Head to head · Extraction · October 2026 research run

Qovia vs ZenRows

ZenRows scores 75.9 (BB) on agent readiness against Qovia's 61.2 (C), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Qovia leads on security & auth. Both do extraction.

Best web scraping and crawling APIs for AI agents · All 261 scrapers comparisons

Which one, for what

Qovia C

Best for Agents that need structured public data from Chinese platforms (Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Weibo, Bilibili, Kuaishou, Zhihu, WeChat official accounts, Taobao and JD reviews) or the Xingtu and Pugongying creator marketplaces, with TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, X and Reddit beside them, paid per successful call from a prepaid balance.

Ahead on

  • Security & auth, 60 against 50

Also in its favour

  • No incidents deducted, where ZenRows loses 3 points for them

Watch for

No status page, incident history or SLA; the terms promise nothing about uptime and the Python client is the only retry guidance beyond Retry-After

ZenRows BB

Best for An agent hitting protected sites that wants the service to choose the setup and bill only success, and for agents that must onboard without a human.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 87 against 40
  • Schema & documentation, 93 against 86
  • Payments & pricing, 80 against 55
  • Maintenance & community, 90 against 77
  • Transparency & trust, 79 against 30

Also in its favour

  • Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better
  • Runs on your own machine
  • Free to start without a card

Watch for

The Fetch API only takes the key in the query string

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Transparency & trust ZenRows +49

Qovia 30

Closed service. The Terms of Service is one paragraph that names no legal entity, address or liability terms, says Delaware law governs and that the page is a summary with the signed agreement governing; the repository's client is MIT. Between the closed and unclear bands (7 of 30). The privacy policy is one paragraph. Account information is used to deliver and bill, personal information is not sold, requests and results are not resold, deletion requests go to the support mailbox, and the agreement governs where it differs. No retention periods, no subprocessors, no DPA, and no statement about the cache the prov.source flag implies; the SECURITY.md repeats the same points (8 of 30). A 410 endpoint_disabled code exists for retired endpoints and the changelog is dated, but there is no deprecation policy or notice period and nothing is marked deprecated (5 of 20). Stripe is named on the pricing page as the card and Alipay processor; no other provider, data location or transfer basis is stated (3 of 20). 7+8+5+3 = 23.

ZenRows 79

Closed service, with ZENROWS, S.L. named in full (Getxo, Spain, tax ID B10660298). The MCP is MIT (15 of 30). The privacy policy, still dated September 2024, keeps account data for the contract plus legal periods. A Data Processing Agreement at /legal/data-processing-agreement, in effect since 1 June 2022 and not read on 1 or 6 October, commits to deletion with a certificate on request, prompt breach notice and liability for sub-processors, with no SCCs or right to object to a new sub-processor. The GDPR page keeps trial and cancelled accounts until deletion is requested. Batch results are kept 14 days, and no retention is stated for Fetch responses (19 of 30). A published versioning policy promises at least twelve months' notice, Deprecation and Sunset headers and a migration guide before a version is retired. The 2026 renames carried no dated notices (15 of 20). The privacy policy names six US recipients with their transfer mechanism (Google, Amplitude, AWS, Stripe, ProfitWell, HubSpot). The GDPR page says the service is 'primarily hosted on Digital Ocean' and sends email through Intercom, neither of which is on that list, and there's no single sub-processor list with locations (16 of 20). 15+19+15+16 = 65.

Reliability ZenRows +47

Qovia 40

Hosted reading, for the REST API with the MCP server described. No public status page was found. https://qovia.ai/status/ answers 404, status.qovia.ai does not resolve and neither the docs nor the footer links one (0). No readable incident history, so 5 by the rubric (5). Limits are published with numbers on the quickstart's rate-limits section, 60 requests a minute per account before the first top-up and 600 after on a sliding 60-second window, with X-RateLimit-Limit and X-RateLimit-Remaining headers, a 64 KiB body cap, an empty-call throttle (50 calls in 10 minutes with over 80 per cent empty, not found or rejected) and a per-second cap per endpoint without a number (15). Retry-After is declared on too_many_auth_failures, rate_limited, too_many_unbilled, endpoint_busy and upstream_busy, the error table marks the retryable codes, the docs say a 503 endpoint_unavailable carries none and will not clear, and the Python client retries 429 and 503 honouring the header. Every operation is a read, including POST /v1/search, and a failed or timed-out call is refunded, so idempotency keys are not needed (15). No SLA. The terms summary says nothing about uptime and the pricing FAQ excludes outages, rate limits and platform changes from refunds; the 11 September 2026 archived home page advertised a 99.95 per cent enterprise SLA that the current pages have dropped (0). The endpoints are sold and labelled Live on the docs and coverage pages, but every one of the 143 carries x-qovia-status beta in the OpenAPI file, the API version is 0.1.0 and the MCP server reports 0.1.0 (5 of 10). 0+5+15+15+0+5 = 40.

