The short version
- Choose Zyte if you are fetching millions of pages, unit cost is the binding constraint, or you already live in Scrapy.
- Choose SarvCrawl if the goal is a searchable corpus and you would rather not build the chunking, embedding and index yourself.
SarvCrawl and Zyte, side by side
| SarvCrawl | Zyte | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Crawl-to-knowledge-base API | Web scraping API with ban handling |
| Best for | Content you want to search — web pages and documents together | High volume where unit cost dominates |
| Output | Markdown, HTML, JSON, links, images | HTML, browser HTML, screenshots, automatic extraction |
| JavaScript rendering | Yes, where a page needs it | Yes, at a higher per-request price |
| Documents | PDF, Office, EPUB, images and audio; OCR for scans | Not the focus |
| Chunking, embeddings, search | Built in (search on paid plans) | Build it yourself |
| Anti-bot and proxies | Not the focus | Built-in ban handling |
| Pricing | 1 billion free tokens, no card; paid plans | From $0.13 per 1,000 simple requests, pay as you go |
| Hosting and licence | Hosted, or self-host: Apache-2.0 with an AGPL-3.0 engine | Hosted; maintains the open-source Scrapy framework |
| Integrations | REST, Node, Python, CLI, n8n, 21 MCP tools | API and a Scrapy plugin |
Where they really differ
Zyte API starts at $0.13 per 1,000 simple HTTP requests, the cheapest entry cost in the market. Read the qualifier: simple means no browser rendering and no serious unblocking. JavaScript-heavy pages behind bot walls cost considerably more.
It is closer to infrastructure than to a product, which suits teams already running Scrapy. What you get back is a page; turning pages into an answerable corpus is your build.
SarvCrawl bills tokens for parsing, chunking and embedding instead of per request, and returns a knowledge base rather than a page. For a corpus you want to search, that removes the most expensive part of the build.
Using both
Fetch at volume through Zyte where unit cost matters, and crawl the sites you want searchable — docs, help centres, product pages — with SarvCrawl.
SarvCrawl vs Zyte: questions
Is SarvCrawl cheaper than Zyte?
Per raw request, no — Zyte's simple-request price is the lowest in the market. SarvCrawl prices the full pipeline, which is the cheaper total if you would otherwise build chunking, embeddings and search.
Is Zyte related to Scrapy?
Yes. Zyte maintains Scrapy, the open-source Python crawling framework, and its API integrates with it through a plugin.
Does SarvCrawl render JavaScript?
Yes, where a page needs it, at no separate per-request tier.
Can I keep Scrapy and use SarvCrawl for search?
Yes. Export what your spiders collect as CSV and upload it, or point SarvCrawl at the same sites, and the content is chunked, embedded and searchable.