Scrapy alternatives

3 tools to consider instead of Scrapy, shown against it.

Scrapy Playwright Zyte Apify
Vendor Zyte (open-source project) Microsoft Zyte Group Ltd. Apify Technologies s.r.o.
Pricing model Open source + paid options Open source + paid options Usage-based Subscription
Free tier Yes Yes Yes Yes
Deployment Self-hosted Self-hosted Cloud Cloud
Open source Yes (BSD-3-Clause) Yes (Apache-2.0) No No
Best for Engineering teams who want full control of crawl logic and are willing to run and maintain their own infrastructure. Engineers who need real-browser rendering for JS-heavy or interaction-gated pages and are building their own crawler. Teams building on Scrapy who want managed hosting, or anyone wanting a pay-per-request unblocking API. Teams that want to rent or run scrapers as managed cloud jobs without operating their own infrastructure.
Pricing

Free and open source; no vendor pricing. Costs are whatever compute, proxies or hosting a team adds around it.

Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.

Free and open source; no vendor pricing. Costs are the compute you run it on and any proxies you add.

Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.

Pay-as-you-go per 1,000 requests, priced by page difficulty tier (HTTP response body vs. browser-rendered), with lower rates at $100/$200/$500 monthly minimum-spend commitments; $5 free trial credit.

Pay as you go $0.13–$1.27 per 1,000 requests (HTTP); $1.01–$16.08 per 1,000 (browser-rendered)
$100/month commitment $0.10–$0.95 per 1,000 (HTTP); $0.75–$12.00 per 1,000 (browser-rendered)
$500/month commitment $0.06–$0.61 per 1,000 (HTTP); $0.48–$7.68 per 1,000 (browser-rendered)
Enterprise custom

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Monthly plans include a platform-credit allowance that covers compute, proxy and storage usage; overage is billed on top.

Free $0/month
Starter $19/month ($17/month billed annually)
Scale $199/month ($179/month billed annually)
Business $999/month ($899/month billed annually)

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Features
  • Asynchronous request scheduling and throttling
  • Built-in HTML/XML selectors (CSS and XPath)
  • Item pipelines for cleaning and storing scraped data
  • Middleware system for proxies, retries and custom headers
  • Built-in export to JSON, CSV and XML
  • Extensible with headless-browser middlewares for JS-heavy sites
  • Command-line tooling for generating and running spiders
  • Drives real Chromium, Firefox and WebKit engines
  • Auto-waiting and network interception for JS-rendered content
  • Multi-language APIs (JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Java, .NET)
  • Headless and headed execution, screenshots and video capture
  • Built-in test runner with parallel execution (for testing use cases)
  • Context isolation for running many independent sessions
  • Codegen tool that records interactions into a script
  • Zyte API: single endpoint for fetching and unblocking any URL
  • Automatic proxy rotation and anti-bot handling, priced by page difficulty
  • Scrapy Cloud for hosting and scheduling Scrapy spiders
  • AI-assisted data extraction (auto-extract for products, articles)
  • Smart browser rendering only when JavaScript execution is needed
  • Maintainers of the open-source Scrapy framework
  • Managed data-extraction services for custom projects
  • Marketplace of pre-built scraper "Actors" for common sites
  • SDK for building custom Actors (JavaScript/Python, open-source Crawlee core)
  • Built-in rotating proxy pool
  • Scheduling, webhooks and REST/GraphQL API
  • Managed storage for datasets, key-value stores and request queues
  • Headless browser and HTTP-based crawling support
  • Team and usage-based billing dashboard

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