> SpecStream is the live web data engine for teams and agents. This is the Markdown copy of https://specstream.ai/alternatives/zyte. Every page, with what SpecStream does and costs: https://specstream.ai/llms.txt

# Best Zyte alternatives in 2026 | SpecStream

Compared on Nov 9, 2026.

# Zyte alternatives in 2026

**Finished rows from one request, at 5¢ to $1 a row.**

SpecStream is the best alternative to Zyte for product and AI teams that need web data as rows in their product or agent. Zyte API fetches one page per request and bills each successful response: $0.13 to $1.27 per 1,000 plain HTTP responses and $1.01 to $16.08 per 1,000 browser-rendered ones on pay as you go, in five tiers set by the website. Finding the pages, joining the records and keeping them up to date stay in your own spiders.

SpecStream is the live web data engine for teams and agents. You ask for the data in plain words, and it searches the live web, reads the pages and returns structured rows that meet every condition you wrote, at 5¢, 15¢ or $1 a row. You approve the most the whole job can cost before it runs.

[Get an API key](https://specstream.ai/signup?src=alternatives-zyte&utm_source=alternatives&utm_campaign=zyte&returnTo=%2Fworkspace%2Fagents%3Ftab%3Dkeys)

New accounts get $10 of credit, no card.

## SpecStream and Zyte side by side

|  | SpecStream | Zyte |
| --- | --- | --- |
| What you send | The data you want in plain words, with the conditions every row must meet | A URL, with the output you want from that page. A request can enable 1 extraction field: product, article, job posting, page content or search results |
| What you get back | Structured rows, one record per company, place, product or filing, with facts from many sites joined. Source URL and read time on every value | One page per request: its HTTP response body, browser-rendered HTML, a screenshot, or structured data for that page. AI extraction covers e-commerce, article and job posting pages |
| Finding the pages | Included in the row. For search alone, the Search API costs $5 per 1,000 searches of up to 10 results and returns the answer with the page it was read on | Search results extraction (`serp`) carries no extraction charge on top of the request. Which pages to fetch next is your code: Scrapy spiders, hosted on Scrapy Cloud at $9 a month per unit |
| Extracting the facts | Included in the row: up to 5 facts at 5¢, up to 15 at 15¢, no limit at $1. For page text alone, the Extract API costs $0.80 per 1,000 pages, and a page with no text is not charged | Automatic extraction adds $0.27 to $1.07 per 1,000 per data type. Custom attributes add $1.34 per 1M input tokens and $6.67 per 1M output tokens, or $4.02 and $20.00 for HTML requests |
| The unit you pay for | A delivered row: 5¢, 15¢ or $1 by how much the row needs, plus 5¢ for an email and 15¢ for a phone. The same rate on every plan | A successful response. Pay as you go, per 1,000: $0.13 to $1.27 for plain HTTP and $1.01 to $16.08 browser-rendered, in five tiers by website. Screenshots add $1.34 per 1,000 |
| What failed or empty work costs | Nothing. A row left out, a retry and a run that finds nothing are not charged | Rate-limited and unsuccessful responses are free. Every successful response is charged |
| The cost cap before a run | The most the whole job can cost, quoted before it starts. Nothing runs until you approve it, and there are no automatic overages | A monthly spending limit: $100 on pay as you go, or $200, $400, $700 or $2,500 with a commitment. At the limit the account is suspended until the next billing month. Zyte assigns each website its tier and reviews tiers quarterly, with 2 weeks notice of a change |
| Plans and commitments | A plan turns its whole price into credit: $19, $99 or $499 a month. Row rates are the same with or without a plan | Monthly commitments of $100 to $500 take 25% to 52% off the pay as you go rate, down to $0.06 per 1,000 for the simplest sites. Enterprise is by quote |
| Free start | $10 of credit, no card | $5 of free credit for the first billing month. When it expires, the account is suspended until you set a spending limit |
| Data you do not have to build | Public databases read every morning at [specstream.ai/data](https://specstream.ai/data?utm_source=alternatives&utm_campaign=zyte): every company that filed a Form D since 2023 with its filing history, nearly 2 million US nonprofits, every US bank failure since 1934, federal rules, open federal contracts and grants, and local businesses. Signals such as funding rounds, new executives and layoffs at [specstream.ai/signals](https://specstream.ai/signals?utm_source=alternatives&utm_campaign=zyte). Ask for your own cut of any of them | Zyte Data, a managed service. A custom feed from a single source typically starts around $500 a month, and each additional source on the same feed adds about $200 a month |
| Reruns and change labels | Hourly to yearly. Each row comes back labeled changed, unchanged or no longer matching. A changed or new row costs half its rate, an unchanged row 1¢ | Scrapy Cloud schedules your own spiders once you buy a unit at $9 a month, and keeps job data for up to 120 days |
| MCP and API | MCP server, REST API, Python and TypeScript SDKs, a CLI and A2A. An agent can buy one request with no account, by card or in USDC | HTTP API at 3,000 requests a minute on standard plans, and a remote MCP server at `https://mcp.zyte.com/v1/mcp` that gets pages, extracts data, searches and works with Scrapy Cloud projects |
| Where the data goes | Google Sheets, Excel, Airtable, Notion, monday.com, HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Attio, Slack, Teams, Zapier, Make, n8n and signed webhooks | API responses and Scrapy Cloud job items. Its docs cover exporting from your Scrapy project to Amazon S3, Azure Storage, Dropbox, FTP and Google Cloud Storage |

