ZenRows

ZenRows is a Spanish-founded, London-headquartered web scraping company that sits at the intersection of a proxy provider and a full anti-bot bypass API. Founded in 2021 by Ander Rodriguez Varela and Aurken Bilbao, the platform packages three products under one account: a Universal Scraper API, a cloud Scraping Browser compatible with Puppeteer and Playwright, and a standalone residential proxy network. The pitch is simple — instead of stitching together a proxy provider, a headless browser farm, and a CAPTCHA solver, ZenRows hands you one endpoint that claims a 99.93% success rate against hard targets.

On the proxy side, ZenRows operates a peer-sourced residential pool of 55M+ IPs across 190+ countries, with country and city-level geotargeting plus carrier targeting on the higher tiers. Sticky sessions are supported (rotating by default, or persistent sessions when you need to hold a cart or login). The network is positioned as "premium" residential rather than datacenter, and the company also exposes Scraping Browser sessions through that same proxy layer so JA3 fingerprints and TLS handshakes look like real Chrome rather than headless traffic. There is no public mobile or ISP proxy tier — if those matter to you, this is not the right shop.

Pricing is subscription-based with a request-credit model rather than pure per-GB. Plans start at $69/month for the Developer tier and ladder up to $2,999/month at the Business+ level, with 10% off for annual commitments. Within a plan, basic GET requests cost 1 credit, JS rendering costs 5x, premium (residential) proxies cost 10x, and combined JS + premium runs 25x — so your effective unit cost depends heavily on how protected your targets are. For pure residential proxy GB, plans range roughly from $3.50/GB on entry tiers down to about $2.73/GB at volume. ZenRows only bills successful requests, and a free trial with 1,000 API credits is offered without a credit card.

The standout feature is the anti-bot engine. ZenRows specifically advertises bypass for Cloudflare (including Turnstile and managed challenges), DataDome, PerimeterX, Akamai, and Kasada — and benchmark coverage from independent reviewers (Scrapeway, ScraperAPI) generally puts it near the top of the pack on protected targets. Average response time on plain requests is around 2–3 seconds; full browser + premium proxy requests typically land in the 5–10 second range, which is the price you pay for emulation. SDKs ship for Python, Node, Java, Go, PHP and Ruby, and there are first-class examples for Scrapy, Playwright and n8n.

The ideal ZenRows customer is a developer or data team scraping hard targets — e-commerce, travel, real estate, SERPs, social — where you would otherwise burn engineering weeks tuning Puppeteer-stealth and rotating BrightData residentials yourself. It's a strong middle-ground between a pure proxy provider (BrightData, Oxylabs, Decodo) and a full managed service. It is not the right pick if you mostly hit unprotected sites (a $1.50/GB Webshare or PYProxy plan will be far cheaper), if you need raw SOCKS5 proxies for non-scraping use cases like sneaker bots or multi-accounting, or if you want a mobile/ISP product. Buyers should also know the credit model can get expensive fast on JS-heavy scraping, the dashboard skews developer-first rather than analyst-friendly, and documentation on the advanced anti-bot toggles still has gaps that you will mostly resolve via support tickets.