Last updated: August 26, 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 26, 2026.
The best Zyte alternatives are String, Scrapfly, Context.dev, Firecrawl, Bright Data and Oxylabs.
On the open Web Data Frontier Benchmark (99 real sites, five attempts each, run August 11, 2026), Zyte returned content on 72.7% of requests. String returned 97.0%, Scrapfly 82.0%, Context.dev 79.2%, Firecrawl 78.6%, Bright Data 78.0% and Oxylabs 76.8%.
Pick String when protected pages have to come back every time. Pick Scrapfly for the closest all-round rival. Pick Context.dev when one flat credit per page matters more than a difficulty tier. Pick Firecrawl for crawling a whole domain. Pick Bright Data for proxy scale. Pick Oxylabs when your targets are PerimeterX-defended.
This page compares all seven web scraping APIs on benchmark success, latency, pricing at roughly $100 a month and MCP support.
Zyte ran on httpResponseBody, its HTTP path. Zyte also sells a browser path, and its own docs say the tier and the price both depend on which one you send. Every Zyte result below is the HTTP path's result, and the section on pricing says what the browser path costs.
TL;DR
| Provider | Best for | Benchmark success | Latency score | What $100 a month buys | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | Protected pages that must return every time | 97.0% (480/495) | 9.98s | Growth: $100/mo, then $0.20 per 1,000 plain fetches or $2.00 premium; blocked requests free | No crawl endpoint, no self-hosting |
| Zyte | Letting the vendor price each site by difficulty | 72.7% (360/495) | 14.85s | $100 commitment: $0.10 to $0.95 per 1,000 HTTP responses, $0.75 to $12.00 browser | Zyte assigns your tier, and 18 sites returned nothing |
| Scrapfly | The closest all-round rival | 82.0% (406/495) | 18.35s | Pro: $100/mo, 1,000,000 credits; ASP mode costs 5 credits, so about $0.50 per 1,000 protected pages | Slowest of the top three on latency; credits do not roll over |
| Context.dev | One flat credit per page, anti-bot included | 79.2% (392/495) | 12.68s | No $100 plan. Developer $25 buys 10,000 credits, Pro $149 buys 200,000, at 1 credit per page | Free tier is one-time, not monthly; 33.3% against Kasada |
| Firecrawl | Crawling a whole domain to markdown | 78.6% (389/495) | 9.21s | Standard: $99/mo, 100,000 pages at 1 credit each whether easy or protected | Charged on a target 403 or 404; 28.9% on the unbranded-defence group |
| Bright Data | Proxy scale and enterprise compliance | 78.0% (386/495) | 26.14s | No $100 plan. Pay-as-you-go is $1.50 per 1,000 requests, so about 66,000 requests | Slowest latency of all 15 providers |
| Oxylabs | PerimeterX-defended targets | 76.8% (380/495) | 14.67s | No $100 plan. Web Unblocker Micro is $75 for 8 GB at $9.40/GB | Billed on bandwidth, so no per-page figure; 42.9% against AWS WAF |
The latency score is a per-target p75 of successful attempts. A provider that returns nothing on a target inherits the p75 of the providers that did succeed there, and a target nobody clears scores the 90-second timeout. It refuses to reward fast failures.
Zyte returned nothing on any of five attempts against 18 of the 99 targets: Temu, Mouser, Trustpilot, Best Buy, Lowe's, Realtor.com, Home Depot, Louis Vuitton, Yelp, Coupang, StubHub, American Airlines, cars.com, Yellow Pages, Google, LinkedIn, Kroger and AXS.
String returned content on 17 of those 18. It cleared 15 on all five attempts and two more on four of five, Mouser and Coupang. The only site that shut out both products is Temu, which shut out every provider in the run.
Nine of those 18 are US brand-name retail and local-listing sites rather than exotic targets. Home Depot, Lowe's, Best Buy, Kroger, Yelp and Yellow Pages are the kind of domain a pricing or local-data project is built on, and the majority of the field returned them: on those six, the other fourteen providers averaged between 36.7% and 55.7%, and between five and seven of them cleared all five attempts.
