Bright Data vs Zyte API

Bright Data

Pay only for successful requests, $1.50 per 1,000 on Web Unlocker and SERP. No public status page or incident history.

Zyte API

One POST endpoint with an OpenAPI 3 contract picks proxies, browser rendering and extraction per site, bills only successful responses, and sends problem+json errors with Retry-After. Prices vary by target site across five tiers, so cost per request isn't known before the site is assigned one, and no dated API changelog was found.

Bright Data

1. Connect with OAuth or keep the ?token= URL out of logs and shared configs
2. Add groups= or tools= to the MCP URL only for the extractors you need. The full set is 69 tools
3. Retry reject_block errors, since each attempt uses a different peer. Certificate and DNS errors fail the same way twice
4. Back off on a 429 sr_rate_limit. Bright Data throttles a target whose success rate drops
5. Use the batch tools for up to 10 searches or scrapes in one call

Zyte API

1. Send the API key as the Basic auth username with an empty password to https://api.zyte.com/v1/extract. Set only one of httpResponseBody or browserHtml, or one extraction field
2. Ask for httpResponseBody before browserHtml. Browser requests cost about eight to thirteen times more per tier
3. Retry 429, 503 and 520 after the Retry-After seconds, with backoff. They aren't billed. Don't retry 400, 401, 422 or 451
4. Read statusCode in a 200 response. A target site's 404 comes back as a successful, billed Zyte API response
5. Have the owner set a blocking spending limit on the key you use. A 403 /auth/account-suspended means the limit or the trial month ended