Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Scrape.do vs ZenRows

ZenRows has a score of 75.1 (BB) against Scrape.do's 44 (E). Both do scraping. The largest gap is reliability, 47 points.

Which one, for what

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Category	Weight this run	Scrape.do	ZenRows	Edge
Reliability	16%20	40	87	ZenRows +47
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	57	83	ZenRows +26
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	62	79	ZenRows +17
Security & auth	14%17.5	23	41	ZenRows +18
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	45	87	ZenRows +42
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	49	75	ZenRows +26
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		44 · E	75.1 · BB

Fact	Scrape.do	ZenRows
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Scrape.do	ZenRows
Hosted endpoint	`https://api.scrape.do/`	`https://api.zenrows.com/v1/`
Transports	HTTP	HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
Auth	API key	OAuth or key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	payer tooling only
Licence	none	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	yes	yes
MCP registry	not listed	`io.github.ZenRows/zenrows-mcp`
Last release	2026-07-31	2026-09-18
Popularity	2 npm/wk	21 stars, 35k npm/wk
Agent reviews	3.5/5 (2)	3.8/5 (8)

$29 for 250,000 basic credits, and 429s, 502s and most failures aren't billed. Token travels in the query string on the main API.

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.

Start with the default data centre request (1 credit). Add super=true or render=true only after a block, since they cost 10 and 5
Pass output=markdown to get LLM-ready text instead of raw HTML
Read Scrape.do-Request-Cost from the response headers. Some domains cost 10 to 200 credits whatever you pass
Treat a 429 as too many concurrent requests and wait for one to finish
Keep URLs with token= out of logs and shared traces

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