ZenRows and ScrapingBee both offer web data collection infrastructure. For years, ZenRows has been famous for their Universal Scraper API alongside a variety of other offerings. Recently, ScrapingBee has emerged as a direct competitor offering an alternative to the ZenRows ecosystem.
In this article, we’ll examine both of these providers in detail so you can decide which one best fits your web data infrastructure needs.
By the time you’re finished reading, you’ll be able to answer the following questions.
- What is ZenRows?
- What is ScrapingBee?
- What products do they offer?
- What do their pricing plans look like?
Overview of offerings from each provider
ZenRows
ZenRows offers a variety of products to meet your extraction needs. Users should note that ZenRows does not include a CAPTCHA solver but they do offer CAPTCHA avoidance. Teams can integrate a third party solution from their settings page.
- Universal Scraper API: Scrape the web using a single, centralized API. This allows developers to focus on logic rather than proxy rotation and integration.
- Scraping Browser: A remote browser hosted in the cloud running on top of ZenRows proxies.
- Residential proxies: Teams can route their traffic through a real home network. This makes web automation blend in more naturally with typical user traffic.
Here are some of the collection options that ZenRows advertises on their site.
- E-commerce: Extract pricing and review data from different shopping sites to perform market intelligence and gain access to market sentiment.
- Real estate: Collect property data from the latest listings. Teams can filter by property type, location and investment criteria.
- SERP: Extract search engine results easily using standardized API. Get Google results in JSON format for structured, AI-friendly SERP data.
- Logistics: Compare shipping options across a variety of carriers with real time data. Monitor inventory levels and track customs requirements. This allows teams to identify shipping bottlenecks as soon as they occur.
- Job boards: Collect data from job postings all over the internet. Compare postings across LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Upwork and Fiverr.
- Social media: Scrape social data from LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok and Reddit. This allows teams to identify trends as they begin to occur.
ScrapingBee
ScrapingBee was recently acquired by Oxylabs. With backing from Oxylabs, we’re expecting this product to continue to grow. While not as extensive as ZenRows with direct offerings, ScrapingBee offers a very similar product overall. Their Scraping API supports the following features.
- Proxy configuration: Choose between “classic”, “premium” and “stealth” proxies based on your team needs. This lets teams choose the best option available for their use case.
- JavaScript rendering: Rather than separately running a dedicated browser, your team can enable JavaScript support directly from the API and wait for content to render.
- SERP: Use their Google API to extract search engine results as structured data in real time.
- E-commerce: ScrapingBee comes with Amazon and Walmart APIs for teams to perform pricing intelligence and sentiment analysis.
- ChatGPT: Extract outputs directly from ChatGPT. This allows teams to analyze LLM outputs and make data driven AI decisions.
- Social media: Currently, YouTube is their only social media scraper. However, YouTube is one of the most used sites online and generally can provide strong insights into current trends.
Testing their playgrounds
Now that we’ve got a basic understanding of each provider, we’ll do a walkthrough of each API playground. These environments allow teams to quickly make prototypes and test requests before building real integrations. The API playground is the perfect place to test out these tools.
We’ll extract a page from Scrape this Site using each provider and output the result in Markdown format. These tools provide a number of other output formats but Markdown is LLM-friendly. Given that most developers are switching to AI-powered web scraping.
ZenRows Universal Scraper API builder
Once you’ve got an account, you gain access to the ZenRows Universal Scraper API builder. It allows you to generate scraping code for a variety of languages and frameworks such as cURL, JavaScript, Python and much more. Once you’ve configured a request, you can test it out from within the playground.
Enter the URL you’d like to scrape and then select your configuration for proxies and JavaScript rendering.
You can scroll down and configure advanced options as well. In the example below, we choose to output the page as Markdown by selecting the Markdown button. When you’re ready, click on Run & Preview Result.
After a few seconds, we receive the following output. The page has been successfully converted to Markdown.
- [ Scrape This Site](http://www.scrapethissite.com/)
- [Sandbox](http://www.scrapethissite.com/pages/)
- [Lessons](http://www.scrapethissite.com/lessons/)
- [FAQ](http://www.scrapethissite.com/faq/)
- [Login](http://www.scrapethissite.com/login/)
# Web Scraping Sandbox
* * *
### [Countries of the World: A Simple Example](http://www.scrapethissite.com/pages/simple/)
A single page that lists information about all the countries in the world. Good for those just get started with web scraping.
* * *
### [Hockey Teams: Forms, Searching and Pagination](http://www.scrapethissite.com/pages/forms/)
Browse through a database of NHL team stats since 1990. Practice building a scraper that handles common website interface components.
* * *
### [Oscar Winning Films: AJAX and Javascript](http://www.scrapethissite.com/pages/ajax-javascript/)
Click through a bunch of great films. Learn how content is added to the page asynchronously with Javascript and how you can scrape it.
* * *
### [Turtles All the Way Down: Frames & iFrames](http://www.scrapethissite.com/pages/frames/)
Some older sites might still use frames to break up thier pages. Modern ones might be using iFrames to expose data. Learn about turtles as you scrape content inside frames.