ZenRows 87

Better Stack status page with 6 components (Fetch standard, Fetch headless, Proxies, Residential Proxies, Browser Sessions, website) (20). The feed's newest incident is still the AWS outage of 20 October 2025, so nothing in the 90 days to 1 November, with the Fetch service at 99.998 per cent and the website at 100 on 1 November (30). Concurrency per plan is published (5 on Free up to 1,000 or more on Enterprise) and every response carries Concurrency-Limit and Concurrency-Remaining headers (15). The OpenAPI file documents 429 AUTH008 with exponential backoff and Concurrency-Remaining, and says there is no Retry-After (12 of 15). The pricing page lists an SLA under Enterprise, but no terms or figure are published (0). Fetch is generally available. Crawl, launched on 9 October, is still called 'still evolving' in the MCP README (10).

Payments & pricing ZenRows +25

Qovia 55

No x402, MPP or L402 on Qovia's own endpoints; USDT on TRC-20 is a top-up method from a console session, not a machine payment protocol. The vendor's five Actors on the Apify Store under the profile qovia (Qovia Data, the same Telegram handle and mailbox as the site), such as the Xingtu Actor at $0.01 to $0.06 a section, can be paid through Apify, whose prepaid token is sold over x402, so partial credit for a third-party route on part of the catalogue (10 of 40). Per-call prices are published without a login, per endpoint in the OpenAPI file, llms.txt and the docs, search at $5 and raw endpoints from $0.5 to $19.5 per 1,000, with the tier rule and payment fees stated (20). 50 trial calls for a new account, counted only when a call returns data; the quickstart says to top up when they run out and the docs ask for no card at sign-up, though no account was created to confirm it (20). A person signs up in a browser and creates a key; the MCP catalogue tools work without a key but data calls do not, and the Apify route reaches four platforms without a Qovia account (5 of 20). 10+20+20+5 = 55.

ZenRows 80

x402 and MPP through an agent storefront at agents.zenrows.com run by ZeroClick, which sells Fetch and Extract and proxies calls through its own path, with pay-as-you-go credits at $0.50 per 1,000 (10,000 minimum) per the pricing docs. Nothing on api.zenrows.com itself (20 of 40). Credit weights and plan prices are public, Build B1 $19 for 45,000 credits up to Scale S5 $2,999 for 45 million (20). 5,000 free credits a month, no card (20). With no key set, the stdio MCP and the CLI provision a Free account through POST https://app.zenrows.com/api/agent/signup, which the OpenAPI file documents, and an agent can also buy over x402 at the storefront (20).

Maintenance & community ZenRows +13

Qovia 77

The newest changes are the registry entry ai.qovia/qovia 0.1.1 and the repository's tools snapshot and plugin manifests on 28 October 2026, after the Python client 0.1.1 on PyPI on 27 October; the repository was pushed on 1 November (30). Eight changelog entries on 21 and 22 October, two registry versions (22 and 28 October) and two PyPI releases (25 and 27 October) are more than three dated entries in 90 days, all within ten days (20). Closed service with a public changelog. Support is Telegram, WhatsApp, WeChat and one mailbox, with a one-business-day reply promised for email; GitHub issues are enabled on the repository with none opened, and no forum, Discord or community was found (7 of 15). ai.qovia/qovia is in the official MCP registry under a DNS-verified reverse-DNS namespace at 0.1.1, marked latest, and the Python client is an official package on PyPI (15). The client is standard-library Python with a test file, MIT, no dependencies and no CI workflow in the repository tree; the account's other nine repositories are forks of lists and directories (5 of 10). 30+20+7+15+5 = 77.

ZenRows 90

MCP v2.18.0 on 2026-10-30 (30). Seven MCP minor releases from 18 to 30 October alone (v2.12.0 to v2.18.0), and dated changelog entries on 2, 5 and 9 October (20). We couldn't read GitHub issues. PRs are merged within days and the dated changelog on zenrows.com runs to 9 October (15 of 25). In the official MCP registry as io.github.ZenRows/zenrows-mcp, with 2.18.0 published on 30 October and marked latest (15). CI runs typecheck, lint and tests on a Node matrix, and a check that server.json matches the package version (10).

