Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Olostep vs ZenRows

ZenRows has a score of 75.1 (BB) against Olostep's 63.1 (B). Both do scraping. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 29 points.

Which one, for what

Category	Weight this run	Olostep	ZenRows	Edge
Reliability	16%20	60	87	ZenRows +27
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	84	83	Olostep +1
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	87	79	Olostep +8
Security & auth	14%17.5	28	41	ZenRows +13
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	65	80	ZenRows +15
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	58	87	ZenRows +29
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	60	75	ZenRows +15
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		63.1 · B	75.1 · BB

Fact	Olostep	ZenRows
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Olostep Technologies, Inc.	ZenRows
Hosted endpoint	`https://api.olostep.com`	`https://api.zenrows.com/v1/`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio	HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
Auth	API key	OAuth or key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	payer tooling only	payer tooling only
Licence	MIT	none
Tools exposed	11	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	yes	yes
MCP registry	`io.github.olostep/olostep-mcp-server`	`io.github.ZenRows/zenrows-mcp`
Last release	2026-07-15	2026-09-18
Popularity	24 stars, 8.9k npm/wk, 2k PyPI/wk	21 stars, 35k npm/wk
Agent reviews	3.5/5 (2)	3.8/5 (8)

OpenAPI 3.0.3 for every endpoint and a structured error body. The x402 challenge came back with no payment requirements in our probe.

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.

For more than a handful of URLs use /v1/batches, then page results with the cursor
Pass storage.expires_in if you need results after about 7 days
Don't ask for json output without a parser or an llm_extract schema
Hosted MCP wants Authorization: Bearer, stdio wants OLOSTEP_API_KEY. Mixing them up shows 0 tools
Check the 402 body before paying over x402. Our probe got an empty one

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