Top 9 Alternatives to Zyte for Web Scraping [2024]

Zyte is a platform specializing in web data extraction, designed to assist businesses in collecting publicly available web data. It offers tools such as scraping APIs and automated scrapers to simplify this process. However, as with any product on the market, Zyte also has areas where it can enhance and refine its offerings.

In this article, we delve into an analysis of Zyte’s offerings, their features and potential areas for improvement. Additionally, the article explores and evaluates the leading competitors and alternatives to Zyte, evaluating their offerings in terms of capabilities, efficiency, and overall value to users.

Zyte: A brief overview

Zyte, a platform focused on web data extraction, was originally known as Scrapinghub before undergoing a rebranding. In 2011, Zyte introduced Scrapy Cloud, catering to users who prefer to manage their web scraping tools in the cloud. The following year, they unveiled Crawlera, a solution designed to streamline proxy management and rotate proxies for large-scale data extraction. In 2013, Zyte began investing in no-code web scraping solutions, launching Portia, a visual web data extraction tool aimed at non-developers, enabling them to easily extract data from web sources.

For those looking to bypass the data scraping process entirely, Zyte made ready-to-use datasets available in 2014. AutoExtract, an automatic web scraping API that allows for data collection from websites without requiring custom coding, was introduced by Zyte in 2019. Then, in 2022, they released the “Zyte API,” an AI-powered API tailored for web data extraction.

Features:

• Automatic proxy rotation and retries: Automatically changes IP addresses by using a pool of different proxies, allowing the API to send each request from a different IP address. If a connection request fails, the scraping API will automatically retry sending the request.
• Datacenter proxy support: Zyte includes support for datacenter proxies in conjunction with its scraping APIs.
• Scriptable browser support: Enables the scraping API to automate and interact with web pages in a way that mimics human browsing behavior, making it suitable for scraping data from dynamic websites that rely heavily on JavaScript and client-side rendering.
• Screenshot: Captures a full page or a viewport screenshot of the target web page at a specified time, enabling users to incorrect page rendering and unexpected changes in web page layout.
• Automatic data parsing: Automatically interprets and converts data from one format into a structured, usable format.

Pricing:

• Free trial: Zyte provides a 14-day free trial and also offers a free plan for Scrapy Cloud.
• Pay-as-you-go: This option is not available.

Top 9 alternatives to Zyte

1. Bright Data

Bright Data stands out as a leading web data platform, providing an extensive array of web scraping solutions tailored for business needs. Their offerings encompass a diverse range of proxy servers, including an exclusive proxy pool, and data extraction services like Web Scraper IDE, Scraping Browser, and SERP API. Additionally, they provide a Web Unlocker and a collection of datasets. These features collectively position Bright Data as a versatile choice for businesses and organizations in need of comprehensive web data services.

Features:

• Diverse proxy networks: Includes residential, datacenter, ISP and mobile IPs.
• Web Unlocker: Many websites have anti-scraping measures to block the web scraping tool’s IP from being accessed and collected their data. The unblocking technology allow web data extraction software to bypass these obstacles and collect publicly available data without interruption. Obtain the data you need from the specified URL in HTML or JSON format.
• Scraping Browser API: Extract data from websites by initiating a browser session and directing it to the specific data required. This process is compatible with frameworks like Puppeteer, Playwright, and Selenium. Includes built-in unblocking capabilities and proxy solutions. Web Unlocker is not designed for integration with browsers or external tools such as Adspower, Puppeteer, Playwright, or Multilogin. Scraping Browser integrates Bright Data’s Web Unlocker and is capable of interacting directly with a browser.
• Web Scraper IDE: It is a cloud solution designed for developers, providing pre-built JavaScript functions and web scraper templates from major websites (eCommerce, social media, real estate) to build web scrapers quickly. Includes built-in fingerprinting, automated retries, and CAPTCHA solving to circumvent anti-bot measures. The scraped data is delivered in formats such as JSON, NDJSON, CSV, or Microsoft Excel.
• Pre-collected datasets: Provides ready-made datasets or the opportunity to access custom datasets designed according to the specific requirements of users.
• SERP API: It is compatible with 3rd party crawler software.The collected data is delivered JSON or HTML output.

Pricing:

• Free trial: Offer 7-day free trial for registered companies only. The trial is available for all proxy networks, Web Unblocker, SERP API, and the Web Scraper IDE. The free trial for Web Scraper IDE includes publishing 3 scrapers, up to 100 records each.
• Billing: Pricing for Web Unlocker and SERP API is determined on a per-request basis, and only successful requests are billed. Meanwhile, the cost for Scraping Browser is based on the amount of bandwidth used plus the duration of the session.
• Pay-as-you-go: Bright Data’s all proxy networks and other web scraping services are available without requiring a monthly commitment.

