Home / Proxy reviews / Zyte Review
In this article, we will review the Zyte API, especially its proxies, and find out how convenient its integrated automatic proxy management system is.
Zyte is a data extraction platform powered by AI known for fast website unblocking and a high success rate while remaining affordable. Its powerful API uses ethically sourced residential and datacenter proxies that will help you with the most advanced web scraping tasks such as evading anti-bot technology and obtaining structured data outputs to ease the cleaning process.
Compared to other companies in the market, what’s unique about Zyte is the fact that the company doesn’t provide proxies as a separate product but as a part of its general-purpose scraping API. If required the API uses proxies – switching between residential and datacenter proxies depending on the use case.
Zyte was founded in 2007 originally known as ScrapingHub. With over 16 years of experience, they’ve established themselves as one of the industry’s oldest and most reliable players in the web scraping field.
In 2021, they rebranded as Zyte and began to sharpen their focus on optimizing their web scraping API. This powerful all-in-one scraping solution is particularly well-suited for e-commerce activities, making it easier to extract valuable data for tasks like product research, competitor analysis, and price tracking.
Built by the team behind Scrapy, one of the most widely adopted open-source web scraping frameworks, especially among advanced developers, Zyte has consistently demonstrated a commitment to providing high-performance data extraction solutions.
In the following sections, you’ll see how the Zyte API can help you unlock the full potential of web scraping.
Zyte’s robust data platform offers a range of innovative solutions, including AI-powered scraping, a user-friendly IDE, and a cloud-hosted automation service:
In addition to these, the Zyte API also comes with an in-built proxy network, and an integrated automatic proxy management system. The smart proxy manager automatically selects and rotates proxies based on specific web scraping goals, website complexity, and geo-location.
This powerful combination enables users to bypass restrictions, reduce the risk of IP blocking, and extract data at scale from even the most complex websites, making it a versatile tool for data-driven businesses.
The Zyte API also integrates seamlessly with Scrapy and offers a range of features that simplify and enhance the web scraping process, including:
Furthermore, the service includes a range of advanced features, such as:
In brief, the Zyte API is an all-in-one general-purpose web scraping solution, offering features specifically designed to overcome sophisticated websites. A key component of this success is Zyte’s robust network of proxies (residential and datacenter).
Moreover, the Zyte API’s integrated smart automatic proxy manager switches to datacenter proxies when you’re not using the full capabilities of residential proxies, so you save money on extraction costs.
This could be viewed as an advantage or disadvantage depending on your use case. While having an all-in-one solution can be simple and convenient, if you have specific needs for which you need to configure proxy selection and management then Zyte API will come up short.
As mentioned before, Zyte’s proxies are part of the Zyte API. These are ethically sourced and compliant with data protection regulations, giving the product a solid ethical foundation.
The API is built on top of a robust network of residential and datacenter proxies, which makes accessing content easy. While the company doesn’t disclose detailed information about its datacenter proxies, it’s clear that it utilizes them within its Proxy Manager tool, which runs automatically and offers several benefits. The key features of Zyte’s Proxy Management tool include:
In addition to these features, Zyte’s proxies are also known for their high uptime, low latency, and scalability. Let’s take a look at the perks of using Zyte’s proxies and its integrated automatic Proxy Manager.
With a strong focus on innovation and customer satisfaction, Zyte’s proxies offer a range of benefits that make them an attractive option for businesses and individuals alike:
While Zyte’s proxies offer excellent perks, it’s important to note that they cannot be managed manually, which reduces the flexibility to choose between datacenter and residential proxies. Nor can a user buy proxies separately – to use Zyte’s proxies, a user would need to get a subscription for the Zyte API.
Zyte API’s built-in proxy manager automatically shifts between these options depending on your web scraping activities, ensuring that you always have the right proxy type for the job. While this feature seems compromising it also means you can focus on extracting valuable insights from your data, without worrying about the complexities of proxy management.
