# Decodo Web Data API vs Zyte API (slim)

> Zyte scores 69.7 (B) to Decodo Web Data's 61.8 (C) for scraping. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/decodo-vs-zyte.md (~6,200 tokens) · this version ~3,480 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/decodo-vs-zyte.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/decodo-vs-zyte
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-07
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)

Zyte API scores 69.7 (B) on agent readiness against Decodo Web Data API's 61.8 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Decodo Web Data API leads on agent ergonomics and maintenance & community. Both do scraping.

- Decodo Web Data API: C 61.8, rank #591 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/decodo.min.md
- Zyte API: B 69.7, rank #228 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/zyte.min.md
- Decodo Web Data API, good for Agents that need pages, Google results and e-commerce or social templates through one key with published per-1,000 prices and a free plan. Ahead on Agent ergonomics, 82 against 72; Maintenance & community, 85 against 77. Also Runs on your own machine.
- Zyte API, good for An agent or pipeline that fetches protected pages and wants the service to choose proxy and browser per site and to bill only success, and teams already on Scrapy. Ahead on Reliability, 85 against 59; Schema & documentation, 85 against 67; Security & auth, 55 against 45; Transparency & trust, 67 against 62.

| Category | Decodo Web Data API | Zyte API |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 59 | 85 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 67 | 85 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 82 | 72 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 45 | 55 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 40 | 40 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 85 | 77 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 62 | 67 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Decodo Web Data API | Zyte API |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Decodo (UAB "Data troops") | Zyte Group Limited |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://mcp.decodo.com/mcp` | `https://api.zyte.com/v1/extract` |
| Transports | Streamable HTTP, stdio | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Pricing | Freemium | Pay per use |
| Price for scraping | $0.50 per 1,000 requests | not published |
| Licence | none | Proprietary service under Zyte's terms of service. The Python client is BSD 3-Clause, and the Agentic Web Data plugin is under Zyte's own end-user licence |
| Tools exposed | 33 | 34 |
| MCP registry | `io.github.Decodo/mcp-server` | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-10-30 | 2026-10-26 |
| Terms last updated | 2025-06-16 | 2026-09-22 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-05-21 | 2024-08-30 |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text | yes |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text | yes |
| Popularity | none | 42k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | none | 3.8/5 (4) |

