 397/500 | 24.87s |
| ScraperAPI | 76.4% | 382/500 | 15.19s |
| Bright | 75.4% | 377/500 | 27.88s |
| Decodo | 71.2% | 356/500 | 28.29s |
| Nimble | 68.0% | 340/500 | 22.65s |
| Oxylabs | 67.4% | 337/500 | 16.62s |
| Browserbase | 43.0% | 215/500 | 18.01s |
| ZenRows | 41.8% | 209/500 | 21.91s |
| ScrapingAnt | 40.0% | 200/500 | 18.39s |
| Scrapingdog | 27.6% | 138/500 | 31.52s |
String vs ZenRows: 99.3% vs 73.3%, and no bill when a page is blocked
Source: October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark; String prices from usestring.ai/pricing, as of October 2026.
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 $99 per month (as of October 2026). Plain fetches on a standard proxy cost $0.16 per 1,000. Premium-proxy fetches cost $0.90, browser requests on a standard proxy cost $0.80, and browser requests on a premium proxy cost $3.25. Starter costs $19 per month and bills $0.25, $2.40, $1.20, and $4.80 for those four paths. The first 20,000 standard fetches are free, blocked requests are not billed, and credits roll over.
Benchmark success. As of the October 2026 run, String passed 493 of 500 requests, or 98.6%, the highest result among seventeen providers. It passed 100% against AWS WAF, Kasada, Fastly, and in-house protection; 98.7% against Cloudflare; 97.9% against DataDome; 97.8% against PerimeterX; and 97.0% against Akamai. It returned content on all five attempts for 95 sites and partial content for five, and no site came back empty.
Latency. 4.24 seconds, first in the benchmark, against ZenRows' 21.91 seconds.
Strengths.
- Highest overall benchmark pass rate.
- Content returned on all 10 sites ZenRows shut out before its API failure, on every attempt.
- Outcome-based billing: blocked requests cost nothing.
- One rate card with four paths, rather than credit weights that multiply by 25.
- Markdown, raw HTML, or a JSON envelope (the default), chosen per request.
- Search, asynchronous sitemap crawling, and remote Chrome over CDP.
Weaknesses.
- No raw proxy-network product and no per-country residential pool to rent.
- No crawl-to-content endpoint, change monitoring, or PDF and DOCX parsing.
- No self-hosted option.
- No SOC 2 report yet. ZenRows offers SOC 2 and ISO 27001 at its Enterprise tier.
- ZenRows beat String on two targets: MarketWatch and Barron's, each 5/5 against String's 4/5.
String's MCP server
String's MCP server is listed on the official registry as ai.usestring/web-access. It is available at https://mcp.usestring.ai 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.
Trying String
curl https://request.usestring.ai/v1/fetch \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $STRING_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"url": "https://www.example.com/the-page-that-blocks-you", "format": "markdown"}'
Leave out format and the page comes back in a JSON envelope. The first 20,000 standard fetches are free, and blocked requests are not billed. Point it at the list that ZenRows is failing on and compare the two.
Scrapfly vs ZenRows: 86.8% and a plan that lands exactly at $100
Source: October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark; Scrapfly prices from its pricing page, checked November 11, 2026.
Scrapfly runs one API key across five products, with an Unblocker flag, formerly asp=True, 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 Unblocker 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. 434 of 500, or 86.8%, fourth of seventeen. Its adapter ran with asp: true, render_js: false and the residential pool pinned, so that number is the 25-credit configuration without browser rendering. Returned nothing on 5 sites.
Latency. 19.62 seconds, slightly faster than ZenRows.
Strengths. The highest benchmark result on this page after String, 45.0 points above ZenRows. A plan at exactly $100, which makes the comparison arithmetic honest. SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and GDPR on every plan rather than at Enterprise only; HIPAA is 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. 11.8 points behind String, with an Akamai column of 78.0% against String's 97.0%.
Oxylabs vs ZenRows: a bigger network with rates you can read first
Source: October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark; Oxylabs prices from its pricing page, checked November 11, 2026.
Oxylabs sells a Web API on top of a large proxy network, with per-domain rates published on the pricing page rather than derived from credit weights.
