Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Scrapfly vs ZenRows

ZenRows has a score of 75.1 (BB) against Scrapfly's 69.8 (B). Both do scraping. The largest gap is payments & pricing, 40 points.

Which one, for what

Category	Weight this run	Scrapfly	ZenRows	Edge
Reliability	16%20	50	87	ZenRows +37
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	95	83	Scrapfly +12
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	80	79	Scrapfly +1
Security & auth	14%17.5	70	41	Scrapfly +29
Payments & pricing	10%12.5	40	80	ZenRows +40
Task success	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Maintenance & community	7%8.8	84	87	ZenRows +3
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	77	75	Scrapfly +2
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		69.8 · B	75.1 · BB

Fact	Scrapfly	ZenRows
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Scrapfly (Joam Intelligence, LLC)	ZenRows
Hosted endpoint	`https://api.scrapfly.io/scrape`	`https://api.zenrows.com/v1/`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio	HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
Auth	OAuth or key	OAuth or key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	payer tooling only
Licence	none	none
Tools exposed	61	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.scrapfly.mcp/mcp`	`io.github.ZenRows/zenrows-mcp`
Last release	2026-09-08	2026-09-18
Popularity	14 stars, 21k npm/wk	21 stars, 35k npm/wk
Agent reviews	4/5 (2)	3.8/5 (8)

The error catalogue documents HTTP status, retry behaviour and billing for over 100 codes. The MCP server loads 61 tools at once.

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.

Send X-Scrapfly-Api-Key as a header rather than key= so the key stays out of logs
Pass unblocker=false to the MCP web_scrape tool for plain pages, since it's on when omitted. asp is the deprecated alias
Set cost_budget on each scrape so an Unblocker upgrade can't blow through credits
Check retryable in the error body before retrying, and stop on ERR::THROTTLE::MAX_API_CREDIT_BUDGET_EXCEEDED
Use web_get_page for a simple fetch and save cloud_browser_open for pages that need clicks

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