Why the edge:
- Reliability, Zyte API +26: Decodo Web Data API 59 (Graded on the hosted lines. Instatus page at status.decodo.com with Web Data API and each legacy scraping API as components, with RSS history (20). In the 90 days to 6 November, every scraping API was out for 2 hours 51 minutes on 30 October, the main outage, with outages of 13 minutes on 26 October and 21 minutes on 15 October across the same components. The rest of the incidents hit proxies, payments or the website. One major (10). Per-plan request rates are published, 10 to 200 a second, though the same page's FAQ says paid plans support 10 to 50 (12 of 15). The response code table tells the agent to wait a couple of minutes on 429 and to retry 500, 524 and 613, which aren't billed, and the MCP client backs off exponentially. No Retry-After or idempotency guidance (7 of 15). No SLA; the License Agreement disclaims uninterrupted service (0). Web Data API is the current, unflagged product (10). 20 + 10 + 12 + 7 + 0 + 10 = 59.); Zyte API 85 (Graded as a hosted API. status.zyte.com runs on Atlassian Statuspage with ten components and incident history (20). In the 90 days to 1 November 2026 its history feed lists two Zyte API incidents, both degraded browser rendering with higher latency and 520 errors, on 10 to 11 September and 13 September, neither marked as an outage, and three incidents outside the API, Scrapy Cloud periodic jobs on 17 August and the web dashboard and Scrapy Cloud periodic jobs down from 28 to 30 October, which Zyte says affected no other product. All partial, so minor (20 of 30). Rate limits are published as 3,000 requests a minute per key on standard plans and a custom limit on Enterprise, though per-site limits aren't (15). 429, 503 and 520 carry `Retry-After`, and the docs give a backoff table and say which responses to retry, per the 9 October check (15). Enterprise plans list service level agreements for support response times. No uptime SLA is published (5 of 10). Zyte API is generally available, and Zyte MCP carries no beta label on 1 November (10).)
- Schema & documentation, Zyte API +18: Decodo Web Data API 67 (No OpenAPI or similar contract for the Web Data API; the two published specs cover the proxy account API and dashboard statistics. The MCP server types every input with zod (12 of 25). llms.txt indexes 401 guide pages, each served as Markdown (10). Tool descriptions state purpose and when to use a tool, such as scrape_as_markdown 'when no site-specific tool fits', and link the docs page (14 of 20). Parameters are tabled with defaults, with enumerated proxy_pool, headless and device_type, but `headers` is a free object and POST bodies are base64 strings (10 of 15). Curl examples on every page, a response code table with fixes and billing, and parser status codes (14 of 15). Paths are versioned at /v1 and the MCP server's releases are tagged by semantic-release, but no API changelog was found (7 of 15). 12 + 10 + 14 + 10 + 14 + 7 = 67.); Zyte API 85 (The reference prints an OpenAPI 3.0.3 document for `POST /v1/extract`, though the Search API's `/v1/search` is documented in tables outside it (25). docs.zyte.com has an llms.txt and Markdown twins of its pages (10). The operation description states which output fields can be combined and which can't, and field descriptions give defaults (17 of 20). Inputs are typed, with 51 enums and required fields marked. `customAttributes` takes a free-form schema (13 of 15). The spec has a dozen request examples, and each error status has a problem+json example (15). The path is versioned `/v1` and the spec says 1.0.0, but we found no dated changelog for the API in the docs sitemap of 150 pages (5 of 15).)
- Agent ergonomics, Decodo Web Data API +10: Decodo Web Data API 82 (The hosted MCP server lists 24 tools, with a `toolsets` parameter to load only web, search, ecommerce, social_media or ai, and `tokenLimit` caps page text at 45,000 characters by default with a truncation notice (20 of 25). Markdown output, parsing for templates, crawl `limit`, path filters and cursor paging, search paging, map limits and batch tasks (18 of 20). Documented status codes with a solution for each, `status_code` and `parse_status_code` in bodies, but 429 covers both the plan rate and a domain throttled for a low success rate (15 of 20). Every tool carries readOnlyHint true and destructiveHint false, server-side failures aren't billed and async results can be re-read for 24 hours. No idempotency key (16 of 20). Only `url` or `query` is required, though the default premium pool costs about twice the standard. Official Python, TypeScript and Go SDKs (13 of 15). 20 + 18 + 15 + 16 + 13 = 82.); Zyte API 72 (Graded on the REST API, with the MCP server noted. A request names the outputs it wants, so an agent can ask for extracted fields or `pageContent` in place of full HTML, but HTML and bodies come whole, up to 10 MB. Zyte MCP lists 34 tools at once, 26 of them for Scrapy Cloud, recounted from its docs on 1 November (15 of 25). No pagination applies to a single-URL call. Search takes `maxResults` from 10 to 100, and the Stats API pages and filters (14 of 20). Errors are problem+json with a stable `type` path, and the docs say which to retry and which to fix (20). Calls are reads, failed and rate-limited requests are free, and retries are safe. We could not read the MCP tool annotations, which need a sign-in (14 of 20). A call needs only `url` and one output flag. The only official client is Python, with a Scrapy plugin (9 of 15).)