Pricing. Basic is $100 a month for up to 111,000 results on general targets. Those cost $0.90 per 1,000 results, $1.40 with JavaScript rendering, Amazon $0.45, and Google $0.90. Starter is $15 at $1.00 and $1.50. Billing is success-based, and new accounts get $5 of welcome credit.
Benchmark success. 337 of 500, or 67.4%, thirteenth of seventeen. Returned nothing on 26 sites, clustered in ticketing at 0%, reviews at 50.0%, and real estate at 62.9%.
Latency. 16.62 seconds.
Strengths. 25.6 points above ZenRows, with 91.1% on PerimeterX. 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 16.7% on AWS WAF. The harness runs Oxylabs through its Web Unblocker, a separate product from the Web API priced above, so Oxylabs' 0/5 on amazon.com says nothing about its dedicated Amazon endpoint at $0.45 per 1,000.
Firecrawl vs ZenRows: crawl-to-content instead of unblocking
Source: October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark; Firecrawl prices from its pricing page, checked November 11, 2026.
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 roll over only on annual Scale and annual Enterprise plans, and the billing page states that a credit is charged even when the target returns a 403 or 404.
Benchmark success. 406 of 500, or 81.2%, sixth of seventeen. Returned nothing on 17 sites.
Latency. 8.87 seconds, third in the benchmark behind String and Scrape.do.
Strengths. 39.4 points above ZenRows, and 98.7% against Cloudflare where ZenRows scored 33.3%. 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. 60.0% on the proprietary and other anti-bot column, the weakest of the four hosted alternatives above ZenRows. More detail is on our Firecrawl alternatives page.
ScraperAPI vs ZenRows: cheap on easy pages, expensive on the ones you came for
Source: October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark (August and September runs where named); ScraperAPI prices from its pricing page, checked November 11, 2026.
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. What replaces ScraperAPI itself is on our ScraperAPI alternatives 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. ultra_premium, the tier the benchmark sent, is 30 credits, or $4.47 per 1,000 on Startup. Successful requests and 404s are both billed.
Benchmark success. 382 of 500, or 76.4%, ninth of seventeen. It scored 64.2% in the August run on its default request and 84.0% in September after the harness moved it to ultra_premium; its adapter did not change for October. Returned nothing on 9 sites.
Latency. 15.19 seconds.
Strengths. 34.6 points above ZenRows, and 81.0% against Akamai, better than Scrapfly's 78.0%. 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. 53.3% against Kasada, below ZenRows' 60.0%. The coverage above was bought at 30 credits a request, and multipliers up to 30x on the default path put the effective rate on hard targets far above the headline. No plan near $100, so budgeting lands at $49 or $149.
Crawl4AI vs ZenRows: free software, and the anti-bot problem is yours
Source: Crawl4AI on GitHub, checked October 27, 2026.
Crawl4AI is an open-source, Playwright-based crawler with 86,000+ 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 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.
Where the anti-bot cut falls
Source: October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark.
Grouping the 100 targets by the protection they run gives a clearer picture than a single average. ZenRows' row includes the 43 targets its API never answered, so read it as a floor.
| Provider | DataDome (19 sites) | Akamai (20) | Cloudflare (15) | PerimeterX (9) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | 97.9% | 97.0% | 98.7% | 97.8% |
| Scrapfly | 92.6% | 78.0% | 93.3% | 93.3% |
| Firecrawl | 85.3% | 80.0% | 98.7% | 100% |
| Oxylabs | 67.4% | 53.0% | 68.0% | 91.1% |
| ScraperAPI | 75.8% | 81.0% | 70.7% | 82.2% |
| ZenRows | 52.6% | 57.0% | 33.3% | 73.3% |
ZenRows places last in three of the four columns; on Akamai its 57.0% is ahead of Oxylabs' 53.0%. Its 33.3% on Cloudflare is the figure most affected by the failure and the one its marketing addresses most, so it is the column to retest on your own list before drawing a conclusion. On the 27 sites running proprietary or in-house protection, ZenRows scored 17.8% and String scored 100%.
