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Top 4 SerpAPI Alternatives

Due to high costs for search engine results a lot of SerpAPIs users are searching for more cost-effective alternatives. To save you nine minutes of reading, here's the result: The most cost-effective SERP scraper with the highest success rate is ZenRows.
Try ZenRows for Free

ZenRows vs SerpAPI – Top Differences

ZenRows and SerpAPI comparison
ZenRows SerpAPI
Reach
All websites Limited to search engines
Cost per Page
$0.28 per 1,000 requests $15 per 1,000 searches
Geolocation
185+ countries 69 countries and 500+ cities
Speed (Concurrency)
Fast (10 pages to unlimited) Slow (1 page)
Structured Data
JSON for popular sites JSON for selected sites
“We power it all with ZenRows. It’s the most cost-effective and reliable data enrichment tool on the market.”
Eric Nowoslawski
Certified Expert at Clay

1. ZenRows

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5.0

ZenRows | Scraper API | Residential Proxies | Scraping Browser
Click to open the image in full screen

ZenRows makes search engine scraping effortless. Packed with advanced anti-bot bypass and vast geo-targeting capabilities, it gets all the data you need with a single API call. While SerpAPI limits you to just search results, ZenRows lets you extract data from any webpage without getting blocked.

Getting started is straightforward. Let's see how it works against an anti-bot challenge demo page, a web page protected by an anti-bot.

Start by signing up for a new account, and you'll get to the Request Builder page.

building a scraper with zenrows
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There, paste your target URL, and activate premium proxies and JS rendering.

Select your programming language (Python, in this case) and choose the API connection mode. Then, copy and paste the generated code into your scraper file.

Here's what the generated Python code looks like:

Terminal
# pip install requests
import requests

url = "https://www.scrapingcourse.com/antibot-challenge"
apikey = "<YOUR_ZENROWS_API_KEY>"
params = {
    "url": url,
    "apikey": apikey,
    "js_render": "true",
    "premium_proxy": "true",
}
response = requests.get("https://api.zenrows.com/v1/", params=params)
print(response.text)

The above code outputs the protected site's full-page HTML, showing that it bypassed the anti-bot measure:

Output
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <!-- ... -->
    <title>Antibot Challenge - ScrapingCourse.com</title>
    <!-- ... -->
</head>
<body>
    <!-- ... -->
    <h2>
        You bypassed the Antibot challenge! :D
    </h2>
    <!-- other content omitted for brevity -->
</body>
</html>

Congratulations 🎉! You bypassed anti-bot protection using ZenRows.

2. Bright Data

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4.7

Bright Data
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While SerpAPI focuses exclusively on search engine results, Bright Data offers a comprehensive data collection platform with SERP scraping capabilities. Their large proxy network enables global search coverage, but users often face challenges with complex implementation and high costs.

Pros:

✅ Largest proxy network available

✅ Pre-collected datasets

✅ Scraping browser

Cons:

❌ Low success rate

❌ Expensive

❌ Steep learning curve for developers

3. Oxylabs

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4.5

Oxylabs
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Oxylabs offers dedicated SERP scraping APIs with a focus on enterprise clients. While they provide good coverage for various search engines, their pricing exceeds SerpAPI's rates, and users often report difficulties with their technical support response times.

Pros:

✅ Comprehensive proxy network

✅ ML-driven Scraper APIs

✅ Readily available datasets

Cons:

❌ Expensive

❌ Slow customer support

4. ScraperAPI

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4.3

scraperapi
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ScraperAPI provides basic search engine scraping capabilities with a straightforward approach. While they offer search engine data extraction at competitive rates starting at $49/month, their service lacks advanced SERP features and struggles with region-specific results compared to other SerpAPI alternatives.

Pros:

✅ Automatic proxy rotation

✅ Competitive pricing

Cons:

❌ Basic anti-bot protection

❌ Less sophisticated proxy selection

Scrape Any Website Without Getting Blocked

1,000 free requests – no credit card required