## Why Zyte buyers move to SpecStream

### One request does the search, the reading and the record

A Zyte API request returns one page, and your spiders decide which pages to fetch, parse them and join what they find. On SpecStream the request is the whole job. It can be companies, places, products, filings or tenders: "online stores in Germany that sell running shoes, with the brands each carries and its returns policy", or "open school HVAC tenders in Texas, with the agency and due date". SpecStream reads the request back as parts you can edit, the conditions every row must meet and the facts to bring back, then searches the live web, reads each page and joins what it finds into one record per row.

### You pay for rows, and the pages behind them are free

Zyte bills every successful response, at a rate that depends on the tier of each website: a browser-rendered page costs $1.01 to $16.08 per 1,000 on pay as you go, and extraction adds $0.27 to $1.07 per 1,000. SpecStream bills the rows that meet your request: 5¢ for a row with up to 5 facts, 15¢ for up to 15 facts and one set of related records, and $1 for a deep row with no limit. 10,000 rows with 5 facts cost $500, and the searches and pages behind them cost nothing. A run that finds nothing costs nothing.

### The price covers the whole job

On Zyte the cost of a job is the sum of its responses, each priced by its website's tier, under a monthly spending limit. SpecStream quotes the most the whole dataset can cost, good for 30 minutes, and nothing runs until you approve it. The charge never goes past that amount, and whatever the run does not use goes back to your balance. An agent's key carries its own limits: total, per run and monthly.

### Search and extraction with published scores

The Search API scores 97.9 F-score on all 1,000 official SimpleQA Verified questions (978 correct), and 64.0 item F1 and 43.4 row F1 on all 200 official WideSearch tasks. The Extract API scores 0.908 F1 on WCXB. The runs are dated November 8, 2026, and the method is at [specstream.ai/benchmarks](https://specstream.ai/benchmarks?utm_source=alternatives&utm_campaign=zyte).

### Reruns label every row and land in your tools

Save the request and it reruns hourly to yearly. Each row comes back labeled changed, unchanged or no longer matching. A changed or new row costs half its rate and an unchanged row costs 1¢, so rechecking 1,000 rows that did not change costs $10. New matches and changes land in Sheets, Airtable, HubSpot, Salesforce, Slack or a signed webhook with no code, or in your agent through the MCP server. Rows you already own are never charged again.