Zyte's own docs name one boundary directly. Zyte API does not log in to sites, and says so plainly: it "cannot automatically get you data that is always locked behind a user login". That explains LinkedIn, and it is a product decision rather than a failure.
Zyte's model is unusual and, on its own terms, honest. Websites are priced in five tiers, from Simple to Advanced, and datacenter proxies, residential proxies and rendering are all included in whichever tier your site lands in. There are no per-feature surcharges to track.
The cost of that design is that you do not set your own rate. Zyte assigns the tier automatically, reviews assignments quarterly, and gives affected customers two weeks' notice of a change. New site and request-type combinations start on a temporary tier until Zyte has enough data to make it permanent. The pricing page's per-site lookup needs an account, so a prospective buyer cannot price their own target list before signing up.
The spread inside a single plan is wide. At a $100 monthly commitment, an HTTP response costs $0.10 per 1,000 at tier 1 and $0.95 at tier 5. A browser-rendered response costs $0.75 at tier 1 and $12.00 at tier 5. Same plan, same month, 120 times the rate between the cheapest and dearest cell.
One label is worth reading twice. The pricing page's rows are headed "Minimum Commitment", and the billing docs say a $100 spending limit carries no commitment at all, while a $100 commitment buys a $200 spending limit. The two pages agree once you know that, but "$100" means a floor in one place and a ceiling in the other. Unused commitment is not refunded.
The benchmark sends the same 99 URLs to 15 providers, five times each: 7,425 live, billable requests.
A request passes only when the response contains a marker from the real page: a product title, article headline or another known piece of content. A captcha page returning HTTP 200 fails. A blank response fails. A fast 403 fails. The benchmark measures whether the requested content actually came back.
Most targets are protected retail, travel, news and social sites. That is intentional. Easy pages tell you whether an HTTP client works. Hard pages tell you whether a web-access product works.
We built the public harness, and String ranks first in it. Do not take our word for it. The targets, pass criteria, provider adapters and raw results are public, and the repo runs with your own API keys.
A Firecrawl engineer submitted a configuration change in pull request #6. We merged it, reran the benchmark and Firecrawl's score rose 7.7 points. This page uses the improved result.
The Zyte adapter posts to /v1/extract with httpResponseBody: true and nothing else. That is Zyte's HTTP path.
State the obvious caveat before a Zyte engineer does: Zyte also sells a browser path, browserHtml, and its docs say the target website and the request type together determine the tier. A browser request on a JavaScript-heavy target would plausibly return content the HTTP path did not.
It would also cost between 7.5 and 12.6 times as much. At the same $100 commitment, tier 1 goes from $0.10 to $0.75 per 1,000 and tier 5 goes from $0.95 to $12.00. So the honest framing is not that Zyte's 72.7% is a ceiling. It is that Zyte's cheap path returned 72.7%, and the escalation route is a different price band rather than a flag you can flip for free.
Other products in this group made a different choice. String accepts the URL and selects the fetch path itself. Scrapfly ran with asp: true and render_js: false, its anti-scraping-protection mode without a browser. Firecrawl's default auto mode retries through an enhanced proxy at the same one-credit price.
Pricing. Growth is $100 a month, then $0.20 per 1,000 standard fetch requests, $2.00 premium, $1.00 per 1,000 standard browser requests and $4.00 premium. Blocked requests are never billed and credits roll over. The first 5,000 requests are free. The four rates are published, and which one applies is determined by the request you send, not by an assignment String makes about your domain.
Benchmark success. 97.0%, 480 of 495, first of fifteen. String returned full content on 92 of the 99 targets against Zyte's 60, and returned nothing on two against Zyte's 18.
Latency. 9.98s against Zyte's 14.85s. String is faster, and the gap is real rather than a rounding difference. Bear in mind the latency score penalises shutouts, and Zyte has nine times as many.
