Zyte
The developer-first web scraping API (formerly Crawlera)
$0.10/1K requests
from $0.10/1K requests /GB
- IP Pool
- Managed pool
- Countries
- 150+
- Uptime
- 99.9%
- Avg. response
- 0.8s
- Free trial
- Yes
- Founded
- 2010
Our verdict
Zyte API is the most complete scraping-as-a-service offering from the most credible engineering lineage in the space (they wrote Scrapy). Automatic ban handling, escalation, and rendering behind a success-priced API genuinely deletes the proxy-ops workload.
It is not a general-purpose proxy — account management and browser-based workflows need conventional providers — and heavy scraping teams with anti-bot expertise can beat its per-request economics.
For developer teams whose product is the data, not the infrastructure, it is the benchmark.
Speed test & performance
- Model
- Scraping API
- Ban handling
- Automatic
- Rendering
- Headless + actions
- Pedigree
- Scrapy authors
Per successful request
Retries & escalation
Optional per request
Scrapinghub, 2010
Pros & cons
Pros
- Pay per successful request, not bandwidth
- Automatic ban handling and IP escalation
- Headless rendering with browser actions
- First-class Scrapy/Python integration
- Deep anti-bot engineering pedigree
Cons
- Not usable as a general-purpose proxy
- Costly on hard sites at high volume
- Extraction features create lock-in
Overview
Zyte — the company behind Scrapy, formerly Scrapinghub — sells scraping infrastructure rather than raw proxies. Zyte API (successor to the Crawlera/Smart Proxy Manager line) bundles smart proxy rotation, automatic ban handling, browser rendering, and extraction into a single per-request API.
Network and coverage
Requests route through a managed global pool with automatic IP-type escalation (datacenter → residential), retry and ban-circumvention logic, session support, geolocation, and optional headless browser rendering with actions. Pricing is per successful request, tiered by site difficulty — you pay for outcomes, not gigabytes.
Who it is for
Developer teams that want to ship scrapers, not operate proxy fleets: the Scrapy heritage shows in first-class Python tooling, and success-based pricing removes the retry-cost anxiety of raw proxies on hard targets.
Trade-offs
It is not a proxy you can point an anti-detect browser at — it is an API. Per-request costs on difficult sites exceed raw-proxy pricing for teams with strong in-house anti-bot skills, and vendor lock-in is real once your stack leans on its extraction features.
Features & capabilities
Success-based pricing
Failed requests are not billed.
Automatic anti-ban logic
Rotation, retries, and IP-type escalation handled internally.
Headless browser actions
Scripted rendering when static fetches fail.
Structured data extraction
Optional automatic parsing for common page types.
Scrapy integration
Native middleware from the framework's authors.
General-purpose proxy endpoints
API-only — no raw IP:port access for browsers.
Integrations & supported tools
Privacy & compliance
Frequently asked questions
Not in the conventional sense. Zyte API is a scraping API: you send it URLs, it manages proxies, bans, retries, and optional browser rendering internally, and returns the page. You cannot plug it into an anti-detect browser.
Per successful request, with the rate tiered by target-site difficulty. Easy sites cost fractions of a cent; heavily protected sites cost more. Failed requests are not billed.
They evolved into Zyte API, which unified the smart proxy layer with rendering and extraction. Zyte is the rebranded Scrapinghub, the company that maintains Scrapy.
When your alternative is engineering time: on hard targets, its success-based pricing beats paying for failed residential retries plus the developer hours spent fighting anti-bot systems.
Yes — requests can invoke a managed headless browser with scripted actions (clicks, scrolls, waits), returning rendered HTML or screenshots.
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