2. Smartproxy

Smartproxy, established in 2018, is a well-known provider of proxy servers and web data scraping solutions. The provider offers 65M+ proxies, including residential, datacenter, mobile and ISP. Their web scraping solutions include no-code web scraper and APIs for data extraction tasks.

Features:

• User-friendly interface: Smartproxy is recognized for its straightforward and user-friendly interface, ensuring ease of setup for both beginners and experienced users.
• No-Code web scraping tool: Automates the web data extraction process providing pre-made scraping templates. The extracted data is delivered in CSV or JSON formats.
• Web Scraping API: This API does not offer parsing functions and provides results in raw HTML format. It is capable of scraping almost any website and can manage JavaScript rendering.
• eCommerce & SERP scraping APIs: Both APIs are full-stack solutions, incorporating proxies, web scraping functionality, and data parsing capabilities.
• Synchronous (real-time) or asynchronous (callback) requests: The Social Media Scraping API allows users to choose between synchronous requests for real-time data retrieval or asynchronous requests where data is received through a callback function.

Pricing:

• Starting price: The starting price for a subscription to web scraping tools is $50 per month plus VAT.
• Free trial: Smartproxy offers a free trial of 3,000 requests for a month for each of its APIs, including eCommerce, SERP, Web Scraping API, Social Media Scraping API, and the No-Code Scraper. 14-day-money back option is available all proxy types.
• Pay-as-you-go: A non-subscription model is available for residential and mobile proxies.

3. Oxylabs

Oxylabs is a well-known proxy service provider, offering a variety of proxy services tailored for data extraction activities. Established with datacenter proxies, Oxylabs broadened its offerings to other proxy types like residential, mobile and static residential proxies (ISP) in addition to data extraction solutions like APIs.

Features:

• Large proxy pool: Offers an extensive proxy network that supports HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS5 protocols, and different geo-targeting options such as coordinate-level targeting, customizable session lengths, and IP rotation.
• Next-gen residential proxies: Oxylabs’ next-generation residential proxies stand out with features such as the ability to execute JavaScript, adapt to changes on dynamic web pages, generate unique fingerprints automatically for each connection request, and offer an auto-retry mechanism.
• E-Commerce Scraper API: Allows users to collect localized ecommerce web data from e-commerce websites or multiple product pages. The collected data is provided in HTML or JSON format.
• Real Estate Scraper API: Extracts web data from popular real estate websites like and the data is delivered as raw HTML in real-time or directly to your cloud storage bucket.
• Headless browser: The Scraper APIs utilize a headless browser to load and render web pages, execute JavaScript, and perform various browser actions like a real user. This includes clicking, scrolling, inputting text, and waiting.
• Custom parser: The Scraper APIs offer a complimentary feature that enables users to create and apply their custom parsing on the raw scraping output.

Pricing:

• Free trial: They offer a 7-day trial period for company representatives and 3-day money-back guarantee for individuals. Refunds can be issued for self-service products, except for pay-as-you-go plans.
• Pay-as-you-go: Residential proxies and mobile proxies offer pay-as-you-go plans.

4. NetNut

NetNut, a proxy service provider, offers a range of four different proxy types specifically designed for data extraction. In 2023, the provider introduced three new scraping products: Unlocker, Social Scraper, and SERP Scraper API.

Features:

• Unblocker: AI-driven technology assists scrapers by automatically adjusting parameters like IP addresses and user agents, and provides features like automatic IP rotation and a retry system.
• Hybrid proxy network: Residential proxies consist of a mix of ISP and P2P proxy networks to enhance performance optimally.
• Google SERP Scraper API: Extracts public SERP data from Google and delivers it JSON or HTML. Featuring detailed targeting at the city/state level, enabling users to access localized data.
• Social Scraper: Gathers data from major social media platforms in real-time and as per demand.

Pricing:

• Free trial: 7-day trial period
• Pay-as-you-go: Unavailable

5. SOAX

SOAX, established in 2018, is a data extraction platform helping businesses to collect data from web sources through API. The provider offers residential and mobile proxies for web scraping tasks. SOAX’s AI Scraper has the capability to decode natural language requests. This means that the scraper can interpret input commands or queries in technical or coded instructions.