Strengths. The highest success rate in the run, no bill for a block, published rates, and 100% on the 15 Cloudflare-defended targets against Zyte's 61.3%.
Weaknesses. No crawl endpoint and no self-hosted option. Zyte beat String on four targets: Skyscanner, where Zyte returned 40% and String returned nothing at all, plus Neiman Marcus, Allegro and Booking.com, where Zyte cleared all five attempts and String cleared four. String has no SOC 2 report; Scrapfly does.
MCP. String publishes a server in the official registry as ai.usestring/web-access, with fetch, search and sitemap tools.
Try it on your own list:
curl -X POST https://api.usestring.ai/v1/fetch \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $STRING_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"url": "https://www.homedepot.com"}'
Pricing. Pro is $100 a month for 1,000,000 credits at $0.10 per 1,000 credits, prepaid. An HTTP scrape on a datacenter IP costs 1 credit, ASP mode or JS rendering costs 5, and residential proxies cost 25, per Scrapfly's billing matrix. A protected page in ASP mode therefore runs about $0.50 per 1,000. Failed requests are never charged. Credits do not roll over.
Benchmark success. 82.0%, 406 of 495, second of fifteen and the closest thing to a like-for-like replacement. It beat Zyte on Cloudflare (92.0% against 61.3%), Akamai (68.0% against 53.0%) and AWS WAF (82.9% against 45.7%).
Latency. 18.35s against Zyte's 14.85s. Zyte is faster here, and on the targets both products cleared, Zyte was faster still.
Strengths. Second place on success, a plan that sits exactly on the $100 anchor, and SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and HIPAA attestations for procurement.
Weaknesses. Slower than Zyte. Credits expire at renewal, and the credit weights mean a residential request costs 25 times a datacenter one, so Scrapfly's own unit is not flat either.
Pricing. Developer is $25 a month for 10,000 credits and Pro is $149 for 200,000. There is no plan at $100. The unit is the appealing part: one credit is one scrape, and Context.dev states that proxies, JS rendering and anti-bot bypass are included in that credit with no surcharge. Blocked requests are not billed. Overage is metered in 10,000-credit blocks at $15 on Developer and $9 on Pro.
Benchmark success. 79.2%, 392 of 495, third of fifteen. It returned nothing on 16 targets against Zyte's 18, and beat Zyte on Cloudflare (90.7% against 61.3%) and Akamai (81.0% against 53.0%).
Latency. 12.68s against Zyte's 14.85s.
Strengths. The flattest pricing unit on this page, and the direct answer to Zyte's tier model: the same page costs the same credit whether it is Simple or Advanced. An official MCP server for Claude Code, Cursor and Windsurf.
Weaknesses. The free tier is a one-time grant of 250 or 500 credits, not a monthly allowance, so it is a trial rather than a standing free plan. Against Kasada it returned 33.3% across three targets, the weakest in this group, where Zyte returned 100%. It also carries a broad brand-data product that you may not want to pay attention to.
Pricing. Standard is $99 a month for 100,000 credits, and a scrape is 1 credit per page whether the page is easy or protected. The enhanced proxy costs the same single credit. The catch is at the other end: Firecrawl charges whenever its infrastructure processes a request, including a target 403 or 404. Zyte does not.
Benchmark success. 78.6%, 389 of 495, fourth of fifteen. It matched String at 100% on the 15 Cloudflare targets, where Zyte returned 61.3%.
Latency. 9.21s, the fastest in the run, against Zyte's 14.85s.
Strengths. Fastest latency tested, a crawl endpoint that turns a whole domain into markdown, and flat credits.
Weaknesses. On the 25 targets with no branded anti-bot vendor it returned 58.4%, against Zyte's 87.2%, and on the nine sites defended by in-house systems it returned 28.9% against Zyte's 77.8%. It also bills blocked requests, which Zyte does not, and blocks some sites by policy.