While Zyte might not be the fastest or most accurate web scraping tool or proxy network in the market, it makes up for it with an incredibly powerful API that’s specifically designed for web scraping and e-commerce tasks.
Zyte provides adaptable pricing options, including a pay-as-you-go plan starting at $25/month and various subscription plans tailored to your specific service needs. For its proxies service, the “Zyte API – Ban Handling” package offers two options: raw response pricing at $0.04 per 1,000 requests or rendered response pricing at $0.30 per 1,000 requests.
Once you sign up, you can utilize Zyte’s dynamic pricing calculator, which takes into account multiple factors to provide a transparent and accurate estimate of your request costs. These factors include website difficulty, residential proxy usage, headless browser implementation, data extraction, and compute time for browser actions, giving you clear control over your expenses.
All customers receive a $5 credit to start as a free trial, which is equivalent to thousands of scrapes when crawling simple websites
Registration
Zyte provides a range of registration options for different user needs, including a standard email and password sign-up, as well as quick registration via Google and GitHub. For developers, signing up with GitHub can be particularly convenient, as it enables seamless integration of web scraping scripts with Zyte’s infrastructure.
After registering, you can choose from four distinct products: Web Scraping API (Zyte API), Cloud Hosting (Scrapy Cloud), Enterprise (Zyte Enterprise), and Web Data (Zyte Data). For web scraping purposes, the Zyte API option is the most relevant, as it allows users to utilize Zyte’s proxies and web scraping capabilities.
Once registered, users gain access to a user-friendly dashboard, where they can manage their accounts, adjust settings, and monitor billing activity. Notably, a single account can be used to manage multiple organizations, each with its own products and members, making it an ideal solution for teams and businesses.
To start using the Zyte API, users need to add a payment method, which requires a credit card. As a security measure, Zyte charges $1 to verify the card, which is promptly refunded, allowing users to begin utilizing the product without delay.
Documentation
Zyte offers extensive documentation in both video and text formats. The API guide is particularly detailed, offering step-by-step instructions and explanations to help users effectively use the platform.
Additionally, the documentation covers essential information about the dashboard and various tools, ensuring users can navigate the platform with ease.
For users who prefer a more visual approach, Zyte’s YouTube channel offers tutorials, guides, and feature explanations. You can also enroll in webinars, which provide an opportunity to stay up-to-date with the latest tools and features, as well as interact with the Zyte team and other users.
Support
Zyte offers customer support in multiple ways. Through the dashboard, you can submit tickets and expect a response within 1 hour, with slightly longer wait times on weekends. Alternatively, you can engage with the 24/7 live chat for immediate assistance. There’s also the Support Center that allows you to submit a thread, however, this might be a bit slower compared to the previous two methods. You can also expect more personalized and rapid responses if you opt for the Enterprise package.
Zyte is a comprehensive, AI-driven data extraction platform that stands out due to its powerful API, efficient automatic proxy manager, and a suite of innovative tools like AI Scraping, IDE, and Scrapy Cloud.
Its proxies offer high anonymity, efficient rate-limit bypass, and region-specific data quality, crucial for businesses aiming for global data insights while maintaining ethical compliance and industry standards.
Although the proxies cannot be manually managed, the automatic switching between residential and datacenter proxies, depending on the user’s web scraping activities, saves users from the complexities of proxy management and ensures optimized costs.
Zyte’s API, while not the fastest, offers a high success rate and its specificity for web scraping and e-commerce tasks makes it a top choice in the industry. The platform offers flexible pricing options, including subscription-based and pay-as-you-go plans, making it accessible for various user needs.
With its robust features and user-centric design, Zyte stands as a potent tool for data-driven businesses, e-commerce companies, or general web scraping activities, providing the means to extract valuable and structured insights and make informed decisions.
Zyte seems like a solid option, but their pricing feels a bit steep. For those who’ve used it, is the reliability worth the cost for large-scale projects?
2 months ago