Compare/vs Zyte

Crawl4AI vs Zyte

Both fetch web pages for your code. Zyte prices each website by one of five tiers it sets. Crawl4AI charges by the work each page needed, never charges a failed call, and comes from the team that wrote the open-source crawler.

Facts last checked 12 Nov 2026

Crawl4AI Cloudcrawl4ai.com

1k browser pages$0.50 on any site

A site's 404 pageFree, blocked pages included

CommitmentNone; cancel any time

Data regionEU, Singapore or US

ZZytezyte.com

1k browser pages$1.01 to $16.08, by site tier

A site's 404 pageBilled as a "successful response"

Commitment$100+ for discounts; 50% exit fee

Data regionNot published; may leave EEA

Talk to us about your team See the side by side ↓

Crawl4AI vs Zyte: the short answer

Crawl4AI charges by the work each page needs ($0.50 per 1,000 browser pages on any site) and nothing for a failed call, a site's 404 page included; Zyte prices each site by a tier it sets, per 1,000 browser pages, and bills a site's 404 page as . Crawl4AI needs no commitment and can be cancelled at any time; Zyte's discounts need a $100 to $500 monthly commitment, and its terms allow a fee of to leave a contract early. Crawl4AI runs in the EU, Singapore and the US with SSO, SCIM and an audit log; Zyte publishes no region choice and none of these controls. Agents set Crawl4AI up from one message, and 93 recipes return named sites such as LinkedIn as rows for 1 credit.

Which one fits

Different tools fit different jobs. Here is when each one is the better choice.

ZChoose Zyte if

You want a live browser your code drives with Playwright or Puppeteer, .
You already write Scrapy spiders and want them hosted on .
Your code already speaks HTTP proxies and you want Zyte as a .
You fetch mostly simple pages at high volume with a $200 or $500 commitment, where their costs less.

Choose Crawl4AI if

You build with AI agents: one message sets Crawl4AI up in Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, Gemini CLI or OpenCode, and 17 MCP tools let the agent run recipes, price a call first and manage its budget.
You want to pay for the work a page needed, and nothing for a failed call. Zyte bills a site's 404 page as .
You need named sites as rows: 93 recipes, a LinkedIn profile for 1 credit. Zyte's policy forbids using its service .
You want no commitment and no contract lock: cancel any time, 14-day refunds, extra credits that never expire.
You need data in the EU, Singapore or the US, and a team with an audit log from Builder.
You want to run it inside your network on the same engine, Apache 2.0.

For enterprise teams

The controls your security team asks for

Crawl4AI's Enterprise plan next to Zyte's. Zyte's side restates its own pages; click a line to see the quote.

Control	Crawl4AI Enterprise	ZZyte Enterprise
SSO (SAML, OIDC)	✓ Yes	Not published
SCIM user sync	✓ Yes	Not published
Teams, roles and audit log	✓ From Builder ($99), no seat limit
Zero data retention	✓ Yes	Not published
IP allowlist and key limits	✓ Yes
Static exit IPs	✓ Yes	Not published
Where data is processed	EU, Singapore or US, your choice
Deployment	Cloud, dedicated fleet, inside your network, managed pipeline; one engine
DPA and invoice billing	✓ Every Enterprise plan
Refunds	14 days, if no credits were used
Status page	Hourly uptime per service, public
Uptime and response SLA	Typical: 99.9% a month; service down: first answer within 1 hour, 24/7; part broken: 4 business hours; a question: 1 business day; 5% of the month's fee back if missed, 10% under 99%
Support	A named engineer
Security assurance	Controls monitored every day in Drata, with the evidence kept; dependencies watched for known vulnerabilities; SOC 2 audit by Sensiba under way, report target January 2027. Security pack on request: policies, audit status, DPA, questionnaire answers.

Bring your current invoice

Send us your last scraping bill, from Zyte or anyone else. We price the same workload on Crawl4AI and walk you through it on a 30-minute call.

Book the invoice call Enterprise plan

Same job, two calls

6 jobs an agent does every day. The call on each side, and the price of 1,000 of them at list. The label marks the side that costs less for that job.

01 · One page to Markdowna plain page

Crawl4AI costs less$0.10/ 1,000

curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com","format":"md"}'

0.1 credit, Markdown included. $0.08 per 1,000 on Builder.

Zyte $0.40–$2.34/ 1,000

curl https://api.zyte.com/v1/extract \
  --user "$ZYTE_KEY:" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com",
       "markdown":true}'

The request at by site tier, plus Markdown, priced at .

02 · A page that needs a browsera JavaScript site

Crawl4AI costs less$0.50/ 1,000

curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"url":"https://app.example.com","format":"md"}'

0.5 credit on any site. The answer says the page needed a browser.