Pricing. Web Unlocker pay-as-you-go is $1.50 per 1,000 requests, and Scale is $499 a month with 383,000 requests included and $1.30 per 1,000 after that. There is no plan at $100, though $100 of pay-as-you-go buys roughly 66,000 requests. Bright Data bills only for success, with two caveats in its own feature docs: premium domains, its tier of harder sites, carry a higher rate that only appears in the dashboard's estimated-cost view, and a zone with custom headers or cookies enabled is billed for 100% of requests, successful or not. The free tier is 5,000 requests a month.
Benchmark success. 78.0%, 386 of 495, fifth of fifteen. It returned nothing on 11 targets, the fewest of any provider on this page except String.
Latency. 26.14s, the slowest of all 15 providers, against Zyte's 14.85s. This is Zyte's clearest win in the group.
Strengths. The largest proxy network here, the smallest shutout count after String, 94.3% against AWS WAF where Zyte returned 45.7%, and an enterprise compliance surface that procurement teams already know.
Weaknesses. Slowest latency in the run by a wide margin. Web Unlocker is explicitly not for browser automation, so a browser workload needs a second Bright Data product. The catalogue is large enough that picking the right product is itself a decision.
Pricing. Web Unblocker Micro is $75 a month for 8 GB at $9.40 per GB, Starter is $325 for 38 GB and Advanced is $660 for 88 GB. The nearest plan to $100 is Micro at $75. Billing is on bandwidth rather than requests, so there is no per-page figure to compare. A standing 40% coupon sits beside the list price on the pricing page, which makes the list rate hard to treat as the rate.
Benchmark success. 76.8%, 380 of 495, sixth of fifteen. It also returned nothing on 18 targets, the same count as Zyte, but on a different 18.
Latency. 14.67s against Zyte's 14.85s. Effectively a tie.
Strengths. 97.8% on the nine PerimeterX targets, the best result in this group and ahead of Zyte's 86.7% and String's 88.9%. If your target list is PerimeterX-heavy, that is a genuine reason to pick it.
Weaknesses. 42.9% against AWS WAF, the weakest here. Bandwidth billing makes cost forecasting hard, because a heavy page costs more than a light one for the same single result.
| Anti-bot system | Sites | String | Scrapfly | Context.dev | Firecrawl | Bright Data | Oxylabs | Zyte |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | 15 | 100% | 92.0% | 90.7% | 100% | 85.3% | 77.3% | 61.3% |
| DataDome | 20 | 98.0% | 82.0% | 76.0% | 90.0% | 82.0% | 78.0% | 82.0% |
| Akamai | 20 | 98.0% | 68.0% | 81.0% | 71.0% | 56.0% | 72.0% | 53.0% |
| PerimeterX | 9 | 88.9% | 82.2% | 73.3% | 84.4% | 68.9% | 97.8% | 86.7% |
| AWS WAF | 7 | 97.1% | 82.9% | 68.6% | 80.0% | 94.3% | 42.9% | 45.7% |
| Kasada | 3 | 100% | 80.0% | 33.3% | 93.3% | 93.3% | 93.3% | 100% |
| No named vendor | 25 | 96.0% | 87.2% | 84.0% | 58.4% | 84.8% | 79.2% | 87.2% |
Zyte is not uniformly behind. It tied String at 100% against Kasada, returned 87.2% on the 25 sites with no branded defence, level with Scrapfly and well ahead of Firecrawl's 58.4%, and matched Scrapfly and Bright Data on DataDome. Its weak columns are specific: Akamai at 53.0% across 20 sites, AWS WAF at 45.7% across seven, and Cloudflare at 61.3% across 15. Akamai and Cloudflare together are 35 of the 99 targets.
This is the number to remember.