Chart data
| Provider | DataDome (19 sites) | Akamai (20 sites) | Cloudflare (15 sites) | PerimeterX (9 sites) | AWS WAF (6 sites) | Kasada (3 sites) | Fastly (1 sites) | Proprietary / other (27 sites) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | 97.9% | 97.0% | 98.7% | 97.8% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% |
| Scrape.do | 97.9% | 87.0% | 93.3% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 92.6% |
| Context.dev | 100.0% | 79.0% | 96.0% | 97.8% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 92.6% |
| Scrapfly | 92.6% | 78.0% | 93.3% | 93.3% | 96.7% | 86.7% | 40.0% | 83.0% |
| ScrapingBee | 85.3% | 74.0% | 97.3% | 88.9% | 63.3% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 88.1% |
| Firecrawl | 85.3% | 80.0% | 98.7% | 100.0% | 83.3% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 60.0% |
| Zyte | 68.4% | 68.0% | 92.0% | 91.1% | 70.0% | 100.0% | 100.0% | 84.4% |
| Apify | 85.3% | 69.0% | 86.7% | 86.7% | 63.3% | 100.0% | 0.0% | 80.7% |
| ScraperAPI | 75.8% | 81.0% | 70.7% | 82.2% | 76.7% | 53.3% | 100.0% | 76.3% |
| Bright | 74.7% | 72.0% | 74.7% | 86.7% | 73.3% | 66.7% | 100.0% | 75.6% |
| Decodo | 65.3% | 68.0% | 73.3% | 86.7% | 73.3% | 100.0% | 0.0% | 70.4% |
| Nimble | 64.2% | 51.0% | 68.0% | 82.2% | 40.0% | 86.7% | 100.0% | 81.5% |
| Oxylabs | 67.4% | 53.0% | 68.0% | 91.1% | 16.7% | 100.0% | 0.0% | 80.0% |
| Browserbase | 31.6% | 28.0% | 6.7% | 73.3% | 16.7% | 33.3% | 0.0% | 80.7% |
| ZenRows | 52.6% | 57.0% | 33.3% | 73.3% | 36.7% | 60.0% | 0.0% | 17.8% |
| ScrapingAnt | 7.4% | 33.0% | 24.0% | 53.3% | 13.3% | 53.3% | 100.0% | 74.8% |
| Scrapingdog | 16.8% | 27.0% | 29.3% | 6.7% | 13.3% | 20.0% | 0.0% | 46.7% |
Which sites does ZenRows fail on?
Source: October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark, per-target results in the public run file.
ZenRows returned no content on 53 of the 100 targets. The count is mostly the API failure: 43 of the 53 are the last 43 targets in the run, where its API closed every connection without a response. CoinMarketCap, GitHub, YouTube, Airbnb, Reddit and TradingView are all in that stretch, so a zero there measures ZenRows' API on the day, not those sites.
The 10 shutouts outside the failure are the ones to read.
| Target | Other 16 providers, average | ZenRows | String |
|---|---|---|---|
| bloomberg.com | 90.0% | 0/5 | 5/5 |
| instagram.com | 86.3% | 0/5 | 5/5 |
| autozone.com | 67.5% | 0/5 | 5/5 |
| ticketmaster.com | 63.8% | 0/5 | 5/5 |
| monster.com | 61.3% | 0/5 | 5/5 |
| lowes.com | 56.3% | 0/5 | 5/5 |
| stockx.com | 56.3% | 0/5 | 5/5 |
| cargurus.com | 53.8% | 0/5 | 5/5 |
| us.louisvuitton.com | 43.8% | 0/5 | 5/5 |
| mouser.com | 26.3% | 0/5 | 5/5 |
Bloomberg is the sharpest case. Thirteen of the other sixteen providers passed all five attempts, and ZenRows passed none.
The vertical cut on those 57 targets says where ZenRows works. It passed 80.0% on the five travel sites it was tested on, 76.7% on six news and finance sites, and 76.0% on ten fashion and luxury sites. Its weakest groups were the three social sites before the failure at 66.7%, seven marketplaces at 68.6%, and the one ticketing site, Ticketmaster, at 0%.
This matters for planning more than for scoring. A provider that fails on the hardest corner of the web is one you can route around. A provider whose misses include Bloomberg and Instagram is harder to plan for, and one whose API can stop answering mid-run needs monitoring that tells an outage from a block.
Why pricing is hard to compare across these providers
Source: each vendor's pricing and billing pages, checked October 27, 2026; String as of October 2026.
