ZenRows alternative
Looking for a ZenRows alternative?
ZenRows has been restructured. It is now four products on one shared credit balance. Fetch retrieves single URLs, Extract returns structured output, Batch runs large asynchronous jobs, and Browser Sessions gives you a remote browser you drive yourself. Only Fetch maps onto what ScrAPI does.
That breadth is real, and on several axes ZenRows is ahead: a permanent monthly free tier, a CDP browser ScrAPI has no equivalent for, and batch scheduling built in. ScrAPI is cheaper per credit, charges less for a hard page, and does not expire your balance.
ZenRows pricing and features last checked: 10 September 2026. Compare ScrAPI with other providers.
Quick comparison
ZenRows figures are from its pricing page and documentation, listed at the bottom of this page. Plan prices are the base credit tier for each plan; ZenRows lets you select a larger credit allocation within a plan at a higher price.
What it actually costs
Both bill in credits with similar multipliers, so this is one of the cleaner comparisons in the market. The difference is the price of a credit. At its base tier a ZenRows Build credit costs $0.000356 ($16 for 45,000) and a Launch credit $0.000228 ($57 for 250,000), against $0.00019 for a ScrAPI pay-as-you-go credit.
ZenRows figures below are marginal credit cost within the stated plan. The monthly fee is payable regardless of usage.
Workload A: 10,000 plain HTTP pages
One credit per request on both products.
Assumptions
- ScrAPI: 1 credit per request.
- ZenRows: 1 credit per base request, no js_render, no premium_proxy.
- ZenRows' free plan (5,000 credits a month) covers half of this workload at no cost.
ScrAPI
Pay as you go, $19 / 100,000 credits
10,000 × 1 credit × $0.00019
$1.90
ScrAPI
Starter, $49/month / 500,000 credits
10,000 × 1 credit × $0.000098
$0.98
ZenRows
Build, $16/month / 45,000 credits
10,000 × 1 credit × $0.000356
$3.56
ZenRows
Launch, $57/month / 250,000 credits
10,000 × 1 credit × $0.000228
$2.28
Workload B: 10,000 JavaScript-rendered pages
Both charge 5 credits, so this is purely a credit-price comparison.
Assumptions
- ScrAPI: useBrowser, 5 credits per request. 50,000 credits total.
- ZenRows: js_render, 5 credits per request. 50,000 credits total, which exceeds the Build plan's 45,000 allowance, so Launch is the realistic tier.
ScrAPI
Pay as you go, $19 / 100,000 credits
50,000 credits × $0.00019
$9.50
ScrAPI
Growth, $79/month / 1,000,000 credits
50,000 credits × $0.000079
$3.95
ZenRows
Launch, $57/month / 250,000 credits
50,000 credits × $0.000228
$11.40
ZenRows
Growth, $165/month / 1,200,000 credits
50,000 credits × $0.0001375
$6.88
Workload C: 1,000 protected pages needing a premium proxy
Here the multipliers diverge: 25 credits on ZenRows against 15 on ScrAPI.
Assumptions
- ScrAPI: useBrowser + residential proxy, 5 + 10 = 15 credits per request.
- ZenRows: premium_proxy with js_render, 25 credits per request.
- No captcha solved. ScrAPI charges 30 credits per captcha on top of these figures.
ScrAPI
Pay as you go, $19 / 100,000 credits
1,000 × 15 credits × $0.00019
$2.85
ScrAPI
Growth, $79/month / 1,000,000 credits
1,000 × 15 credits × $0.000079
$1.18
ZenRows
Build, $16/month / 45,000 credits
1,000 × 25 credits × $0.000356
$8.89
ZenRows
Launch, $57/month / 250,000 credits
1,000 × 25 credits × $0.000228
$5.70
ZenRows also offers an adaptive mode that varies the multiplier between 1 and 25 depending on what the target actually needs, which can land well below the flat 25 assumed here. ScrAPI has no equivalent published mechanism, so on targets whose difficulty you cannot predict, the real-world gap may be smaller than this table suggests.
There is no Google Search row here. ZenRows does not document a dedicated parsed SERP product, so a Google URL goes through Fetch like any other target and the comparison would depend entirely on which proxy tier that request happened to need. Forcing a number onto that would be guesswork.
Where the products actually differ
A browser you drive versus a browser that drives itself
This is the clearest gap, and it favours ZenRows. Browser Sessions gives you a WebSocket to a real remote browser that you connect to with Puppeteer, Playwright or raw CDP, with a session TTL you set between one and fifteen minutes. ScrAPI takes a list of browser commands with the request and returns the result. If your automation is interactive, such as a multi-step login or a stateful checkout flow, ZenRows can do something ScrAPI cannot.
The counterpoint is that ZenRows documents Browser Sessions as unable to solve CAPTCHAs, so the interactive product and the anti-bot product are not the same product.
Batch work
ZenRows Batch takes up to 100,000 URLs in a job, retries, tracks status, delivers via HMAC-signed webhooks and supports one-shot, interval and calendar scheduling, retaining results for 14 days. ScrAPI's asynchronous story is a per-request callbackUrl. For a large one-off crawl, ZenRows saves you building a queue.
The free tier
ZenRows gives 5,000 credits every month, permanently, with no card. ScrAPI gives 1,000 once, plus 5,000 for finishing its ecommerce tutorial. For a hobby project that runs a few hundred requests a month and never grows, ZenRows may cost you nothing indefinitely. That is a real advantage.
Getting fields out
ZenRows has css_extractor supporting both CSS and XPath, an outputs field filter, Autoparse for recognised page categories, and Extract for automatic structured JSON. Extract is documented as beta and limited to supported domains, so it is not yet a general answer, but the extraction options are wider than ScrAPI's single response selector.
Geo-targeting granularity
ZenRows documents country-level targeting across 190+ countries. ScrAPI exposes both proxyCountry and proxyCity. If you need to look like you are in a specific city rather than a specific country, for local pricing or store availability, that is a ScrAPI capability with no documented ZenRows equivalent.
Enterprise assurances
ZenRows lists SOC 2, ISO 27001, a DPA, an SLA and a dedicated account manager on its Enterprise plan. ScrAPI does not publish equivalent certifications. If your procurement process requires them, that decides the question before any pricing table matters.
Billing edge cases worth knowing
ZenRows bills only successful requests and does not charge for failed attempts, which is a clean policy. One detail to note: it counts 404 and 410 responses as successful and charges for them. If you are checking whether product URLs still exist, a large share of your bill will be pages that are gone.
ScrAPI consumes no credits for failed requests that return no HTML or Markdown content. One exception is worth budgeting for. A solved captcha is charged at 30 credits even when the request then fails. Neither product refunds a page that returned 200 with a block message on it, which is the case that actually costs people money.
Two other ZenRows charges are worth budgeting for if you use the wider product set. Residential bandwidth costs 25,000 credits per gigabyte, and Browser Sessions add 5 credits per minute of session time on top of bandwidth. ScrAPI does not meter bandwidth and its documentation states unlimited bandwidth.
ScrAPI keeps no scrape history. Requests are metered as aggregate counters against your API key, so target URLs and page content are not written to its database and responses are not cached. Screenshots, PDFs and video are stored under hash-derived filenames and deleted within 24 hours. Two honest caveats: a saved ecommerce monitor necessarily stores the URL you configured, and diagnostic logs can capture request details when a request fails. ZenRows publishes a 14-day retention window for Batch results; its general logging policy is not something we found stated in numeric terms, so we are not characterising it here.
Which one should you pick?
ScrAPI may be a better fit if
- Your hard targets need a browser and a residential proxy. ScrAPI charges 15 credits for that combination against ZenRows' 25, on top of a lower per-credit price.
- You want to buy credits once rather than subscribe, and you do not want a balance that expires after a month.
- You need city-level geo-targeting, which ZenRows does not document.
- You want video recording of the browser session, or captcha solving alongside browser interaction rather than in a separate product.
ZenRows may be a better fit if
- You want a real remote browser to drive with Playwright or Puppeteer. Browser Sessions has no ScrAPI equivalent.
- Your usage is small and permanent. ZenRows' 5,000 free credits a month renew indefinitely; ScrAPI's starter credits are a one-off grant.
- You need to queue tens of thousands of URLs with scheduling and signed webhook delivery, rather than managing that yourself.
- You need SOC 2 or ISO 27001 in a procurement process, which ZenRows lists on its Enterprise plan and ScrAPI does not publish.
Common questions
Does ZenRows have a free tier?
Yes, and it is more generous than ScrAPI's. ZenRows offers a permanent free plan with 5,000 credits every month, five concurrent requests and no credit card. Credits refresh monthly and do not roll over. ScrAPI gives 1,000 starter credits once, on a verified account, with a further 5,000 for completing its ecommerce tutorial. If you want an ongoing free allowance rather than a one-off, ZenRows is the better answer.
How do the credit multipliers compare?
They are similar in shape and differ at the top end. ZenRows charges 1 credit for a base request, 5 with JavaScript rendering, 10 for a premium proxy and 25 for both together. ScrAPI charges 1 for a plain HTTP fetch, 5 for a browser, 5 for a data centre proxy and 10 for a residential proxy, added together, so a browser with a residential proxy is 15 rather than 25.
What is the difference between ZenRows Browser Sessions and ScrAPI's browser mode?
They are different products. ZenRows Browser Sessions gives you a real remote browser over a WebSocket that you drive yourself with Puppeteer or Playwright, billed by bandwidth plus 5 credits per minute of session time. ZenRows documents that Browser Sessions cannot solve CAPTCHAs. ScrAPI does not hand you a CDP connection: you send a list of browser commands with the request and get the result back. If you need to drive a browser interactively over a long session, ZenRows has something ScrAPI does not.
Does ZenRows charge for failed requests?
No. ZenRows bills only successful requests, and states that failed attempts are not charged. Note that it counts 404 and 410 responses as successful and charges for them. ScrAPI consumes no credits for failed requests that return no HTML or Markdown content, except that solved captchas are charged at 30 credits each even when the request ultimately fails.
Do credits roll over on either product?
ZenRows free-plan credits refresh monthly with no rollover, and paid top-ups roll over for one month. ScrAPI's plans are configured to roll credits over on both the one-off top-up and the monthly subscriptions, without a one-month expiry.
Sources checked
Every ZenRows figure on this page comes from one of the official pages below, read on 10 September 2026. Scraping providers change pricing often, so check the source before relying on a number for a purchasing decision.
- ZenRows pricing, https://www.zenrows.com/pricing
- ZenRows documentation, https://docs.zenrows.com/
Plan prices come from ScrAPI's published pricing table and per-feature credit costs from its credit documentation. A few figures on these pages were taken from the service implementation rather than the documentation, because the two currently disagree: the 20-credit Google SERP surcharge, the 1-credit charge for supplying a callback URL, the 200-concurrent-request-per-IP limit, and the 15-minute session window are all read from the code. Where they conflict, the implementation is what you will be billed for.
Start with 1,000 free credits
Sign in with an email address, verify it, and ScrAPI issues an API key with 1,000 starter credits. There is no card to enter and no trial clock. Run your own URLs in the Playground and compare the result against whatever you use today.
ZenRows and other product names and trademarks referenced on this page belong to their respective owners and are used only to identify those products. ScrAPI is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by ZenRows. Pricing and features were checked against publicly available information on 10 September 2026 and may since have changed.