Sort the 99 targets by how hard they proved for the field as a whole, then split them into quarters. Every provider drops as the pages get harder. What separates them is where the drop happens.
| Provider | Hardest 25 | Second 25 | Third 25 | Easiest 24 | Third to second |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| String | 89.6% | 98.4% | 100% | 100% | 1.6 pts |
| Scrapfly | 62.4% | 83.2% | 90.4% | 92.5% | 7.2 pts |
| Context.dev | 45.6% | 84.8% | 89.6% | 97.5% | 4.8 pts |
| Firecrawl | 60.0% | 84.8% | 80.0% | 90.0% | none |
| Bright Data | 57.6% | 78.4% | 83.2% | 93.3% | 4.8 pts |
| Oxylabs | 45.6% | 72.0% | 92.0% | 98.3% | 20.0 pts |
| Zyte | 43.2% | 61.6% | 90.4% | 96.7% | 28.8 pts |
Zyte handles the third quartile as well as Scrapfly does, at 90.4% each. One band harder, it returns 61.6% while Scrapfly returns 83.2%. That 28.8-point fall is the largest of the eight providers that cleared 70% overall, and more than twice the drop of every provider above it except Oxylabs.
The second quartile is not the hard end of the web. These are sites the field as a whole cleared between 51% and 67% of the time. Seven of the 25 returned nothing at all to Zyte across five attempts: cars.com, Home Depot, Yellow Pages, Kroger, Google, StubHub and LinkedIn. String cleared all seven on all five attempts. Thirteen of the 25 failed to return full content.
The practical consequence is a budgeting one, and it is where Zyte's tier model and its benchmark result meet. The escalation route for a page the HTTP path cannot return is the browser path, and at the same commitment that path costs 7.5 to 12.6 times as much per 1,000. On the hardest quartile everyone expects to pay more. The second quartile is the band where a buyer has usually assumed the cheap path will hold, and on this suite it is where Zyte's cheap path stopped holding first.
Seven reasons, all present in the seven tools above.
Against Zyte specifically, at this level, the honest answer runs both ways. Zyte and String both bill only pages that return, so their rate cards compare directly, with no success-rate adjustment to make. Zyte's HTTP path runs $0.10 to $0.95 per 1,000 returned pages at a $100 commitment; String Growth runs $0.20 standard and $2.00 premium. Every Zyte tier undercuts String's premium rate, and the two cheapest tiers undercut the standard rate too. The argument for moving is not the rate. It is the 18 sites that returned nothing, which a success-billed rate card cannot price because nothing came back, and the browser tier you reach for when the cheap path stops working.
Pick String when the job is protected pages that have to return every time, and you would rather read your rate off a published card than be assigned one. 97.0% against 72.7%, 100% on Cloudflare against 61.3%, and no bill for a block.
Pick Scrapfly when you want the closest all-round replacement and a plan that lands exactly on $100. Second place on success, and the compliance paperwork is already done.
Pick Context.dev when the thing you dislike about Zyte is the tier model itself. One credit per page, anti-bot included, no per-site repricing. Check Kasada coverage first if that matters to you.
Pick Firecrawl when the job is crawling whole domains to markdown and speed matters more than the last few points of coverage. Watch the billing on blocked pages.
Pick Bright Data when you need proxy scale, the widest product catalogue and enterprise compliance, and you can absorb 26.14s latency.
Pick Oxylabs when your target list is PerimeterX-heavy. 97.8% on that group beats everything else here.
Stay on Zyte when your targets sit in the easy two-thirds of the web, where it returned 90.4% and 96.7%, and you would rather have one automated API that picks proxies and rendering for you than tune flags yourself. Its billing is genuinely buyer-friendly: no charge for a ban, and no per-feature surcharges. If your domains sit in tier 1 or 2, it is the cheapest option on this page per page returned.
String or Firecrawl. Across the 15 Cloudflare-defended targets in the August 2026 benchmark, both returned content on 100% of requests, against Zyte's 61.3%. Scrapfly returned 92.0% and Context.dev 90.7%. Cloudflare is 15 of the 99 targets and one of Zyte's two weakest columns, alongside Akamai at 53.0% across 20 sites.
Eighteen of the 99, on all five attempts: Temu, Mouser, Trustpilot, Best Buy, Lowe's, Realtor.com, Home Depot, Louis Vuitton, Yelp, Coupang, StubHub, American Airlines, cars.com, Yellow Pages, Google, LinkedIn, Kroger and AXS.
