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Web scraping has become essential for developers seeking to extract valuable data from websites. Among the players in this domain, ScrapingBee provides web scraping services. However, with the increasing complexity of data extraction tasks, technical users are now looking for alternatives that offer a more effective solution.
There are many ScrapingBee alternatives, but this article delves into one that stands out as a promising contender: ZenRows.
ScrapingBee and ZenRows are two popular web scraping tools. ScrapingBee is a good choice for developers who want to get started with web scraping quickly and easily. It has a simple interface and various features to help developers avoid being blocked by websites. However, ScrapingBee sometimes falls short at trying to avoid getting blocked by target sites.
ZenRows is a more powerful ScrapingBee alternative offering a more powerful anti-bot bypass toolkit, while it’s also very handy for beginners. Let’s discover why ZenRows has become the preferred choice for developers looking for a reliable and effective web scraping solution.
Similarities between ScrapingBee and ZenRows
ZenRows and ScrapingBee both aim to make web scraping easy and reliable. They handle the more technical parts, so users can focus on getting the data they need. Although they have unique differences, they also have similar features.
Both tools render JavaScript, use proxies to keep users anonymous while scraping and make it easy to get the data in the format users want. Overall, they both focus on ensuring a smooth web scraping experience.
1. Intuitive and User-Friendly Interfaces
Both ZenRows and ScrapingBee’s APIs are easy to understand. Even developers with no prior web scraping experience can use these APIs in no time.
2. Rotating Proxies
Both ZenRows and ScrapingBee provide rotating proxies to maintain a high level of anonymity. Proxy rotation enables scrapers to randomly switch their IP addresses from a large pool of proxies. It makes it harder for websites with anti-bot detection measures to detect or block requests.
3. Compatibility with JavaScript-Rendered Websites
Both ZenRows and ScrapingBee excel in handling dynamic websites and JavaScript-rendered content. They can simulate user actions, like scrolling, form submissions, and waiting for page loading, ensuring accurate results even on sites with complex JavaScript interactions.
This feature is crucial as many websites nowadays rely on JavaScript to generate content dynamically, meaning the site’s content changes based on user actions. A web scraping API that cannot handle dynamic websites might fail at capturing the correct content.
4. Data Extraction Formats
ZenRows and ScrapingBee are both web scraping APIs that allow users to extract data from various sources and convert it into formats like JSON or CSV. It makes it possible to collect data from a wide range of websites and store it in a format that is easy to use and analyze.
5. User-Friendly Documentation
ZenRows and ScrapingBee provide access to easy-to-use and well-documented APIs which contain code samples in multiple programming languages. Developers of all levels of experience integrate the APIs into their workflows easily. This makes them a powerful tool for web scraping, regardless of the complexity of the website or the amount of data that needs to be collected.
6. Both services charge for only successful requests
Only successful requests are charged, which gives more guarantees to their users.
ZenRows’ Edge over ScrapingBee
Read the differences between the two tools below.
1. Efficiency through Parallel Requests
ZenRows and ScrapingBee allow you to make multiple requests at the same time. However, by subscribing to the cheapest plan, you can make up to 10 concurrent requests with ZenRows as opposed to 5 with ScrapingBee. You can cover more ground with ZenRows by scraping more data in less time.
2. Proxy Network
As mentioned earlier, ZenRows and ScrapingBee both provide rotating proxies. ZenRows has an edge in providing reliability, speed, and scalability. That is because ZenRows’ proxy rotation system is more sophisticated than ScrapingBee’s.
3. Pricing
ZenRows and ScrapingBee provide various pricing plans to cater to different users’ needs starting from $49. However, ZenRows provides 250,000 API credits for the lowest price compared to ScrapingBee, which provides only 150,000 API credits for the same price. ZenRows stands out as the most cost-effective solution.
4. Anti-bot Bypass
Both ZenRows and ScrapingBee offer features to overcome bot detection measures, but ZenRows is more effective in this regard. ZenRows has a more advanced anti-bot bypass toolkit, is more reliable, and is more efficient. This makes it easier to avoid getting blocked while scraping data with ZenRows.
Conclusion
In this article, you learned about two popular web scraping tools: ZenRows and ScrapingBee. You learned about their differences, how they work, and ZenRows’ advantage as a ScrapingBee alternative.
Based on the points outlined in this article, ZenRows is the superior option when it comes to avoiding getting blocked, cost, and allowed concurrent requests. Additionally, ZenRows offers a better value for the features you get.
