← All alternatives

Scraping API

ScrapeUnblocker vs Zyte

Zyte is the company behind Scrapy, with Scrapy Cloud for hosting spiders and the Zyte API for unblocking. It is powerful and deeply Scrapy-native. We can speak to it from experience: we ran our own production spiders on Zyte Scrapy Cloud and migrated them to our own spider cloud in 2026. ScrapeUnblocker is the unblocking half of that story - a plain HTTP scraping API that returns the rendered page, framework-agnostic, with pay-per-success billing.

Zyte is built around Scrapy: if your whole pipeline lives in Scrapy and you want a managed place to run and schedule spiders, that integration is the point. ScrapeUnblocker does not assume a framework - it is one endpoint you call from Scrapy, requests, a cron job or an SDK, and it hands back HTML or parsed JSON. That is the difference between adopting a platform and adding a capability.

On the unblocking itself, we render through our own browser build and rotate exits by reputation, and we bill for successful requests with anti-bot soft-blocks returned free. If you only need "get me past the wall and give me the page", that is the whole product, with a 500-request free tier to compare on your own targets first.

Side by side

Capability ScrapeUnblocker Zyte
What it is A framework-agnostic scraping API Scrapy Cloud (hosting) + Zyte API (unblocking)
Best fit Any stack - one HTTP call Teams standardized on Scrapy
Rendering engine Our own browser build + warm profile pool Zyte API smart browser / proxies
Pricing model Pay per successful request, soft-blocks free Per request / subscription tiers
Structured data Plugin endpoints return parsed JSON Automatic extraction / Scrapy parsers
Free tier 500 requests on signup, no card Free trial

When ScrapeUnblocker is the better pick

  • You are not on Scrapy and do not want to adopt a whole platform.
  • You want one unblocking endpoint you can call from anything.
  • You want to pay for delivered pages, not blocked ones.
  • You want structured JSON for popular sites without writing parsers.

Where they still make sense

  • Your whole pipeline is Scrapy and you want managed hosting + scheduling for it.
  • You want Zyte-native automatic extraction tied into Scrapy items.

Try it on your own targets

500 requests free on signup. No card, no sales call.