The pattern is the notable part. Zyte returns 90.4% on the third-hardest quarter of the suite and 61.6% on the second, a 28.8-point drop and the largest of the eight providers that cleared 70% overall. Seven of the shutouts sit in that second quartile, which is mid-difficulty rather than hard. LinkedIn is explained by product design: Zyte does not log in to sites.
When your targets sit in the easy two-thirds of the web and you want the vendor to handle path selection. Zyte returned 90.4% on the third quartile of the suite and 96.7% on the easiest, and 87.2% on the 25 sites with no branded anti-bot vendor, level with Scrapfly. It tied String at 100% against Kasada.
Its billing is also genuinely buyer-friendly. Zyte's docs say that when it cannot avoid a ban in reasonable time it returns a ban response "for which you are not charged", and that rate-limiting and unsuccessful responses are free. String, Scrapfly, Context.dev and Bright Data bill the same way; Firecrawl charges when its infrastructure processes the request, including a target 403 or 404. One caveat cuts the other way: Zyte treats a target's 404 as a successful response and bills it.
If Zyte assigned your domains to tier 1 or 2, it is the cheapest product on this page per page returned, and there is no coverage argument for moving unless your list reaches into the second quartile.
Every tool here has a free entry point, and they are not the same size. Zyte gives $5 of credit for the first billing month. String gives the first 5,000 requests free, and because a block is never billed, testing your hardest URLs costs nothing. Firecrawl gives 1,000 credits a month and Bright Data 5,000 requests a month. Scrapfly gives 1,000 credits on signup with no expiry. Context.dev gives 250 or 500 credits once, not monthly.
It depends on which tier Zyte put your sites in, and on how each vendor bills. Zyte, String, Scrapfly and Context.dev charge only for pages that return, so their listed rate is already the cost per usable page: Zyte's HTTP path runs $0.10 to $0.95 per 1,000 at a $100 commitment, String Growth is $0.20 standard or $2.00 premium, Scrapfly Pro is about $0.50 in ASP mode, and Context.dev Pro works out to about $0.75. Firecrawl bills per attempt, so at its 78.6% benchmark rate a usable page costs about $1.26 per 1,000. Bright Data bills successes at $1.50 per 1,000, and its premium domains cost more. Oxylabs bills bandwidth, so it has no per-page figure.
All six, and not Zyte. String is in the official registry as ai.usestring/web-access. Context.dev and Firecrawl run hosted servers, Oxylabs publishes an official integration, and Bright Data and Scrapfly both ship servers. Zyte does not host one: it publishes a guide to building your own, and the servers on offer are third-party.
On the HTTP path, mostly no. Both products bill only successful responses, so the rate cards compare directly. Zyte at a $100 commitment runs $0.10 to $0.95 per 1,000, so every tier undercuts String's $2.00 premium fetch rate, and the two cheapest tiers undercut the $0.20 standard rate as well. If your domains are Simple or Easy, Zyte is the cheaper product and this page will not pretend otherwise.
Where String costs less is the browser path and the failures. A browser-rendered page on Zyte at tier 5 is $12.00 per 1,000 against String's $4.00 premium browser rate, and the 18 sites Zyte never returned cost whatever the fallback costs. String credits roll over; Zyte's unused commitment does not.
Run the benchmark.
The harness, 99 target URLs, pass criteria, provider adapters and raw results are public. The repo takes your own API keys.
The live leaderboard, August 2026 results post and raw results JSON all use the same run.
Benchmark figures come from the August 11, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark: 99 targets, five attempts each, 15 providers, raw results JSON.
Pricing pages and vendor documentation were checked on August 26, 2026: Zyte pricing, Zyte billing docs, Zyte error and billing behaviour, String pricing, Scrapfly pricing, Context.dev pricing, Firecrawl pricing, Firecrawl billing docs, Bright Data Web Unlocker pricing, Bright Data Web Unlocker feature docs and Oxylabs Web Unblocker.