Zyte $1.01–$16.08/ 1,000

curl https://api.zyte.com/v1/extract \
  --user "$ZYTE_KEY:" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://app.example.com",
       "browserHtml":true}'

Browser pages by site tier: . A site's tier is shown after you enter its URL.

03 · A site that blocks botsproxies and a real browser

Crawl4AI costs less$2.00/ 1,000

curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"url":"https://hard-site.example",
       "proxy":"extra"}'

2 credits for a hard page. A page we cannot get costs nothing.

Zyte $8.04–$16.08/ 1,000

curl https://api.zyte.com/v1/extract \
  --user "$ZYTE_KEY:" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://hard-site.example",
       "browserHtml":true}'

Complex and Advanced sites (tiers 4 and 5) as browser pages. Residential addresses add .

04 · Google results with adsone results page

Crawl4AI $1.00/ 1,000

curl "https://api.crawl4ai.com/serp?q=best+crm&country=us" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY"

/serp: 1 credit for Google's own results page as data, with organic results, ads, maps and the AI overview.

Zyte costs less$0.85/ 1,000

curl https://api.zyte.com/v1/search \
  --user "$ZYTE_KEY:" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"domain":"search.engine.com",
       "query":"best crm",
       "include":["organic"]}'

, organic results. AI overview is in the docs and on the product page. Ads and maps: Not published.

05 · A LinkedIn profile as rowsname, title, company, history

Crawl4AI costs less$1.00/ 1,000

curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/recipes/linkedin-profile \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"profile":"satyanadella"}'

A recipe: 2 units × 0.5 credit. The same named columns every time; one of 93.

Zyte Not allowed/ 1,000

# Not allowed by Zyte's policy.
# Closest job, a product page:
curl https://api.zyte.com/v1/extract \
  --user "$ZYTE_KEY:" \
  -d '{"url":"https://shop.example/item",
       "product":true}'

Zyte's Acceptable Use Policy forbids . The closest job is a product page with automatic extraction: the request plus $0.27 to $1.07.

06 · Structured JSON from a pageyour schema, filled by a model

Crawl4AI costs less$1.87/ 1,000

curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/extract \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"url":"https://news.ycombinator.com",
       "instruction":"the top stories",
       "schema":{…}}'

Median of real calls this week: 0.5 credit for the page plus the model's tokens.

Zyte $6.42–$7.22/ 1,000

curl https://api.zyte.com/v1/extract \
  --user "$ZYTE_KEY:" \
  -d '{"url":"https://news.ycombinator.com",
       "article":true,
       "customAttributes":{…}}'

Model tokens at , plus and the request. 3,000 tokens in, 300 out, tier 1.

Crawl4AI vs Zyte, side by side

Each Zyte cell restates Zyte's own pages, read on 12 Nov 2026. Click it to see the quote and the page. "Not published" means those pages say nothing about it, not that it is missing.

	Crawl4AI Cloud	ZZyte
Pricing
How you pay	Credits in every plan: Free, Starter $10, Builder $99, Scale $499
1,000 plain / browser / hard pages	$0.10 / $0.50 / $2.00
Failed calls	Free, blocked pages included
A page already cached	Half price	Not published
Commitment	None; plans from $10
Free start	1,000 credits every month, no card
Refunds	14 days, if no credits were used
Cancel	Any time
What you get back
Formats	Markdown, HTML, links, media, metadata, tables; engine and cache on every answer
Whole site	/site deep crawl (500 pages a call); /scan up to 50,000 URLs	No crawl endpoint published; your own spider
Search	/search 1 credit; Google results as data with /serp
Google results	Organic, ads, maps and AI overview; 1 credit
Named sites	93 recipes; a LinkedIn profile 1 credit
Documents	PDF, Word and Excel; a PDF costs one page
Change monitoring	Watch (beta)	Not published
Hard sites
Bot checks and CAPTCHA	Gets past them on hard sites; a page we cannot get costs nothing
Residential addresses	proxy extra: 4x only on a page it served
Agents
MCP	Hosted, no install; key or OAuth; 17 tools
Setup	One message sets it up in 7 coding agents
Agent budget	Estimate, balance, spend cap and top-up as tools; cost on every answer
Open source
License	Apache 2.0, 87,236 GitHub stars
Self-host	The same engine as the Cloud	Zyte API self-host not published

Crawl4AI's prices come from its live price list, GET /v1/prices. Prices change; check each product's own pricing page before you decide.

The trade-off

What each one does better

ZWhere Zyte does best

Live browser sessions. A remote browser your code drives over CDP with Playwright or Puppeteer.
The Scrapy ecosystem. Scrapy, its plugins, and Scrapy Cloud to host your own spiders.
Proxy mode. A proxy endpoint for code that already speaks HTTP proxies.
Low price on simple sites. Tier 1 HTTP pages cost $0.06 to $0.08 per 1,000 with a $200 or $500 commitment.