Features:

• SERP API: Ready-to-use web scraping solutions access raw HTML or structured JSON data from search engines and eCommerce websites. It automatically selects and switches between proxy services, and manages headless browsers to render web pages on the server side.
• eCommerce API: Collects real-time data points such as product reviews, search results, and seller data in bulk and delivers raw HTML or structured data in JSON format. APIs are compatible with all programming languages
• Social Media API: Collects publicly available social media data from any social media platform and provides the collected data in raw HTML, structured JSON, or CSV formats.
• Targeting capabilities: Allows for ISP-level targeting with their proxy services. Users have the ability to customize their proxy server settings according to specific state, city and mobile operator.

Pricing:

• Free trial: A 3-day free trial is available for proxy servers at a cost of $1.99. SOAX does not offer a free trial for their scraping services.
• Pay-as-you-go: Unavailable
• Billing: SOAX provides various pricing options for their scraping APIs, categorized by the type of results: raw data and parsed data. The cost is higher for accessing parsed data.

6. ScraperAPI

ScraperAPI is a proxy API that enables developers to build their scrapers without handling IP rotation and headless browsers. The platform helps users simplify the process of extracting and processing web content through API calls. ScraperAPI is suitable for large-scale data collection activities.

Features:

• Different content types: Handles a variety of content types, including HTML, PDF files, documents, and images.
• Customizability: ScraperAPI offers the flexibility to enhance web scraping capabilities by simply adding commands to their API calls. This ease of configuration allows for the activation of various features such as JavaScript rendering, custom headers, and IP geolocation.
• CAPTCHA solving: When the API encounters a CAPTCHA, it will automatically retry the request using a different IP address. Simultaneously, it works on unblocking the IP that was initially blocked by the CAPTCHA.

Pricing:

• Free trial: ScraperAPI provides both a 7-day free trial and a free version of its service.
• Pay-as-you-go: They don’t offer a pay-as-you-go option.

7. Octoparse

Octoparse offers a visual and automatic web data scraping software that helps users extract data from static and dynamic websites, exporting data in different formats like CSV, Excel, HTML, and TXT. The platform is suitable for both beginners and advanced users.

Features:

• Enterprise-level projects: Octoparse offers customized web scraping services specifically designed for enterprise-level customers, catering to their unique and large-scale data extraction needs.
• Local and cloud data extraction: Allows users to perform data scraping activity on their own computer or local server, or use remote servers hosted on the cloud.
• Preset templates: Octoparse features a template-based system, providing more than 50 modifiable task templates that don’t require any initial setup.

Pricing:

• Free plan: Octoparse offers a 14-day free trial. The provider also offers a free plan that restricts users to 10 crawlers and a maximum of 10,000 records, with the operations confined to local machines only.
• Pay-as-you-go: The provider doesn’t offer a pay-as-you-go option.

8. ZenRows

ZenRows is a web scraping API that simplifies the process of extracting data from websites with rotating proxies (residential and datacenter) and headless browser functions. The API delivers data in JSON format.

Features:

• JavaScript rendering: Dynamically load and display JavaScript content ,allowing the scraping API to access and extract this dynamically loaded web data.
• Autoparse: Automatically convert unstructured data extracted from a web page like raw HTML into a useful structured web data like CSV or JSON.
• Built-in headless browser: Allows the web scraping API to render web pages in the background without the visual component, making it useful for scraping dynamic websites that require browser rendering.

Pricing:

• Free trial: 1,000 API requests are free
• Pay-as-you-go: Unavailable

9. Diffbot

Diffbot is a cloud-based knowledge management solution, offering a data collection tool that helps companies and individuals classify and extract the content of the target web page. Diffbot provides different APIs that feature functionalities for recognizing faces, analyzing emotions, identifying products, extracting articles, and retrieving images.

Features:

• Knowledge Graph: It is a Diffbot offering, enabling users to locate and extract necessary data from a target web page. It’s beneficial for instances where you know the data required but are uncertain of its location. This feature analyzes multiple entities like people, companies, and articles in a content.
• Natural Language Processing: Enables users to programmatically extract entities, categorize, and comprehend the context of unprocessed text.
• Crawlbot: This tool streamlines large-scale web crawling operations. It allows users to configure it for full-site crawling and data extraction, utilizing automated or tailored APIs.
• Datacenter proxy: Diffbot’s enterprise plan supports the use of third-party proxies in conjunction with their APIs. All their subscription plans come with included datacenter proxies. Normally, extracting a single page consumes one credit. When a datacenter proxy is used for this extraction, the credit cost doubles, requiring two credits.

Pricing:

• Free trial: The company offers a 14-day trial.
• Pay-as-you-go: Unavailable

Further reading

• Top 5 IPRoyal Alternatives & Competitors
• Top 5 SOAX Alternatives & Competitors
• Top 3 ParseHub Alternatives & Evaluation

For guidance to choose the right tool, check out data-driven list of web scrapers, and reach out to us: