Proxyway, one of the most respected voices in the web scraping industry, just released its much-anticipated Web Scraping API Report for 2025, again confirming Zyte’s leadership in the field.
For years, Proxyway’s independent and in-depth research on the proxy and web scraping markets have been a trusted barometer for the industry, offering unbiased benchmarks and analysis that help businesses make informed decisions.
After evaluating 11 top web scraping APIs against 15 of the web’s most challenging, protected websites, the 2025 report found:
Unrivaled success: Zyte API successfully returns more results ahead of all competitors.
Fastest results: Zyte API returns data quicker than all rivals.
Low cost: Zyte is among the cheapest providers.
Top tools: Zyte has “amazing” open-source scraping tools.
AI leadership: Zyte is “the most active” vendor introducing AI-assisted extraction.
Let’s dive in…
Unmatched unblocking
In the core benchmark of unblocking performance, Zyte API emerged as the clear leader.
From a list of 6,000 tough URLs, Zyte API unblocked 93.14% at two requests per second and 85.89% at 10 requests per second - that’s up to 7.3% more successful than the second-placed vendor.
"Just like last year, Zyte did an amazing job at unblocking tough websites."
Proxyway also notes that Zyte is "leading the way" with the highest success rate of any provider.
Fastest response time
Speed is another critical factor in web scraping and here, too, Zyte excelled.
Of the hardest sites to unblock, the report found Zyte API delivers 51.6% more results per hour than Oxylabs overall.
Proxyway’s report observed the bottom-placed vendor’s “interesting strategy of failing fast”, which can appear to generate fast results but which actually “offloads the burden of retrying to the user”. The researchers preferred to measure by sending consecutive requests through one open connection.
“All things considered, Zyte was probably the fastest.”
Cost-effective and scalable
For many common targets, Zyte offers exceptional value. The report notes, "Zyte was among the cheapest providers with many of the targets (our 14,000 YouTube requests cost just $1!)." This demonstrates that high performance does not have to come with a high price tag for most use cases.
“Zyte costs peanuts for basic targets.”
For the most difficult targets, which require more advanced unblocking techniques, Zyte's pricing scales accordingly. This variable model ensures that customers pay only for the resources they actually need.
A leader in AI and innovation
The 2025 report also delves into the impact of artificial intelligence on the web scraping industry. Here again, Zyte is recognized as a key innovator.
The report highlights Zyte's advanced use of machine learning, stating:
"The most active in this domain is probably Zyte, whose machine learning models are able to extract various page types (product, news, etc.) in predictable schemas."
This capability is crucial for businesses looking to extract structured data from the vast, unstructured long-tail of the web. Zyte API’s model can return unstructured data in rich, context-specific schemas, while Zyte has also launched Web Scraping Copilot, an agentic AI sidekick injecting scraping automation into Visual Studio Code.
Zyte's long-standing commitment to innovation is also evident in its creation of Scrapy, which the report calls one of the "amazing web scraping frameworks" available today.
The final word
Web scraping APIs bundle multiple aspects of the web scraping process into a single, easily accessible endpoint, including proxy management, anti-bot management, browser rendering, request presentation, geographical distribution and even parsing.
Proxyway’s 2025 Web Scraping API Report provides a clear and data-driven picture of the industry landscape. The findings confirm Zyte’s position as a market leader, delivering a powerful combination of performance, speed, and value.
Zyte chief product officer Iain Lennon said:
“Proxyway's independent testing confirms that our deep commitment to advanced unblocking technology and machine learning-based extraction is delivering the results that web scraping engineers need.
“And that’s not just the success rates, it’s also the speed. Typically, in the past, engineers have had to choose between solutions that are either very effective or very fast. With the emergence of agentic use cases and the very large crawls that power data-hungry products, combining both is more important than ever before."
See the full results and methodology in detail at Proxyway Web Scraping API Report for 2025.