Web scraping has become a must-have skill for people whose day-to-day lives revolve around data. These include developers, marketing teams, researchers, and data scientists. It is a great way to gain insights, gather information, improve data analysis processes, and build digital products that scale and meet the needs of the audience.
Many websites have implemented anti-bot measures to detect and block the activities of automated tools on their websites. However, going to websites one after the other to get data can be time-consuming, discouraging, and stressful.
Because of this, multiple tools and technologies have evolved over the years to help bypass these mechanisms and ease the workflow of web scrapers, saving tangible time, cost, and resources. Some of these tools include proxies and proxy rotators and, anti-CAPTCHA tools, or even all-in-one web scraping APIs.
Among the numerous tools available, we’ll compare ZenRows vs ScrapingBee today, both web scraping APIs. They both provide robust features for web scraping.
ScrapingBee is a tool that eases web scraping workflows and helps developers avoid being blocked. Meanwhile, ZenRows is a powerful ScrapingBee alternative because of its advanced features, like proxy rotation, headless browsers, handling JavaScript-rendered websites, CAPTCHA handling, and others.
This article analyzes their key features, performance, reliability, pricing, and effectiveness. It highlights the strength of each one and will help you make informed decisions per use case. Let’s go!
Similarities Between ZenRows and ScrapingBee
Both ZenRows and ScrapingBee aim to provide a reliable and uninterrupted scraping experience. They handle the underlying complexities and technicalities of web scraping, allowing users to focus solely on obtaining the desired data without concerns.
ZenRows and ScrapingBee are both powerful web scraping APIs that offer a range of features to facilitate data extraction from websites. Despite their unique qualities, there are several similarities between the two services.
They have some similarities, including user-friendly APIs, support for dynamic websites and JavaScript rendering, proxy rotation for anonymity, data extraction and conversion, and a focus on providing a hassle-free scraping experience.
Table of Contents
1. Documentation
Both ZenRows and ScrapingBee provide user-friendly APIs and well-documented resources, including code samples in various programming languages. This makes it easy for users, regardless of their expertise or familiarity level, to integrate and implement the APIs seamlessly into the developers’ workflows.
2. Handling Dynamic Content
One notable similarity is that both APIs excel in handling dynamic websites and JavaScript-rendered content. ZenRows and ScrapingBee can mimic user actions such as scrolling, submitting forms, and waiting for site loading, ensuring accurate scraping results and interactive actions even on websites with complex JavaScript interactions.
3. Proxy Rotation
Both ZenRows and ScrapingBee offer proxy rotation capabilities to maintain a high level of anonymity and prevent IP blocking. By randomly rotating shared IP addresses from a large pool of proxies, both services make it challenging for websites to detect and block scraping activities.
4. Extraction Formats
ZenRows and ScrapingBee allow users to extract data from various sources and convert it into formats like JSON or CSV.
5. Ease of Use:
Both ZenRows and ScrapingBee’s APIs are known for their intuitive and beginner-friendly interface. It is easy for developers with different skill or expertise levels to adapt to them and use them effectively for their work.
The Winner between ZenRows vs ScrapingBee
Let’s discuss the differences between these powerful tools.
1. Anti-Bot Bypass:
Although both tools have features to overcome bot detection measures, ZenRows offers higher and more advanced effectivity in this regard. It is easier to avoid getting blocked with ZenRows because of its packed anti-bot toolkit, reliability, and efficiency.
2. Proxy Network
Both ZenRows and Scraping Bee proxy rotation systems switch IP addresses dynamically. They rotate through a collection of dedicated IP addresses, providing a reliable and secure scraping experience.
During increased traffic, ScrapingBee tends to be slower than ZenRows. ScrapingBee and ZenRows prioritize anonymity, but ZenRows has an edge in providing reliability, speed, and scalability due to its high-level proxy rotation abilities and combination with other anti-bot bypass measures.
3. Concurrent Requests
Concurrent requests in web scraping involve making multiple requests at the same time. With ZenRows’ cheapest plan, you can make up to 10 concurrent requests and get up to 250,000 API credits, which is higher than ScrapingBee’s 5 concurrent requests and 150,000 API credits. This saves a lot of time and provides a better price for the user.
4. Pricing
Both APIs offer pricing plans depending on users’ web scraping needs. Whether you are new to web scraping or you are a large-scale web scraper, there is a subscription plan that suits you.
In the event of a failed request, ZenRows’ users are not charged, ensuring cost-effectiveness and minimizing financial risks.
5. Support
ZenRows provides better support for its users compared to ScrapingBee. In addition to documentation and FAQs, ZenRows’ developers offer support via chat and email to help you when you get stuck while using the tool for web scraping activities.
Conclusion
In this article, you read about two widely-adopted web scraping tools: ZenRows vs ScrapingBee. You learned their differences, how they work, and the edge ZenRows has over ScrapingBee.
Considering the outlined points in this article, comparing ZenRows and ScrapingBee based on avoiding getting blocked, cost, and allowed concurrent requests, ZenRows stands out as the superior option. ZenRows is better in terms of anti-bot bypass, speed, and reliability. Also, ZenRows’ pricing structure provides a compelling balance between the cost and features; it is a cheaper and more cost-effective option.