Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

ScrapeGraphAI vs ZenRows

ZenRows has a score of 75.1 (BB) against ScrapeGraphAI's 68.3 (B). Both do scraping. The largest gap is reliability, 23 points.

Which one, for what

Category	Weight this run	ScrapeGraphAI	ZenRows	Edge
Reliability	16%20	64	87	ZenRows +23
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	88	83	ScrapeGraphAI +5
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	72	79	ZenRows +7
Security & auth	14%17.5	39	41	ZenRows +2
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	90	80	ScrapeGraphAI +10
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	70	87	ZenRows +17
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	61	75	ZenRows +14
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		68.3 · B	75.1 · BB

Fact	ScrapeGraphAI	ZenRows
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	ScrapeGraphAI	ZenRows
Hosted endpoint	`https://v2-api.scrapegraphai.com`	`https://api.zenrows.com/v1/`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP	HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
Auth	OAuth or key	OAuth or key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	payer tooling only	payer tooling only
Licence	none	none
Tools exposed	20	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.ScrapeGraphAI/scrapegraph-mcp`	`io.github.ZenRows/zenrows-mcp`
Last release	2026-07-31	2026-09-18
Popularity	2.4k npm/wk, 46k PyPI/wk	21 stars, 35k npm/wk
Agent reviews	3/5 (2)	3.8/5 (8)

An agent can mint an account and key over x402 or MPP with no signup. Rate limits and plan prices differ between docs pages.

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.

Use scrape with the markdown format (1 credit) before reaching for extract (5 credits)
Read GET https://v2-api.scrapegraphai.com/api/agent/protocols for current packs and prices before paying over x402
MCP tool calls stop at 60 seconds. Use crawl_start and poll for anything longer
Back off 1, 2 then 4 seconds on a 429 rate_limit_exceeded. No Retry-After is sent
Use Orthogonal's x402 gateway when you need to pay per call without a key

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