ZenRows vs ScrapingBee Pricing and Cost per 1,000 Scraped Pages

ZenRows and ScrapingBee get compared more than almost any other pair of scraping APIs, and the reason is that they look alike. Both take a URL, rotate the proxy, render JavaScript on request and return HTML or extracted data. Both sell monthly plans of credits. Both start at 19 USD. Both charge more credits for rendering and for residential proxies, and the multipliers are nearly identical.

That last point is what decides the comparison. When two vendors price the same features at the same number of credits, the cheaper vendor is simply the one that sells credits for less. This article puts both on one scale, dollars per 1,000 pages, for the page types teams actually pay for. Plans were read from zenrows.com/pricing and scrapingbee.com/pricing on October 15, 2026, monthly billing in USD, and credit rules come from each vendor's documentation. We sell a scraping API that competes with both, so we say plainly where each wins. Per vendor detail is in our ZenRows pricing breakdown and ScrapingBee pricing breakdown.

ZenRows and ScrapingBee plans side by side

ZenRows sells four self serve plans, each in three sizes, so the ladder has twelve rungs from 19 to 999 USD, and the Scale plan now also offers 1,999 and 2,999 USD sizes. ScrapingBee has five self serve plans from 19 to 599 USD, then enterprise tiers from 999 USD. The table lines up the rungs at similar prices.

At the same price ScrapingBee gives roughly twice the credits from 49 USD upward, and about two thirds more at 19 USD. ZenRows narrows the gap with its yearly discount, which takes about a sixth off, and with finer rungs that let you buy closer to your real volume. Neither changes the picture much on its own. The page costs do.

How ZenRows and ScrapingBee count credits per page

ZenRows charges 1 credit for a standard request, 5 with JavaScript rendering, 10 with premium residential proxies and 25 with both. That is the whole ladder: 25 is the most a single page can cost, and it already includes the anti-bot handling ZenRows applies on its premium route.

ScrapingBee charges 1 credit for a request through classic proxies with rendering off, 5 with rendering, which is its default, 10 for premium proxies without rendering and 25 with it. Above that sits the stealth proxy at 75 credits, sold for the sites that block both classic and premium addresses. Google search URLs have their own rate of 15 credits on classic or premium proxies.

The first four rows are identical. That is unusual in this market, and it means the vendor with cheaper credits wins those rows outright. The last two rows are where the comparison gets interesting. The Google row carries an assumption: ZenRows has no Google specific rate, and whether a results page loads on the 10 credit premium route or needs rendering on top depends on the query and region. Test a day of your own keywords before you budget it.

Cost per 1,000 pages on both

Credits per page times the plan's price per credit. Two budget levels: the 19 USD entry plans most people trial on, and the 99 USD plans where small production jobs usually settle.

Read it by row. ScrapingBee is cheaper on every ordinary page type at both budgets, by about 40 percent at 19 USD and by half at 99 USD. ZenRows takes the hardest anti-bot row, and by a wide margin: a page that needs ScrapingBee's stealth proxy costs about one and a half to two times as much as ZenRows' top route. Whether stealth is actually needed is the one fact that flips this comparison, so find out on your own targets before you sign.

Monthly budgets for four real workloads

Each workload on the cheapest plan of each vendor that covers it, monthly billing, no overage. The last column is our flat price for the same pages, for reference.

The premium rows show how close the two get once every page costs 25 credits: 1,250,000 credits is just over the 1,200,000 in ZenRows Growth at 199 USD, so ZenRows needs its 279 USD rung while ScrapingBee covers it with Business at 249. Where stealth applies, ScrapingBee needs three times the credits and ZenRows costs less than half.

The first two rows are a tie on price, and there ScrapingBee's extra headroom matters more than the invoice: Startup leaves 700,000 and 500,000 credits unused that ZenRows would not. Our flat price is the most expensive option for plain and ordinary rendered pages, and we would not argue with that.