* * *
### [Advanced Topics: Real World Challenges You'll Encounter](http://www.scrapethissite.com/pages/advanced/)
Scraping real websites, you're likely run into a number of common gotchas. Get practice with spoofing headers, handling logins & session cookies, finding CSRF tokens, and other common network errors.
* * *
Lessons and Videos © Hartley Brody 2023
You can view a screenshot of the output from the dashboard below. You also get the option to copy or download the output.
ScrapingBee request builder
ScrapingBee’s request builder is very similar. First, we input our target URL. We also get options to configure proxies and JavaScript support. We get options to generate code for cURL, JavaScript, Python and much more.
Like ZenRows, you can scroll down to configure advanced options. Once again, you choose Markdown as an output format.
Our output is almost identical to the output we got from ZenRows. ScrapingBee extracted the page data within just over a second.
* [
Scrape This Site](/)
* [Sandbox](/pages/)
* [Lessons](/lessons/)
* [FAQ](/faq/)
* [Login](/login/)
Web Scraping Sandbox
====================
---
### [Countries of the World: A Simple Example](/pages/simple/)
A single page that lists information about all the countries in the world. Good for those just get started with web scraping.
---
### [Hockey Teams: Forms, Searching and Pagination](/pages/forms/)
Browse through a database of NHL team stats since 1990. Practice building a scraper that handles common website interface components.
---
### [Oscar Winning Films: AJAX and Javascript](/pages/ajax-javascript/)
Click through a bunch of great films. Learn how content is added to the page asynchronously with Javascript and how you can scrape it.
---
### [Turtles All the Way Down: Frames & iFrames](/pages/frames/)
Some older sites might still use frames to break up thier pages. Modern ones might be using iFrames to expose data. Learn about turtles as you scrape content inside frames.
---
### [Advanced Topics: Real World Challenges You'll Encounter](/pages/advanced/)
Scraping real websites, you're likely run into a number of common gotchas. Get practice with spoofing headers, handling logins & session cookies, finding CSRF tokens, and other common network errors.
---
Lessons and Videos © Hartley Brody 2023
If you look at the results portion of the page, you can see status codes and even execution time (1288 milliseconds).
You do not get the option to download the output. However, there is a button you can use to copy the output to your clipboard.
Product pricing
Now, let’s take a look at the pricing plans these providers offer. Both tools offer four different pricing tiers. Custom options are also available for enterprise teams with larger infrastructure needs.
ZenRows
- Developer ($69/month): Their lowest tier is the Developer plan. Teams can run up to 20 concurrent requests and make up to 250,000 total requests. Teams get AI support, automated retries, standard analytics and alerts.
- Startup ($120/month): Teams gain access to everything from the Developer plan as well as chat support. The concurrency limit gets increased to 50 and the total request limit support increases to 1,000,000.
- Business ($299/month): Access everything above as well as advanced analytics. Run up to 100 concurrent requests and 3,000,000 total requests.
- Business 500 ($499/month): Up to 5,000,000 total requests and a concurrency limit of 150. Teams also gain access to priority support.
Each of these plans also give your team access to Scraper APIs, Scraping Browser and their Residential Proxies.
ScrapingBee
- Freelance ($49/month): Make up to 150,000 requests with a concurrency limit of 10. Teams get JavaScript rendering, premium proxy and rotation support as well as screenshots, custom extraction rules and the Google Search API.
- Startup ($99/month): All of the benefits listed above as well as priority email support. Total requests increase to 1,000,000 and the concurrency limit increases to 50.
- Business ($249/month): Make up to 3,000,000 requests with a concurrency limit of 100. Teams also gain access to ScrapingBee’s team management feature.
- Business+ ($599/month): Everything included in the Business plan but with support for higher usage. Make up to 8,000,000 total requests and up to 200 concurrent requests.
Key comparison: ZenRows vs. ScrapingBee
| Category | ZenRows | ScrapingBee |
|---|---|---|
| Positioning | Full web scraping ecosystem | API-first scraping tool |
| Core product | Universal Scraper API | Scraping API |
| JavaScript support | Configurable via API and browser | Enabled directly via API |
| Scraping browser | Yes | No |
| SERP scraping | Google SERP API | Google Search API |
| E-commerce focus | General e-commerce use cases | Amazon and Walmart APIs |
| Social media support | LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok and Reddit | YouTube only |
| Entry-level price | $69/month | $49/month |
| Top-tier price | $499/month | $599/month |
| Max concurrency (top tier) | 150 concurrent requests | 200 concurrent requests |
| Max supported requests (top tier) | 5,000,000 requests | 8,000,000 requests |
Conclusion
ZenRows does offer a more broad ecosystem. For teams who need access to Scraping Browser or raw residential proxies, it still remains an obvious choice. However, when it comes to just the scraping API, ScrapingBee goes toe to toe with ZenRows and does not back down. Teams needing higher concurrency or throughput even get slightly better support from ScrapingBee.
Regardless of your scraping needs, both of these providers offer strong support for data extraction. ZenRows gives you access to a variety of extraction tools while ScrapingBee gives you a powerful all-in-one scraping API and higher usage support.