A Zyte alternative where you drive the browser yourself
Browserless gives your code a live session over Puppeteer, Playwright, CDP, or BrowserQL, on five browser engines, in our cloud or on your own infrastructure.
Browserless
Browser infrastructure you connect to and program. Real Chromium, Chrome, Firefox, WebKit, and Edge sessions over Puppeteer, Playwright, CDP, REST, or BrowserQL, with stealth, CAPTCHA solving, and optional residential or datacenter proxies. Cloud or self-hosted.
Zyte
A web scraping API built around ban handling and structured web data, with declarative browser actions and automatic per-target request tiers. Zyte also maintains Scrapy, the open-source Python framework. Fully managed, cloud-only.
How Browserless and Zyte compare
Both tools run headless browsers and handle JavaScript rendering on web pages behind bot protection. The difference is whether you get a browser or a result, and what happens when the job runs long.
Zyte details reflect their published documentation and pricing as of September 2026. Check their current pages before deciding.
Browserless vs. Zyte
Zyte API is a request-shaped web scraping service: you send a URL, optionally a list of browser actions, and get a result back, with ban avoidance and typed data extraction handled for you. Browserless is a browser endpoint: you connect Puppeteer, Playwright, CDP, or BrowserQL to a live session and drive it from your own code.
Zyte does have a CDP mode with sessions up to a 3600-second TTL. Their browser requests are the other path, where you send a declarative list of actions in the request body rather than holding a connection open, and browser execution there is capped at 60 seconds. On Browserless, the direct connection is the product; it reaches Firefox and WebKit as well as Chromium, and it runs self-hosted. The best alternative depends on the job: pick Zyte for structured data and automatic ban handling out of a single request, or if you're already a Scrapy shop.
Describing a flow and running one are not the same job
Declarative actions work well for flows you can write down in advance. They stop being enough the moment the next step depends on what came back.
A described flow
You send the URL and a list: wait for this selector, type into that field, click, wait again. Zyte runs it server-side and returns the result. For a login and a table read, that's less code than a browser session.
The limits show up on dynamic websites where the flow branches. There's no point in the list where you can read the dynamic content, decide, and change the plan, and browser execution on that path is capped at 60 seconds.
A held session
Browserless hands you the browser and keeps out of the way. The loop, the conditionals, and the error handling live in your code, so a paginated crawl that stops at a known record is just a while loop.
Sessions run up to 60 minutes on Scale, and Authenticated Profiles replay a saved login into as many parallel sessions as your concurrency allows.
Neither model is universally better. If every flow fits in a list of actions, the request shape is less to maintain.
What you get with Browserless
One platform for web scraping, testing, PDF and screenshot generation, and AI agents, with the same API in the cloud and on your own hardware. Whether the use case is market research or AI scraping at scale, the key features below run identically everywhere.
puppeteer.connect or Playwright's connectOverCDP and drive the session from your own process. Control flow stays in your code, where you can branch on what the page returned and set a breakpoint when it misbehaves.When to choose Zyte
Zyte has been in the web scraping industry for a long time and maintains the framework much of it is built on. If one of Zyte's features below is your requirement, consider it.
Automatic structured extraction
Zyte API returns typed data for products, articles, and other common shapes, priced per data type. If you want fields rather than a page, that is a real product, and writing your own parsers instead is real work.
They maintain Scrapy
Scrapy's own site lists Zyte as its maintainer, alongside 500-plus contributors. If your tech stack is already Scrapy, staying inside the ecosystem its maintainers run is a legitimate reason to pick them.
You only pay for successful responses
Their docs are explicit that Zyte-side failures and rate limits are not charged, and that tiers are assigned automatically per target. A 200 that wraps a site error or a failed action still bills. We bill browser time whether or not the page cooperates, so on high-block-rate sites the difference favors them.
The branch that a list of actions cannot express
Most real scraping jobs stop early. You work through pages until you hit a record you already have, or until a date falls out of range. That decision needs the page content in hand before the next action is chosen, the one thing a pre-declared action list can't do.
With a held session, your own scrapers are ordinary code. Proxy routing, stealth, ad blocking, and timeouts are query parameters on the connection URL, so the same script runs locally and in production with a single line changed.
- Standard Puppeteer, Playwright, and CDP clients developers already use. No proprietary SDK.
- Three regional endpoints: US West, London, and Amsterdam.
- The same API access if you later move to a self-hosted deployment.
from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright
URL = (
"wss://production-sfo.browserless.io"
"?token=YOUR_API_TOKEN"
"&proxy=residential&proxyCountry=us"
)
SEEN = "order-10432"
with sync_playwright() as p:
browser = p.chromium.connect_over_cdp(URL)
page = browser.new_page()
page.goto("https://portal.example.com/orders")
rows = []
while True:
for r in page.locator(".order").all():
oid = r.get_attribute("data-id")
# Stop as soon as we reach known data.
if oid == SEEN:
browser.close()
raise SystemExit(print(len(rows)))
rows.append(oid)
if not page.locator(".next").count():
break
page.click(".next")
print(len(rows))
browser.close()The limitations of a cloud-only API
Zyte runs as a cloud service. Browserless publishes a Docker image, so enterprise teams can run the same browser automation and web data collection in-house when they need data residency or a security review requires it.
Self-hosted containers run entirely inside your network: metrics are exposed locally, traffic goes through your own proxies, and nothing calls back to us. The open-source image ships Puppeteer, Playwright, and the core REST APIs, while BrowserQL, stealth, and session recording require the licensed Enterprise image, and some cloud APIs, including Smart Scrape, are cloud-only.
See what self-hosting includesSecurity & compliance
Zyte alternative FAQs
Zyte alternative FAQs
Try it on the flow that branches
Start free with 1,000 units and no credit card. Take the job a list of actions cannot express and run it as one browser session.