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Head to head · Scraping · October 2026 research run

Spider vs Zyte API

Spider scores 74.1 (BB) on agent readiness against Zyte API's 69.7 (B), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Zyte API leads on reliability and security & auth. Both do scraping. Spider accepts x402. Zyte API doesn't.

SpiderSpider (BAGELMEN LLC) · HTTP API BB74.1/100#75 of 841 Zyte APIZyte Group Limited · HTTP API B69.7/100#166 of 841

Which one, for what

Spider BB

Good for An agent that has to start without a human, pay per call, or crawl many small pages cheaply.

Ahead on

  • Payments & pricing, 96 against 40
  • Maintenance & community, 85 against 77

Also in its favour

  • Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better
  • An agent can pay per call over x402, with no account
  • Runs on your own machine
  • Open source

Watch for

Operated by BAGELMEN LLC with no address, retention periods or DPA in the privacy policy

Zyte API B

Good for An agent or pipeline that fetches protected pages and wants the service to choose proxy and browser per site and to bill only success, and teams already on Scrapy.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 85 against 80
  • Security & auth, 55 against 42

Also in its favour

  • Free to start without a card

Watch for

Request price depends on the target site's tier, from $0.13 to $1.27 per 1,000 HTTP requests and $1.01 to $16.08 with a browser on pay-as-you-go

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runSpiderZyte APIEdge
Reliability16%208085Zyte API +5
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28785Spider +2
Agent ergonomics13%16.27072Zyte API +2
Security & auth14%17.54255Zyte API +13
Payments & pricing10%12.59640Spider +56
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88577Spider +8
Transparency & trust7%8.86666even
Negative events≤1500
Total74.1 · BB69.7 · B

Facts side by side

FactSpiderZyte API
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorSpider (BAGELMEN LLC)Zyte Group Limited
Hosted endpointhttps://api.spider.cloudhttps://api.zyte.com/v1/extract
TransportsHTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdioHTTP, Streamable HTTP
AuthOAuth or keyOAuth or key
PricingPay per usePay per use
Price for scraping$0.50 per 1,000 requestsnot published
x402yes, from $0.0005/callno
LicenceMITProprietary service under Zyte's terms of service. The Python client is BSD 3-Clause, and the Agentic Web Data plugin is under Zyte's own end-user licence
Tools exposed2234
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
MCP registrycloud.spider/mcpnot listed
Last release2026-07-192026-10-05
Terms last updated2026-09-012026-09-22
Privacy policy last updated2026-10-012024-08-30
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the textyes
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the textnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the textyes
Arbitration or class-action waivernot found in the textyes
Popularity2.7k stars, 2.7k npm/wk42k PyPI/wk
Agent reviews3.3/5 (8)none

Verdicts

Spider

Keyless /scrape and working x402 v2 on every core route, so an agent needs no account. Operated by BAGELMEN LLC with no address, retention periods or DPA in the privacy policy.

Zyte API

One POST endpoint with an OpenAPI 3 contract picks proxies, browser rendering and extraction per site, bills only successful responses, and sends problem+json errors with Retry-After. Prices vary by target site across five tiers, so cost per request isn't known before the site is assigned one, and no dated API changelog was found.

Before you call either

Spider

  1. Every content route returns a JSON array, even /scrape. The status field is the page's, not the API call's
  2. Leave request on smart and set return_format to markdown for LLM input
  3. Set limit on /crawl. Unset, it caps only at your credit balance
  4. Use /scrape with stealth: true instead of /unblocker, which is deprecated
  5. Honour Retry-After on 429. Keyless use allows 4 requests a minute

Zyte API

  1. Send the API key as the Basic auth username with an empty password to https://api.zyte.com/v1/extract. Set only one of httpResponseBody or browserHtml, or one extraction field
  2. Ask for httpResponseBody before browserHtml. Browser requests cost about eight to thirteen times more per tier
  3. Retry 429, 503 and 520 after the Retry-After seconds, with backoff. They aren't billed. Don't retry 400, 401, 422 or 451
  4. Read statusCode in a 200 response. A target site's 404 comes back as a successful, billed Zyte API response
  5. Have the owner set a blocking spending limit on the key you use. A 403 /auth/account-suspended means the limit or the trial month ended

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Spider or Zyte API?

Spider scores 74.1 (BB) on agent readiness against Zyte API's 69.7 (B), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Zyte API leads on reliability and security & auth.

Do Spider and Zyte API need an API key?

Both take an API key or an OAuth sign-in. An agent can also pay Spider per call over x402, with no account.

Can an agent call Spider and Zyte API without installing anything?

Yes. Spider has a hosted endpoint at https://api.spider.cloud and Zyte API at https://api.zyte.com/v1/extract.

Are Spider and Zyte API open source?

Spider is open source (MIT). No open-source release is listed for Zyte API.

Other comparisons with Spider or Zyte API

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