Bright Data vs Zyte
A side-by-side look at 2 AI & ML tools for 2026 — the verdict, pricing, ratings, features, and what readers think.
brightdata.com
Best for Data and AI teams needing large-scale, unblocked web data: pricing, SERP, leads and agent browsing.
Web data infrastructure for humans and AI agents: proxies, scraper APIs, SERP, browsers and datasets in one platform.
Visit Bright Data
zyte.com
Best for Engineering teams that need reliable, high-volume scraping of hard websites, or finished datasets.
Web scraping API and managed data delivery that handles bans, rendering and extraction for you.
Visit ZytePricing compared
Bright Data
$1/1k requests
Zyte
$0.13/1K responses
Head to head
| Bright Data | Zyte | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $1/1k requests | $0.13/1K responses |
| Free tier | Yes | — |
| Free trial | Free trial; free tiers on Unlocker, SERP API, Scraper APIs | $5 free credit, 30 days to try, no commitment |
| Platforms | API · Web · CLI | Web · API · CLI |
| Founded | 2014 | — |
| HQ | Tel Aviv, Israel | Cork, Ireland |
| Team size | 201-500 | — |
Pros & cons
Bright Data
Pros
- One platform covers proxies, unblocking, SERP, crawling, browsers, scraper APIs and ready-made datasets.
- Large proxy footprint: 400M+ residential IPs in 195 countries, plus ISP and datacenter options.
- Pay-per-use entry pricing, from $1 per 1,000 requests on Unlocker, SERP and Crawl APIs.
- Free tiers on several products and a free MCP server make agent prototyping cheap.
- Managed data acquisition and datasets let teams skip building pipelines entirely.
Cons
- Pricing differs for every product (per request, per GB, per IP, per record), so total cost is hard to forecast.
- Broader and heavier than developer-first scrapers like Firecrawl, with a steeper learning curve.
- Enterprise orientation: managed services start at $1,500 to $2,000 per month.
- Performance and customer-outcome claims on the site are vendor-published, not independently tested.
Zyte
Pros
- One API covers proxy rotation, ban handling, headless rendering and extraction.
- You pay per successful response, with the price set by the difficulty of the target site.
- Every plan includes the full feature set, with no feature gating by tier.
- Zyte Data offers a fully managed option when you do not want to maintain crawlers.
- Maintains Scrapy, the widely used open-source crawling framework, and hosts it on Scrapy Cloud.
Cons
- Per-request pricing varies by site tier, so budgeting needs the cost calculator rather than a flat rate.
- Some advanced features carry additional usage-based costs.
- Compliance guardrails restrict logins and PII extraction, which can limit some use cases.
- Managed Zyte Data and Enterprise pricing is quote-only.