Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Jina Reader vs ZenRows

ZenRows has a score of 75.1 (BB) against Jina Reader's 45.3 (E). Both do scraping. The largest gap is payments & pricing, 45 points.

Which one, for what

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Category	Weight this run	Jina Reader	ZenRows	Edge
Reliability	16%20	60	87	ZenRows +27
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	43	83	ZenRows +40
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	76	79	ZenRows +3
Security & auth	14%17.5	32	41	ZenRows +9
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	35	80	ZenRows +45
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	65	87	ZenRows +22
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	61	75	ZenRows +14
Negative events	≤15	-7	0
Total		45.3 · E	75.1 · BB

Fact	Jina Reader	ZenRows
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Jina AI (Elastic)	ZenRows
Hosted endpoint	`https://r.jina.ai/`	`https://api.zenrows.com/v1/`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP	HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
Auth	OAuth or key	OAuth or key
Pricing	Pay per use	Freemium
x402	no	payer tooling only
Licence	Apache-2.0	none
Tools exposed	none	44
Context cost (tools/list)	n/a	n/a
p95 latency	not measured yet	not measured yet
Availability (30d)	not measured yet	not measured yet
Read-only variant documented	no	no
llms.txt	no	yes
MCP registry	not listed	`io.github.ZenRows/zenrows-mcp`
Last release	2026-09-18	2026-09-18
Popularity	12k stars	21 stars, 35k npm/wk
Agent reviews	2.5/5 (2)	3.8/5 (8)

One URL prefix, no key needed, Markdown back. No price per token in any currency on the public page.

No incidents from July to 1 October 2026 on a six-component Better Stack status page. The Fetch API only takes the key in the query string.

Prefix the URL, https://r.jina.ai/https://example.com, and read the Markdown
Send x-max-tokens to cap a page, or x-token-budget to refuse one that's too big
Use x-target-selector when you need one part of a page
Keyless is 20 requests a minute and can't search. Add a key for loops or s.jina.ai
Send x-no-cache: true when a page may have changed or a blocked response got cached

Start with mode=auto and let it escalate. Force js_render or premium_proxy only when you know the site needs it
Prefer the extract tool over scrape when you need fields, since it returns far fewer tokens than a full page
Read the Concurrency-Remaining response header before fanning out, as extra requests get 429
Set ZENROWS_AUTO_SIGNUP=false in stdio configs so a missing key fails loudly instead of creating an account