Which one to pick for which job

Pick ScrapingBee when your URL list is mostly ordinary sites, rendered or not, when you run Google searches often, or when you want the most concurrency per dollar. Its credits are cheaper at every comparable price, its plans include more concurrent requests, and its fixed 15 credit Google rate is easy to budget.

Pick ZenRows when the valuable part of your list sits behind serious anti-bot systems and ScrapingBee's tests show you would need stealth. Its ceiling of 25 credits a page caps what a hard target can cost, its yearly plan takes a sixth off, and the twelve rung ladder lets a growing project step up in small increments instead of jumping from 99 to 249 USD.

If the reason you scrape company websites is to collect contact addresses for outreach, neither API is the cheapest route: an email finder with verification built in does that one job without you writing and maintaining a parser.

When a flat price per page beats both

Credit pricing rewards a team that knows its mix in advance and punishes the mix it did not plan for. A retailer adds an anti-bot vendor, a client asks for daily Google positions, a crawler starts rendering pages it never needed to, and the same plan covers a third of what it did last month.

Our plans charge one successful request per page whatever the target: 0.98 USD per 1,000 on Starter, 0.60 on Growth and 0.33 on Scale, half that on yearly billing. Residential and datacenter proxies, rendering, retries through blocks and JSON extraction are part of the request, and a blocked page is never billed. That is why the last two rows of the budget table cost 49 USD with us and 199 to 599 USD with either vendor. For Google results specifically, the SERP API returns parsed organic results at the same one request per page, and the Cloudflare scraping API page shows how protected pages are handled without a stealth surcharge.

If you are already leaving a credit API, our ScraperAPI alternative page runs the same arithmetic for ScraperAPI's domain rates, and the ScrapingBee vs ScraperAPI pricing comparison covers the other half of this shortlist. If ScrapingBee is the plan you are paying for today, the ScrapingBee alternative page shows what 49 USD buys on premium, stealth and Google pages, and the ZenRows vs ScraperAPI pricing comparison prices the third pair.

Questions buyers ask

Is ZenRows cheaper than ScrapingBee? Usually not. Both charge 1, 5, 10 and 25 credits for plain, rendered, premium and premium rendered pages, and ScrapingBee sells more credits per dollar at every plan size. ZenRows is cheaper only on targets where ScrapingBee needs its 75 credit stealth proxy, because ZenRows tops out at 25.

Which is better, ZenRows or ScrapingBee? For broad lists of ordinary sites and Google searches, ScrapingBee gives more pages and more concurrency for the money. For lists dominated by heavily protected sites, ZenRows' 25 credit ceiling makes it the cheaper and more predictable choice. Test both on a day of your real URLs before deciding.

How much does ZenRows cost? Build is 19, 29 or 39 USD for 45,000, 80,000 or 120,000 credits; Launch 69, 99 or 129 USD; Growth 199, 279 or 399 USD; Scale from 549 USD for 5,000,000 credits, with yearly billing at ten months for twelve. A rendered page is 5 credits and a premium rendered page 25.

How much does ScrapingBee cost? Hobby is 19 USD for 75,000 credits, Freelance 49 USD for 250,000, Startup 99 USD for 1,000,000, Business 249 USD for 3,000,000 and Business + 599 USD for 8,000,000, with enterprise tiers from 999 USD. A rendered page is 5 credits and a stealth page 75.

Do ZenRows and ScrapingBee charge for failed requests? Both bill successful requests only, and ZenRows documents that a 404 or 410 counts as a success. A block the API cannot get past is not charged on either, so the cost of a hard target shows up as the premium or stealth credits needed to succeed at all.

Is there a cheaper alternative to ZenRows and ScrapingBee? For protected pages and Google results, a flat per page API usually is. On WebScrap every successful page costs 0.33 to 0.98 USD per 1,000 whatever the target, so 50,000 premium rendered pages fit the 49 USD Starter plan.