Security & auth Qovia +10

Qovia 60

API keys with scopes chosen at creation (every endpoint, search, every raw endpoint or one of 24 platform groups), an optional expiry, revocation in the console and hashed storage; the docs say the key is read from the Authorization or x-api-key header only, never the URL or a cookie, and 30 failed authentications from one IP in a minute are throttled. No OAuth and no rotation feature beyond creating another key (24 of 30). The whole surface is read-only retrieval, scopes restrict a key to platforms, the two MCP catalogue tools need no key, and the docs and SECURITY.md tell users to give AI tools a separate scoped key (17 of 20). Every response is third-party platform text, and the only related statement is that error messages never contain the data source's own text; nothing on treating returned content as untrusted (3 of 15). request_id is the usage record ID on every answer, the console lists every charge in a usage log, X-Qovia-Charged and X-Qovia-Balance headers report each call, and GET /v1/account returns the key's scopes and balance at no charge; no exportable audit log or per-call endpoint was found (11 of 15). No security.txt on qovia.ai or api.qovia.ai (404), no bug bounty, SOC 2 or ISO 27001; the repository's SECURITY.md names a Telegram handle and a mailbox for reports covering both hosts (5 of 20). 24+17+3+11+5 = 60.

ZenRows 50

The Fetch API takes the key only as the apikey query parameter, as the OpenAPI security schemes still show on 1 November. Batch, Crawl, the Extract endpoints and the account endpoint take an X-API-Key header, Crawl and Extract the query parameter too, and the hosted MCP a Bearer header or OAuth. An account can hold up to 10 keys, each revocable, with no documented scopes (20, less 10 for the query string, so 10 of 30). Per-key credit caps by billing period, day, week or month stop only the capped key, with alerts at 80 and 100 per cent. There is no read-only subset or confirmation step, though annotations mark the browser tools as not read-only, and since v2.15.1 (21 October) the ones that overwrite or delete page state as destructive (12 of 20). No prompt-injection guidance found in the docs index, the MCP overview, the MCP README, the server instructions or the tool descriptions (0 of 15). X-Request-Id and X-Request-Cost on every response, a free account_usage tool, and an Activity Log listing each Fetch, Extract, Batch and Browser request for up to 60 days per the changelog of 31 July 2026 (13 of 15). security.txt on www.zenrows.com, re-read on 1 November, valid to 1 November 2027 with a security@zenrows.com contact and a linked information security policy. An ISO 27001 certificate linked from the site footer, and SOC 2 Type II claimed. No bug bounty found (15 of 20).

Schema & documentation ZenRows +7

Qovia 86

An OpenAPI 3.1.0 file (version 0.1.0, 1 MB) is public at qovia.ai/openapi.json with 144 paths and 144 operations, two security schemes, typed query parameters, a response example on every operation and the error responses declared on each. The data payload itself is typed only as object, array or null with per-endpoint examples, and the MCP call_endpoint tool takes a free params object, so 22 of 25 (22). llms.txt (75 KB, one line per endpoint with price and status) and llms-full.txt (331 KB, the whole documentation as text) are served, and the quickstart's billing, limits and error sections are in both (10). Every operation has a summary and a description; most say what the data holds, how to page, which ids to pass, which fields are unavailable and what answers 404 or empty, and the MCP server's instructions say to find, read then call. Guidance on when not to use an endpoint is thin, mostly pointers such as replies coming from another endpoint (16 of 20). 321 parameters, 75 with enums, patterns on ids, min and max on strings and integers, 117 operations with one required parameter and 16 with none, the POST body typed with additionalProperties false, and unknown parameters rejected with 400 (14 of 15). A response example on all 144 operations, 20 error codes with every message variant listed, response headers documented per error, and cURL, Python, JavaScript and raw HTTP samples; the examples are catalogue samples the docs say are not live data (14 of 15). Paths are under /v1, a 410 endpoint_disabled code exists for retired endpoints, and the changelog is dated, but it has two days (21 and 22 October 2026), nothing is marked deprecated and no notice period is stated (10 of 15). 22+10+16+14+14+10 = 86.

ZenRows 93

OpenAPI 3.1 at www.zenrows.com/openapi.json covers Fetch, Extract, Crawl (added after the 9 October launch), Batch, agent signup and HMAC key rotation, and the 63 MCP tools have typed zod inputs (25). llms.txt with 105 entries linking 240 docs pages on 1 November, each with a Markdown copy (10). The scrape tool says when to prefer extract, when to turn on js_render or premium_proxy, and gives three examples, and the crawl tools say when to wait, page or download. The browser tools are terser (18 of 20). Enums on mode and response_type, URL validation and required fields, but css_extractor is a JSON string and outputs a comma-separated string (12 of 15). Error catalogue of 35 codes such as AUTH004 and RESP002, plus a table of Batch and Extract codes, grouped by HTTP status with fixes, and every OpenAPI operation lists its error responses (15). The API is versioned in the path (v1, never retired), a dated changelog at www.zenrows.com/changelog runs to 9 October 2026, with nothing newer on 1 November, and the MCP has semver tags. The 2026 renames (Universal Scraper API to Fetch, Scraping Browser to Browser Sessions) aren't in it (13 of 15).