Where Crawl4AI is the better choice

Pay for the work, not the site tier. $0.50 for a browser page on any site, nothing for a failed call or a site's 404, half price for a page we already hold.
No lock-in. No commitment, cancel any time, 14-day refunds, extra credits that never expire.
Ready data from named sites. 93 recipes, LinkedIn included, return fixed columns for about 1 credit.
Made for agents and enterprise. One message sets it up, 17 MCP tools run the budget, and three regions, SSO, SCIM and an audit log serve the security review.

Switch in one prompt

Move your Zyte calls in minutes

Paste this into Claude Code, Cursor or Codex in your project. It finds your Zyte calls and moves them to Crawl4AI, one endpoint at a time, and keeps both working until you check the results.

Move this project's Zyte calls to Crawl4AI Cloud. Read https://crawl4ai.com/llms.txt first. 1. Find every call to the Zyte API or SDK. 2. Map each one: /v1/extract httpResponseBody → POST /scrape · /v1/extract browserHtml → POST /scrape · markdown: true → POST /scrape (format md) · customAttributes → POST /extract · product, article, jobPosting → POST /recipes/{name} · /extract · /v1/search → GET /serp · /search · geolocation, ipType → country, proxy · Scrapy spider crawl → POST /site · /scan. 3. Read the key from CRAWL4AI_API_KEY (YOUR_CRAWL4AI_API_KEY). 4. Keep the old path behind a flag; compare 20 real URLs on both; show me the diff.

then add your API key. Get a free key

Zyte		Crawl4AI
/v1/extract httpResponseBody	→	POST /scrape
/v1/extract browserHtml	→	POST /scrape
markdown: true	→	POST /scrape (format md)
customAttributes	→	POST /extract
product, article, jobPosting	→	POST /recipes/{name} · /extract
/v1/search	→	GET /serp · /search
geolocation, ipType	→	country, proxy
Scrapy spider crawl	→	POST /site · /scan

From both products' docs, 12 Nov 2026.

Using both

Not either-or. Both speak MCP, so one agent can hold both. A team could keep Zyte for live browser sessions and its Scrapy spiders, and use Crawl4AI for recipes, Google results with ads and maps, and EU data.

Zyte
live browser · Scrapy spiders

Crawl4AI
recipes · Google · EU data

Frequently asked questions

How much does Zyte cost?

Zyte prices each website by one of five tiers it sets: $0.13 to $1.27 per 1,000 HTTP pages and $1.01 to $16.08 per 1,000 browser pages on pay-as-you-go, with 25% to 52% off for a $100 to $500 monthly commitment. Crawl4AI charges by the work each page needed: $0.10 per 1,000 plain pages, $0.50 per 1,000 browser pages and $2.00 per 1,000 hard pages, with no commitment.

Does Zyte charge for failed requests?

Zyte does not charge for bans, rate limits or invalid requests. Its docs say a site's 404 page, failed browser actions and extraction mismatches come back as successful responses, and successful responses are billed. On Crawl4AI none of these is charged.

Is there a Zyte free plan?

Zyte gives $5 of credit for the first billing month; its terms say unused amounts are lost, and its pricing docs say the account is suspended when the credit expires. Crawl4AI's Free plan gives 1,000 credits every month with no card.

Can I cancel Zyte at any time?

Zyte's terms say subscriptions "are not terminable by you during their term", renew for the same term, and an early exit can carry a fee of "at least 50% of the remaining value". Crawl4AI plans can be cancelled at any time, and extra credits never expire.

Can Zyte scrape LinkedIn?

Zyte's Acceptable Use Policy says users may not "use the Service to scrape any data from LinkedIn’s website". Crawl4AI has LinkedIn recipes for profiles, companies, jobs, people search and posts; a profile costs 1 credit.

Does Zyte have EU data residency?

Zyte's pages do not publish a region choice. Its DPA says Zyte "may from time to time transfer ... Service Personal Data outside of the EEA", and its browser sessions run from a single US region. Crawl4AI runs in the EU, Singapore and the US, and keeps account and billing data in the EU.

Is Crawl4AI only a crawler framework you build on?

No. A Zyte blog post lists Crawl4AI as a framework to build a crawler on, and leaves it out of its hosted Markdown APIs; that is out of date. Crawl4AI Cloud is a hosted API in three regions with a public price list: /scrape returns Markdown for 0.1 credit a page, /site crawls a whole site, proxies and browsers are in the page price, and a failed call costs nothing. The open-source engine is Apache 2.0, with 87,236 GitHub stars (GitHub, 2026-11-12), and it also runs inside your network.

Sources and method

We read these pages on 12 Nov 2026. Crawl4AI's facts come from its live price list, docs and terms. Something wrong or out of date? Write to hello@crawl4ai.com and we fix it.

This page for your agent or notes · Markdown ↗ · JSON ↗