Seven reasons, and every one of them appears somewhere on this page.
- The unit differs. String and Oxylabs bill per successful request or result. ZenRows, Scrapfly, Firecrawl, and ScraperAPI bill per credit, and a credit is not a page.
- Credit weights vary by request. A ZenRows page is 1, 5, 10, or 25 credits. A Scrapfly page is 1, 5, 25, or 60. A ScraperAPI page ranges from 1 to 75.
- Browser rendering is metered separately. Oxylabs adds $0.50 per 1,000 for JavaScript rendering on Basic. String has a separate browser rate. ZenRows charges 5 credits for it.
- Output formats can surcharge. Firecrawl adds 4 credits per page for JSON output.
- What counts as billable differs. String does not bill blocked requests. ZenRows and Scrapfly do not bill failed attempts, but ZenRows bills 404 and 410 responses as usable results. Firecrawl bills 403 and 404. ScraperAPI bills 200 and 404.
- Prepaid behaviour differs. String credits roll over. ZenRows plan credits expire at every renewal, with only top-up credits carried forward once. Scrapfly does not roll over at all, and Firecrawl does only on annual Scale and annual Enterprise.
- Enterprise pricing is custom. ZenRows, String, Scrapfly, Oxylabs, and ScraperAPI all quote custom rates above their published ladders, and ZenRows puts SOC 2, ISO 27001, and a DPA behind that door.
What $100 a month buys
Source: each vendor's pricing page, checked October 27, 2026; String as of October 2026.
- String Growth, $99 (as of October 2026). $0.16 per 1,000 plain fetches, $0.80 to $0.90 with a browser or a premium proxy, $3.25 with both. Blocked requests are free and credits roll over.
- ZenRows Launch L2, $99. 500,000 credits: $0.20 per 1,000 standard pages, $4.95 per 1,000 protected ones. Growth G1 at $199 gives 1.2 million: $0.17 and $4.15.
- Scrapfly Pro, $100. 1,000,000 credits: $0.10 per 1,000 HTTP scrapes, $0.50 with Unblocker or JS, $2.50 with residential proxies.
- Firecrawl Standard, $99. 100,000 credits, or $0.99 per 1,000 pages, easy or protected alike.
- Oxylabs Basic, $100. Up to 111,000 results: $0.90 per 1,000, $1.40 with JavaScript rendering.
- ScraperAPI, no plan at $100. Startup at $149, the nearest, gives $0.15 per 1,000 standard pages and $1.49 to $1.64 per 1,000 Cloudflare-protected ones. Hobby at $49 gives $0.49 and $4.90 to $5.39.
- Crawl4AI, $0. Plus proxies, servers, captcha solving, and your time.
Against ZenRows at this level, String is cheaper per protected page: $0.90 per 1,000 premium fetches against ZenRows' $4.95 on Launch L2 and $4.15 on Growth G1. On plain pages String's $0.16 per 1,000 is also below ZenRows' $0.20 on Launch L2 and $0.17 on Growth G1. The comparison that decides it is not the rate. On the 57 targets ZenRows' API answered, 73.3% of its attempts returned content and 99.3% of String's did, so a thousand pages of intent is a different number of pages of data.
Which ZenRows alternative should you pick?
Source: October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark; prices checked October 27, 2026; String as of October 2026.
Pick String when the pages that matter are protected, and a gap in the data costs more than the fetch. As of October 2026 it has the highest benchmark result in the run, it returned every site ZenRows shut out before its API failure, and a blocked request costs nothing.
Pick Scrapfly when you want the best benchmark result on this page after String, a plan that lands exactly at $100, (as of October 2026) 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 an 81.2% pass rate is fine.
Pick ScraperAPI when you want a URL priced before you scrape it and will pay 30 credits a request for its 76.4%, or your targets are easy and volume is the constraint. 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 fashion, news, and travel 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.
Switching from ZenRows to String
Source: ZenRows documentation and String docs, checked October 27, 2026; String's free allowance as of October 2026.
What carries over. A Fetch GET to api.zenrows.com/v1/ becomes a POST to String's /v1/fetch with the key in a header. Keep the URL list and the code that reads HTML. response_type=markdown maps to "format": "markdown", js_render=true to "executeJS": true, proxy_country to countryCode, and js_instructions to String's browser actions. premium_proxy and mode=auto have no String equivalent, because String picks the proxy class itself.