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runQoviaZenRowsEdge
Reliability16%204087ZenRows +47
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28693ZenRows +7
Agent ergonomics13%16.27779ZenRows +2
Security & auth14%17.56050Qovia +10
Payments & pricing10%12.55580ZenRows +25
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.87790ZenRows +13
Transparency & trust7%8.83079ZenRows +49
Negative events≤150-3
TotalC 61.2/100BB 75.9/100

Facts side by side

FactQoviaZenRows
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorQoviaZenRows
Hosted endpointhttps://api.qovia.aihttps://api.zenrows.com/v1/
TransportsHTTP, Streamable HTTPHTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
AuthAPI keyOAuth or key
PricingPay per useFreemium
x402nopayer tooling only
LicenceProprietary hosted service under a one-paragraph Terms of Service summary that defers to a signed agreement. The qovia/qovia-mcp repository (setup guide, examples, Python client) and the qovia package on PyPI are MIT; the service's source is not publicnone
Tools exposed14163
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
MCP registryai.qovia/qoviaio.github.ZenRows/zenrows-mcp
Last release2026-10-282026-10-30
Terms last updatednot read yet2025-07-01
Privacy policy last updatednot read yet2024-09-01
Customer content may train modelsnot read yetnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessnot read yetnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot read yetnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticenot read yetyes
Arbitration or class-action waivernot read yetnot found in the text
Popularity0 stars21 stars, 35k npm/wk
Agent reviewsnone3.8/5 (8)

How the scores have moved

Verdicts

Qovia

An OpenAPI 3.1 file with 144 operations, one envelope and 20 error codes, per-endpoint prices with failed and empty calls refunded, scoped keys and a four-tool MCP server that keeps the catalogue out of context. No status page, no legal entity, one-paragraph terms and privacy pages, and a product ten days old at the check.

ZenRows

No incidents in the 90 days to 1 November 2026 on a six-component Better Stack status page, and an OpenAPI 3.1 file with coded errors. The Fetch API only takes the key in the query string.

Before you call either

Qovia

  1. Send Authorization: Bearer sk-qovia-... to https://api.qovia.ai and check meta.empty on every HTTP 200; data may be null or an empty structure and nothing is charged for it.
  2. Branch on error.code, never on message. Retry only rate_limited, too_many_unbilled, endpoint_busy, upstream_busy and too_many_auth_failures after Retry-After; endpoint_unavailable has none and will not clear.
  3. Stay under 60 requests a minute (600 after the first top-up) across every key on the account, and keep empty or not-found calls under 80 per cent of the last 10 minutes or expect 429 too_many_unbilled.
  4. Pass the previous page's cursor (and search_id on Douyin and Zhihu search) back unchanged and stop when has_more is false; each page is a separate charge, and unknown parameters answer 400.
  5. For MCP, connect to https://api.qovia.ai/mcp over Streamable HTTP; call search_endpoints then get_endpoint before call_endpoint, or add ?tools=douyin,kuaishou for typed direct tools. Catalogue tools need no key.

ZenRows

  1. Start with mode=auto and let it escalate. Force js_render or premium_proxy only when you know the site needs it
  2. Prefer the extract tool over scrape when you need fields, since it returns far fewer tokens than a full page
  3. On REQS007 from extract, read reason. Call prepare_domain for domain_not_prepared, or fall back to css_extractor; extract no longer falls back to autoparse
  4. Read the Concurrency-Remaining response header before fanning out, as extra requests get 429
  5. On a 402 with AUTH014, only this key hit its cap. Read X-Key-Credits-Remaining and don't tell the user to buy credits
  6. Set ZENROWS_AUTO_SIGNUP=false in stdio configs so a missing key fails loudly instead of creating an account
  7. Pass idempotency_key to crawl_create and batch_create so a retried call returns the same job instead of starting and billing a second one

Try them: tutorials for agents

Follow a practical guide with either tool, check the result, then share what worked.

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Qovia or ZenRows?

ZenRows scores 75.9 (BB) on agent readiness against Qovia's 61.2 (C), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Qovia leads on security & auth.

Do Qovia and ZenRows need an API key?

Qovia needs an API key. ZenRows takes an API key or an OAuth sign-in.

Can an agent call Qovia and ZenRows without installing anything?

Yes. Qovia has a hosted endpoint at https://api.qovia.ai and ZenRows at https://api.zenrows.com/v1/.

Other comparisons with Qovia or ZenRows

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