## Other Zyte alternatives

### SpecStream

The live web data engine for teams and agents. One request in plain words returns structured rows at 5¢, 15¢ or $1 a row, under a maximum you approve before the run. The Search API costs $5 per 1,000 searches of up to 10 results, and the Extract API costs $0.80 per 1,000 pages.

### Firecrawl

Search, Scrape, Crawl and Agent endpoints billed in credits. The free tier has 1,000 credits a month, which covers about 1,000 pages, and the Hobby plan costs $19 a month for 5,000 credits. On SpecStream the pages read to find a row are not billed.

### Apify

A platform for cloud programs called Actors. Plans cost $19 (Starter), $199 (Scale) or $999 (Business) a month plus pay as you go, and a compute unit costs $0.2, $0.16 or $0.13 by plan. SpecStream has one rate card for every request, the same on every plan.

### Bright Data

A web data platform. Its Web Scraper API costs $1.5 per 1,000 records pay as you go, and a record is one extracted item, such as one LinkedIn profile. A SpecStream row joins the facts from many sites into one record that meets every condition you wrote.

### Exa

A search API. Search costs $4 (Lite) or $7 (Auto) per 1,000 requests with up to 10 results, and results above 10 cost $1 more per 1,000 requests. SpecStream's Search API costs $5 per 1,000 searches, and one Deep Search request returns the finished rows.

## How SpecStream scores

The same numbers as the benchmarks page, from the official tasks and scorers.

ResultsWideSearchCostSimpleQA Verified

|  | SpecStream | ![](https://specstream.ai/images/benchmarks/parallel.svg)Parallel | ![](https://specstream.ai/images/benchmarks/exa.svg)Exa | ![](https://specstream.ai/images/benchmarks/tavily.svg)Tavily | ![](https://specstream.ai/images/benchmarks/perplexity.svg)Perplexity |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **Web research**WideSearch, GPT-5.6 Luna | 60.9 | 45.5 | 53.0 | 47.9 | 47.0 |
| **Factual accuracy**SimpleQA Verified, GPT-5.6 Luna | 96 | 94 | 91 | 94 | 94 |
| **Factual accuracy**SimpleQA Verified, GPT-5.6 Sol | 99 | 97 | 91 | 92 | 95 |

## How to switch from Zyte

Write the data you want in plain words, in place of the URLs you request and the spiders that pick them today. Sign up and you get $10 of credit, no card. At 5¢ a row, that is up to 200 rows.

Or send the request from code. This call spends nothing: the `402` reply shows how SpecStream read the request, the columns and the most it can cost.

```
curl -i https://api.specstream.ai/v1/agent/lists \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"request": "Online stores in Germany that sell running shoes, with each store URL, the brands it carries, its returns policy and a support email", "count": 25}'
```

Approve that maximum by card through Stripe's Link agent wallet, or in USDC on Base, Arbitrum or Polygon, and you pay for the rows found. On an account, your agent uses the MCP server at `https://api.specstream.ai/mcp` and your team uses the workspace, from the same balance.

[Get an API key](https://specstream.ai/signup?src=alternatives-zyte&utm_source=alternatives&utm_campaign=zyte&returnTo=%2Fworkspace%2Fagents%3Ftab%3Dkeys)

## Frequently asked questions

Something we didn't answer? [Talk to a human](https://specstream.ai/talk-to-a-human.md)

How much does Zyte cost?

Zyte API costs $0.13 to $1.27 per 1,000 successful plain HTTP responses and $1.01 to $16.08 per 1,000 browser-rendered responses on pay as you go, in five tiers set by the website. A monthly commitment of $100 to $500 takes 25% to 52% off. Automatic extraction adds $0.27 to $1.07 per 1,000 per data type, and Scrapy Cloud costs $9 a month per unit.

What is the best Zyte alternative?