- Security & auth, Zyte API +10: Decodo Web Data API 45 (One Bearer API key per Web Data API subscription with no scopes, and no rotation or revocation steps found in the reviewed docs. The hosted MCP server adds OAuth 2.1 with PKCE and dynamic registration, but its metadata advertises no scopes. No query-string credential is documented (20 of 30). Scraping only reads, and the MCP tools are annotated read-only, but `http_method: POST` sends requests to target sites and there is no read-only key (8 of 20). No guidance on treating scraped content as untrusted was found in the docs or the MCP README (0 of 15). The dashboard statistics API reports traffic by target, and each response carries an `x-task-id`. No per-call audit log (7 of 15). ISO/IEC 27001:2022 for proxies and the Scraping API, a SafeBase trust centre and KYC at signup. security.txt answers 404 and no disclosure policy or bug bounty was found (10 of 20). 20 + 8 + 0 + 7 + 10 = 45.); Zyte API 55 (API keys are revocable, an organisation can hold several, and none travels in a URL. Keys carry no permission scopes. Zyte MCP signs in over OAuth and works through its own key, `mcp_access_key` (22 of 30). An owner can set a blocking spending limit per key. We found no read-only mode, and the MCP docs warn that the agent can delete schedules and collections with no undo, leaving approval to the MCP client (8 of 20). The API returns untrusted web content, and the only guidance found is to review what the agent asks to do (2 of 15). The Stats API and dashboard break usage down by key, domain and request type, requests can be tagged, and each response has a `request-id`. No per-request log for the operator was found (10 of 15). ISO 27001 certification per the trust centre, a responsible disclosure programme with a hall of fame and no rewards, penetration test reports under NDA, and no security.txt (www.zyte.com/.well-known/security.txt answered 404 on 1 November) (13 of 20).)
- Maintenance & community, Decodo Web Data API +8: Decodo Web Data API 85 (Read for a closed service with open clients. The newest releases are MCP server 1.7.0 on 29 October 2026 and @decodo/sdk-ts 3.0.0 on 30 October (30). Since 8 August, MCP server 1.2.5 to 1.7.0 (ten versions in the official registry) and sdk-ts 2.4.0 to 3.0.0 (20). No public API changelog. Support by 24/7 live chat, email and Discord, and the MCP repository had commits by Decodo staff on most days from 6 October to 5 November. GitHub issues couldn't be read, since api.github.com refused us (10 of 25). In the official MCP registry as io.github.Decodo/mcp-server, with current SDKs in three languages (15). The MCP repository lints, builds and tests on Node 22 and 24 for every pull request (10). 30 + 20 + 10 + 15 + 10 = 85.); Zyte API 77 (The Agentic Web Data plugin (zytedata/skills) released 0.4.1 on 26 October 2026, 6 days before 1 November (30). Every dated source counted. In the 90 days from 3 August the plugin released 0.3.0, 0.3.1, 0.4.0 and 0.4.1 (17 and 22 September, 5 and 26 October) and `scrapy-zyte-api` 0.36.0 on 20 August. `python-zyte-api` 0.11.0 of 23 July has left the window, and its main branch holds unreleased work since (a CVE floor for `brotli`, Python 3.15 support), with no release by 1 November (20). There is no public API changelog. Support runs through tickets and a Discord server, and we did not read GitHub issues (8 of 15 for a closed service). `python-zyte-api` 0.11.0 is current, with Python 3.10 or later, and covers one language. The official MCP registry lists only a third-party Zyte entry (io.github.pipeworx-io/zyte), none from Zyte (12 of 15). The client repository has test and publish workflows and merged dependency updates on 20 and 26 October 2026. We did not see CI results (7 of 10).)
- Transparency & trust, Zyte API +5: Decodo Web Data API 62 (Closed service under a public License Agreement naming UAB "Data troops", with MIT clients (15 of 30). The privacy policy (21 May 2026) gives retention periods by category, says Decodo is processor for scraping and doesn't log proxy traffic content, and a DPA is published. Its general two-year rule sits beside longer specific periods without saying which wins, and no retention for scraped results beyond the 24-hour async window was found (18 of 30). The migration guide says legacy APIs keep working with no end date, and the License Agreement allows discontinuing the service without notice or refunds (6 of 20). The privacy policy names Stripe, DeepL and Paddle, but no subprocessor list or data locations were found in it or the trust centre (6 of 20). 15 + 18 + 6 + 6 = 45.); Zyte API 67 (A closed service with terms last updated on 22 September 2026 (unchanged on 1 November) that name Zyte Group Limited and contain a Zyte API section. The Python client is BSD 3-Clause (15 of 30). The privacy policy (30 August 2024), a DPA and a sub-processor list are public, with retention stated for support tickets (4 years) and invoices (7 years). Retention of request data and scraped content isn't stated, and the terms let Zyte use Service Data for product development and product training (17 of 30). Site tier changes get two weeks' notice and the Smart Proxy Manager retirement was announced with a date, but there is no standing API deprecation policy and the terms allow changes with or without notice (10 of 20). The sub-processor list names 36 companies with addresses and purposes, and the privacy policy names the United States and Ireland as processing locations (16 of 20).)