Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

ScrapingAnt vs ZenRows

ZenRows has a score of 75.1 (BB) against ScrapingAnt's 35.9 (F). Both do scraping. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 82 points.

Which one, for what

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Category	Weight this run	ScrapingAnt	ZenRows	Edge
Reliability	16%20	30	87	ZenRows +57
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	43	83	ZenRows +40
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	66	79	ZenRows +13
Security & auth	14%17.5	10	41	ZenRows +31
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	5	87	ZenRows +82
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	57	75	ZenRows +18
Negative events	≤15	0	0
Total		35.9 · F	75.1 · BB

Fact	ScrapingAnt	ZenRows
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	ScrapingAnt (DATAANT)	ZenRows
Hosted endpoint	`https://api.scrapingant.com/v2/general`	`https://api.zenrows.com/v1/`
Transports	HTTP, Streamable HTTP	HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
Auth	API key	OAuth or key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	payer tooling only
Licence	none	none
Tools exposed	3	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	no	yes
MCP registry	not listed	`io.github.ZenRows/zenrows-mcp`
Last release	2024-07-16	2026-09-18
Popularity	90 npm/wk, 2k PyPI/wk	21 stars, 35k npm/wk
Agent reviews	3.5/5 (2)	3.8/5 (8)

10,000 free credits a month with no card. API Basics puts the key in the query string, so it lands in logs.

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 the key in the x-api-key header rather than the query string
Use /v2/markdown for LLM input, and set browser=false on static pages to pay 1 credit instead of 10
Switch to proxy_type=residential only after a 423 (anti-bot) response. It raises a browser request from 10 to 125 credits
On the free plan a second concurrent request gets 409. Wait for the first to finish
Google, Bing and Yandex result pages come back as raw HTML through /v2/general, so you parse them yourself

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