SpecStream, at 5¢, 15¢ or $1 per delivered row. You describe the data in plain words with every condition, approve the most the job can cost, and get structured rows that meet all of them in your sheet, your CRM, Slack or your agent. The same request reruns on your schedule, and only delivered rows are billed.

Does Zyte have a free plan?

Zyte gives $5 of free credit for the first billing month, and the account is suspended when it expires until you set a spending limit. SpecStream gives $10 of credit, no card. At 5¢ a row, that is up to 200 rows.

Is there a cheaper alternative to Zyte?

Compare the price of a finished row: on SpecStream it is 5¢ with up to 5 facts, so 10,000 rows cost $500, and the searches and pages behind each row are not billed. Zyte bills each successful response by its website's tier, plus $0.27 to $1.07 per 1,000 for automatic extraction, and the pages that never become a record are billed too.

Does SpecStream have an API?

Yes, three: the Search API at $5 per 1,000 searches of up to 10 results, the Extract API at $0.80 per 1,000 pages, and Deep Search at 5¢, 15¢ or $1 a row. There are Python and TypeScript SDKs, a CLI, an MCP server and A2A, and new accounts get $10 of credit, no card.

Does SpecStream have an MCP server?

Yes, at `https://api.specstream.ai/mcp` over Streamable HTTP, with OAuth or an API key, and connecting an agent costs $0 on every plan. Your agent sends the data it needs in plain words, sees the most the run can cost, and reads rows that meet every condition, inside the limits you set on its key.

### Sources

SpecStream wrote this page. Each rival figure comes from that company's own page.

1.  [SpecStream pricing](https://specstream.ai/pricing)specstream.ai/pricing, read Nov 9, 2026
2.  [SpecStream for agents](https://specstream.ai/agents.md)specstream.ai/agents.md, read Nov 9, 2026
3.  [SpecStream benchmarks](https://specstream.ai/benchmarks)specstream.ai/benchmarks, read Nov 9, 2026
4.  [SpecStream data](https://specstream.ai/data)specstream.ai/data, read Nov 9, 2026
5.  [SpecStream signals](https://specstream.ai/signals)specstream.ai/signals, read Nov 9, 2026
6.  [Zyte pricing](https://www.zyte.com/pricing/)zyte.com/pricing/, read Nov 9, 2026
7.  [Zyte API pricing, docs](https://docs.zyte.com/zyte-api/pricing.html)docs.zyte.com/zyte-api/pricing.html, read Nov 9, 2026
8.  [Zyte API rate limits](https://docs.zyte.com/zyte-api/usage/rate-limit.html)docs.zyte.com/zyte-api/usage/rate-limit.html, read Nov 9, 2026
9.  [Zyte API automatic extraction](https://docs.zyte.com/zyte-api/usage/extract/index.html)docs.zyte.com/zyte-api/usage/extract/index.html, read Nov 9, 2026
10.  [Zyte MCP](https://docs.zyte.com/zyte-web-data/mcp.html)docs.zyte.com/zyte-web-data/mcp.html, read Nov 9, 2026
11.  [Scrapy Cloud pricing](https://docs.zyte.com/scrapy-cloud/pricing.html)docs.zyte.com/scrapy-cloud/pricing.html, read Nov 9, 2026
12.  [Zyte Data](https://www.zyte.com/data-extraction/)zyte.com/data-extraction/, read Nov 9, 2026
13.  [Zyte docs index](https://docs.zyte.com/llms.txt)docs.zyte.com/llms.txt, read Nov 9, 2026
14.  [Firecrawl pricing](https://www.firecrawl.dev/pricing)firecrawl.dev/pricing, read Nov 9, 2026
15.  [Apify pricing](https://apify.com/pricing)apify.com/pricing, read Nov 9, 2026
16.  [Bright Data Web Scraper API pricing](https://brightdata.com/pricing/web-scraper)brightdata.com/pricing/web-scraper, read Nov 9, 2026
17.  [Exa pricing](https://exa.ai/pricing)exa.ai/pricing, read Nov 9, 2026
