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cdpfleet vs ZenRows

The ZenRows Browser — cloud Chrome over CDP, always on its residential proxies, 15-minute sessions, billed in credits per minute and per GB — and its Fetch, Crawl and Batch APIs, against a fleet of twelve real browsers on flat threads with free traffic through any proxy, and cdpfleet Functions.

ZenRows sells web data APIs paid from one monthly credit balance: Fetch (formerly the Universal Scraper API — a URL in, the page out as HTML, Markdown, JSON, a screenshot or a PDF, with JavaScript rendering and residential "premium" proxies as credit multipliers), and Extract, Crawl and Batch built on it. The ZenRows Browser (formerly Scraping Browser) is a cloud Chrome you reach over a CDP WebSocket with Puppeteer or Playwright, with every request going out through ZenRows' residential proxies in 190+ countries. This page compares the browser with cdpfleet sessions, and the APIs with cdpfleet Functions, jobs and monitors. cdpfleet is a fleet of twelve real desktop browsers — Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, Naver Whale, Yandex Browser, Chromium, Patchright, Rebrowser, Camoufox, Firefox and WebKit — launched with one HTTPS call and driven over the Playwright protocol or CDP from five languages, through any proxy you choose, on threads you buy.

cdpfleetZenRows
Browsers12 — Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, Naver Whale, Yandex Browser, Chromium, