Zyte

Zyte is one of the best-known names in web scraping: it’s the company that maintains Scrapy, the open-source Python framework thousands of developers use to crawl websites, and it offers a commercial platform on top of it that runs from a scraping API to a managed data service. This audit combines the public documentation on zyte.com (products, pricing and features) with public user ratings on G2, checked in October 2026, to help you decide whether Zyte fits your web data extraction project.

What Zyte is and who’s behind it

Zyte was formed in 2010 by Shane Evans (Ireland) and Pablo Hoffman (Uruguay), and is historically known as Scrapinghub. Its origin is Scrapy: Evans’s team built an in-house crawling framework around 2007 at a London startup, and Hoffman, who ran the scraping team, proposed open-sourcing it. The name blends “scrape” and “Python,” and the project became hugely popular. Zyte still maintains Scrapy and boasts a community of more than 2,000 engineers, and it hosts Extract Summit, which it describes as the world’s largest web scraping conference.

That origin explains its positioning: Zyte didn’t start out as a proxy seller, but as a company of scraping engineers that turned its experience into products.

Zyte products and services

Zyte isn’t a single product. Its current offering is organized into these pieces:

• Zyte API: the web scraping API for easy, moderate and hard websites. It picks the least costly access method that works and only escalates when needed. It handles bans, proxies, browser rendering and structured extraction.
• Zyte Data: a managed service where Zyte builds, runs and maintains data collection and delivers deduplicated, schema-defined data to your warehouse on the agreed schedule.
• Scrapy Cloud: cloud hosting to run and scale Scrapy spiders without managing servers.
• MCP server, skills and plugins: tools to give AI agents and coding assistants access to Zyte API.
• Scrapy: the open-source framework the company maintains.

The data types it highlights on its site are ecommerce (products, prices, reviews and inventory), AI data, job postings, real estate, news and articles, search engine results (SERP) and social media.

Zyte API: how “pay only for what works” scraping works

The core idea of Zyte API is simple: you request a URL and the API takes care of fetching it. Under the hood it decides whether a plain HTTP request is enough or a full browser is needed, which proxy to use, and how to avoid blocks. And most important for your budget: you’re billed only for successful responses.

Its main capabilities:

• Browser rendering with full JavaScript execution for dynamic SPA-style sites.
• Automatic and AI extraction: turns HTML into structured data for products, articles and job postings, and supports custom schemas with large language models.
• Actions: automates clicks, forms, scrolling and navigation.
• Geolocation: requests from specific countries and regions.
• Session management: persistent cookies across requests.
• Ban handling: automatically adjusts request patterns, proxies and browser fingerprints.
• SERP: rankings, ads, snippets, maps and localized results.
• IP types: residential, datacenter and mobile, rotated automatically on every request.

If you want to try it with no commitment, you can create a Zyte account through this referral link: the official pricing page mentions $5 of free credit for 30 days, with no subscription.

Zyte API pricing: table by difficulty tier

Zyte publishes its rates, something not every scraping provider does. Price is expressed per 1,000 successful responses and depends on two factors: site difficulty (five tiers, from “simple” to “advanced”) and whether the request needs browser rendering. You can also pay as you go or commit to a monthly minimum ($100, $200 or $500) in exchange for a lower price.

HTTP request (response body), price per 1,000 successful responses:

Difficulty tier	Pay as you go	$100/mo	$200/mo	$500/mo
1 · Simple	$0.13	$0.10	$0.08	$0.06
2 · Easy	$0.23	$0.17	$0.14	$0.11
3 · Moderate	$0.44	$0.33	$0.26	$0.21
4 · Complex	$0.70	$0.53	$0.42	$0.34
5 · Advanced	$1.27	$0.95	$0.76	$0.61

With browser rendering, price per 1,000 successful responses:

Difficulty tier	Pay as you go	$100/mo	$200/mo	$500/mo
1 · Simple	$1.01	$0.75	$0.60	$0.48
2 · Easy	$2.01	$1.50	$1.20	$0.96
3 · Moderate	$4.02	$3.00	$2.40	$1.92
4 · Complex	$8.04	$6.00	$4.80	$3.84
5 · Advanced	$16.08	$12.00	$9.60	$7.68

According to the pricing page itself, there’s no overage penalty: whatever you use beyond your minimum is charged at your plan’s discounted rate. Some advanced features may carry extra usage-based costs, and for large volumes there are Enterprise discounts through sales.

Practical cost examples

To get a feel for it (pay-as-you-go, using the table rates):

• 100,000 simple pages with an HTTP request (tier 1): about $13.
• 100,000 moderate-difficulty pages with an HTTP request (tier 3): about $44.
• 100,000 simple pages with browser rendering (tier 1): about $101.
• 100,000 advanced-difficulty pages with a browser (tier 5): about $1,608.

The practical lesson is clear: the gap between HTTP and browser, and between a simple site and an advanced one, can multiply cost by more than a hundred. It’s worth estimating the tier of your target sites with a small test before projecting monthly spend.

Try Zyte API with $5 free ↗

Scrapy Cloud: spider hosting pricing

Scrapy Cloud has two plans. Starter is free forever, with unlimited projects, team members and requests, but limited to 1 hour of crawl time, 1 concurrent crawl and 7 days of data retention. Professional starts at $9 per unit per month (one unit equals 1 GB of RAM and 1 concurrent crawl), with unlimited crawl time and concurrency, intelligent scheduling, 120 days of retention and personalized support. Deploying an existing Scrapy project takes three commands: pip install shub, shub login and shub deploy.

Zyte Data: managed service

For anyone who doesn’t even want to code the scrapers, Zyte Data delivers clean, deduplicated data to your data warehouse at the frequency you agree. We found no public rate on the pages we consulted, so pricing is quoted by the sales team based on the project.

Use cases: what Zyte is for

• Price monitoring and ecommerce: price tracking, catalog enrichment and inventory with structured product extraction.
• AI data: collecting large volumes of web content as raw material for models and agents.
• Job postings, real estate and news: automatic extraction of known schemas (listings, articles) without hand-writing selectors.
• SERP and ranking analysis: search engine results, ads and localized maps.
• Scrapy projects in production: deploying, scheduling, monitoring and scaling spiders on Scrapy Cloud.

User reviews and reputation

In G2’s comparisons, Zyte shows a rating of around 4.3 out of 5 with roughly 96 reviews; that’s an indicative figure worth checking on G2’s own listing before you decide. Users mainly highlight ease of implementation, especially if they already know Scrapy. The most repeated criticism is that some users have run into blocking on certain sites and that it can take time to optimize for specific workflows.

Zyte shows customer testimonials on its site praising low block rates and high success rates; these are customer opinions published by the company itself, not independent measurements. Customers it names include Sage AI Labs, Red Bull, McDonald’s, Muck Rack, Odeon, Edmunds, Data Impact by NielsenIQ, Alphabet, AMC Theatres and MikMak.

In volume of independent reviews, Zyte sits below larger competitors like Bright Data (around 4.7/5 on G2 with more than 340 reviews, per our Bright Data audit). That’s why we recommend running your own test on your target sites: success rate depends heavily on which pages you point it at.

Compliance, ethics and the legality of scraping

Zyte’s site links to a web data compliance resource and a Trust Center with its security certifications, and displays an ISO 27001 seal and an Ethical Web Data badge. These are positive signals for teams that need to justify the provider to procurement, legal or security.

That doesn’t mean every use is legal. Responsibility for respecting target sites’ terms, GDPR and other data-protection rules, and for not bypassing paywalls, logins or access controls, still rests with whoever uses the tool. We recommend sticking to public data, avoiding personal data unless there’s a clear legal basis, and consulting a legal professional on sensitive projects.

Zyte vs. Bright Data vs. in-house scraping

	Zyte	Bright Data	In-house scraping
Pricing model	Per 1,000 successful responses, by difficulty tier	Per GB (proxies) or per page/request (scraping)	Development, proxy and maintenance cost
Public rates	Yes, table by tier and request type	Yes, per product	Not applicable
Ban handling	Included in the API	Included in Web Unlocker and Scraping Browser	You build and maintain it
Scrapy ecosystem	Maintains the framework and Scrapy Cloud	Not its focus	Free (open-source Scrapy)
Managed service	Zyte Data	Datasets and managed services	No
Best for	Technical teams, Scrapy, paying per useful response	Very granular geographic coverage and large proxy volume	Full control with your own team

In short: if your priority is paying only for what works and fitting a Scrapy workflow, Zyte has the edge; if your priority is granular geographic coverage and IP volume, Bright Data is usually the reference, at a higher per-GB price on low volumes.

How to get started with Zyte, step by step

1. Create your account and take advantage of the free trial credit. You can do it through this Zyte referral link.
2. Test your real sites with a small batch to see the difficulty tier and success rate.
3. Work out the cost with the pricing table and choose between pay-as-you-go or a monthly minimum.
4. Integrate the API into your code (or deploy your spiders to Scrapy Cloud with shub deploy).
5. Monitor consumption and adjust the plan once your volume is stable.

Get started with Zyte API ↗

Frequently asked questions

What is Zyte and what is it for? Zyte is a web scraping platform from the company that maintains Scrapy. It’s used to extract public data from websites at scale with an API, host Scrapy spiders in the cloud, or delegate data collection to a managed service.

How much does Zyte API cost? From $0.06 per 1,000 successful HTTP responses with a $500/month commitment. On pay-as-you-go, from $0.13 to $1.27 per 1,000 HTTP responses and from $1.01 to $16.08 with browser rendering, depending on site difficulty.

Does Zyte have a free trial? Yes: according to its pricing page, $5 of credit for 30 days, with no subscription or commitment. Scrapy Cloud also has a free Starter plan with limits.

Are failed requests charged? No: Zyte API bills only successful responses.

What is Scrapy Cloud? It’s Zyte’s managed hosting for Scrapy spiders, with a real-time dashboard, scheduling, logs and monitoring. It deploys from the command line or GitHub.

Is Zyte the same as Scrapinghub? Zyte is historically known as Scrapinghub; today it operates as Zyte and maintains Scrapy.

Is scraping with Zyte legal? It depends on what data you extract and how. Zyte offers compliance resources, but responsibility for respecting sites’ terms and data-protection rules rests with whoever uses the tool.

What’s the best alternative to Zyte? It depends on the case. For very granular geographic coverage and large proxy volume, see our Bright Data audit. For full control, you can build your own scraping with Scrapy and separately contracted proxies.

Methodology of this audit and transparency

This analysis is based on Zyte’s public documentation (official site, pricing page, Zyte API, Scrapy Cloud and its history) and on public user ratings on G2, checked in October 2026. It doesn’t replace your own exhaustive test with a large-scale scraping project, and prices may change: confirm them on the official page before signing up.

Transparency: the Zyte links on this page are referral links. If you create an account through them, Product Auditors may receive compensation, at no extra cost to you and without affecting the assessment. You can read more about how we work in our editorial methodology and our affiliate policy.