What you rebuild. Extract, Crawl, Batch jobs with webhooks and schedules, css_extractor, PDF rendering, and per-key credit caps. Puppeteer or Playwright code on ZenRows Browser Sessions can connect to String's remote browser over CDP instead. Batch and Crawl stay with ZenRows or move to a job runner you already operate.
Integrations to reconnect. ZenRows publishes clients for Python, Node.js, and Go, a CLI, a remote MCP server, and integrations for n8n, Zapier, Make, LangChain, and LlamaIndex. String ships no language SDK, so an SDK call becomes one HTTP POST. Its hosted MCP server runs at mcp.usestring.ai, n8n calls String through the HTTP Request node, and Zapier, LangChain, and the Vercel AI SDK have setup guides in String's docs.
Test on your own failing URLs first. Start with the 10 sites ZenRows shut out above, then add your own URLs that fail today. Compare pages returned and cost per usable page, and move only the targets that improve. Leave custom headers off for the test: String does not bill a blocked request unless that request sent custom headers. The first 20,000 String standard fetches are free with no card. The String vs ZenRows page compares the two products in more depth.
FAQ
Source for the figures below: October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark; prices from each vendor's pricing page, checked October 27, 2026; String as of October 2026.
What is the best ZenRows alternative for Cloudflare-protected sites?
String, level with Firecrawl. As of the October 2026 benchmark run, both passed 98.7% of requests on the 15 Cloudflare-protected sites in the October 2026 benchmark. ZenRows passed 33.3%, a figure that includes targets its API never answered. Scrapfly passed 93.3% on that column and ScraperAPI 70.7%.
Which sites does ZenRows fail on?
ZenRows returned no content on 53 of 100 benchmark targets, but 43 of those are the stretch where its API closed every connection without a response. Outside that stretch it shut out 10: Bloomberg, Instagram, AutoZone, Ticketmaster, Monster, Lowe's, StockX, CarGurus, Louis Vuitton and Mouser. On Bloomberg, thirteen of sixteen other providers passed all five attempts and ZenRows passed none.
Is there a free ZenRows alternative?
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 20,000 standard fetches free, Scrapfly gives 1,000 credits on signup with no time limit, Firecrawl gives 1,000 credits a month, and Oxylabs gives $5 (as of October 2026) of welcome credit. ZenRows' own free plan is 5,000 credits a month with no card, which is 200 protected pages at 25 credits each.
What is the cheapest ZenRows alternative?
It depends on the page. On plain pages, Scrapfly Pro is cheapest at $0.10 per 1,000 (as of October 2026), then ScraperAPI Startup at $0.15, String Growth at $0.16 and ZenRows Growth G1 at $0.17, with ZenRows Launch L2 at about $0.20. On protected pages, String Growth is $0.90 per 1,000 premium fetches and Scrapfly Pro is $2.50, against ZenRows at $4.15 on Growth G1 and $4.95 on Launch L2. Firecrawl is $0.99 flat but charges on 403 and 404 responses, and passed 81.2% of the benchmark.
Which ZenRows alternatives have an MCP server?
All the hosted ones. String at mcp.usestring.ai, 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.
Is String cheaper than ZenRows?
Yes, against both ZenRows plans near $100. On plain fetches String's $0.16 per 1,000 (as of October 2026) is below ZenRows' $0.20 on Launch L2 and $0.17 on Growth G1. On protected pages String is cheaper too: $0.90 per 1,000 premium fetches against ZenRows' $4.95 on Launch L2 and $4.15 on Growth G1. Both bill only for requests that return content. The larger cost difference is the pass rate, which changes how many requests you have to send to get the same dataset.
When is ZenRows still the better choice?
Source: October 30, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark. When your targets are fashion, news, and travel pages at moderate protection levels, where its 76.0%, 76.7%, and 80.0% results on the targets its API answered 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 two targets in this run: MarketWatch and Barron's.
Can I verify these numbers?
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 October 2026 run, its raw results file, and the live leaderboard carry the per-site results behind every figure on this page, including the ZenRows errors on the last 43 targets.