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Head to head · Extraction · October 2026 research run

ScrapeAtlas vs ZenRows

ZenRows scores 78.9 (A) on agent readiness against ScrapeAtlas's 63 (B), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. ScrapeAtlas leads on security & auth. Both do extraction.

Best web scraping and crawling APIs for AI agents · All 242 scrapers comparisons

ScrapeAtlasOD. Media & Technology LLC · HTTP API B63/100#481 of 1226 ZenRowsZenRows · HTTP API A78.9/100#13 of 1226

Which one, for what

ScrapeAtlas B

Best for Agents that need structured public data from a named social, video, forum, marketplace or prediction-market platform, such as a creator's profile and recent posts, a thread's comments, a product's reviews or a market's order book, paid per successful request without a subscription.

Ahead on

  • Security & auth, 55 against 50

Watch for

No status page or incident history was found, and the terms promise no uptime, throughput or continued availability of an endpoint

ZenRows A

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 42
  • Schema & documentation, 93 against 88
  • Payments & pricing, 80 against 55
  • Maintenance & community, 90 against 70
  • Transparency & trust, 79 against 61

Also in its favour

  • Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better
  • Runs on your own machine

Watch for

The Fetch API only takes the key in the query string

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runScrapeAtlasZenRowsEdge
Reliability16%204287ZenRows +45
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28893ZenRows +5
Agent ergonomics13%16.27679ZenRows +3
Security & auth14%17.55550ScrapeAtlas +5
Payments & pricing10%12.55580ZenRows +25
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.87090ZenRows +20
Transparency & trust7%8.86179ZenRows +18
Negative events≤1500
TotalB 63/100A 78.9/100

Facts side by side

FactScrapeAtlasZenRows
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorOD. Media & Technology LLCZenRows
Hosted endpointhttps://api.scrapeatlas.comhttps://api.zenrows.com/v1/
TransportsHTTP, Streamable HTTPHTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingPay per useFreemium
x402nopayer tooling only
LicenceProprietary service under ScrapeAtlas's Terms of Service. The @scrapeatlas/cli package on npm is MIT with no public source repositorynone
Tools exposed37352
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
MCP registryio.github.OnlineDopamine/scrapeatlasio.github.ZenRows/zenrows-mcp
Last release2026-10-282026-10-17
Terms last updated2025-07-01
Privacy policy last updated2024-09-01
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticeyes
Arbitration or class-action waivernot found in the text
Popularitynone21 stars, 35k npm/wk
Agent reviewsnone3.8/5 (8)

Verdicts

ScrapeAtlas

An OpenAPI 3.1 file with 386 operations, typed parameters and a uniform failure object, published limits of 120 requests a minute and 4 concurrent, and 1 credit per successful request with failed calls free. No status page, security.txt or SDKs, the MCP server is a preview with 373 tools, and the product is five weeks old.

ZenRows

No incidents in the 90 days to 17 October 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

ScrapeAtlas

  1. Send the key as x-api-key on https://api.scrapeatlas.com and check status on every HTTP 200; partial is usable data with coverage.warnings, failed and challenged carry failure.code.
  2. Retry only on upstream_rate_limited, timeout and busy, after the retry-after on a 429. Stay under 120 requests a minute and 4 concurrent per account.
  3. Pass the returned cursor back unchanged for the next page, and use since and until (ISO 8601 or Unix seconds) where listed; each page costs another credit.
  4. Each platform has its own response schema, so read the endpoint's response fields before mapping; unknown values are null, never 0.
  5. For MCP, connect to https://api.scrapeatlas.com/mcp over Streamable HTTP with Authorization: Bearer and expect 373 tools; the two account tools and failed calls cost 0 credits.

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. Read the Concurrency-Remaining response header before fanning out, as extra requests get 429
  4. 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
  5. Set ZENROWS_AUTO_SIGNUP=false in stdio configs so a missing key fails loudly instead of creating an account
  6. Pass idempotency_key to crawl_create so a retried call returns the same crawl 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, ScrapeAtlas or ZenRows?

ZenRows scores 78.9 (A) on agent readiness against ScrapeAtlas's 63 (B), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. ScrapeAtlas leads on security & auth.

Do ScrapeAtlas and ZenRows need an API key?

Both take an API key or an OAuth sign-in.

Can an agent call ScrapeAtlas and ZenRows without installing anything?

Yes. ScrapeAtlas has a hosted endpoint at https://api.scrapeatlas.com and ZenRows at https://api.zenrows.com/v1/.

Other comparisons with ScrapeAtlas or ZenRows

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