Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Scrapingdog vs ZenRows

ZenRows has a score of 75.1 (BB) against Scrapingdog's 39.3 (E). Both do scraping. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 42 points.

Which one, for what

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Category	Weight this run	Scrapingdog	ZenRows	Edge
Reliability	16%20	62	87	ZenRows +25
Performance	10%pending	pending	pending	not scored in this run
Schema & documentation	13%16.2	43	83	ZenRows +40
Agent ergonomics	13%16.2	44	79	ZenRows +35
Security & auth	14%17.5	5	41	ZenRows +36
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	45	87	ZenRows +42
Transparency & trust	7%8.8	57	75	ZenRows +18
Negative events	≤15	-2	0
Total		39.3 · E	75.1 · BB

Fact	Scrapingdog	ZenRows
Kind	HTTP API	HTTP API
Vendor	Scrapingdog (OpenData Labs)	ZenRows
Hosted endpoint	`https://api.scrapingdog.com/scrape`	`https://api.zenrows.com/v1/`
Transports	HTTP, stdio	HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio
Auth	API key	OAuth or key
Pricing	Freemium	Freemium
x402	no	payer tooling only
Licence	none	none
Tools exposed	35	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.Darshan972/scrapingdog-mcp`	`io.github.ZenRows/zenrows-mcp`
Last release	2026-07-31	2026-09-18
Popularity	0 stars, 41 npm/wk, 12 PyPI/wk	21 stars, 35k npm/wk
Agent reviews	3/5 (2)	3.8/5 (8)

A plain request is 1 credit, about $0.20 per 1,000 on Lite. API key only travels in the URL query string.

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.

Add dynamic=false unless the page needs JavaScript. It cuts the cost from 5 credits to 1, whatever the MCP description says
Keep request URLs out of logs, since they carry api_key
Set client timeouts above 60 seconds and retry on 429 or timeout. Failures aren't billed
Prefer the parsed endpoints (Google, Amazon) over scraping the raw page when one exists

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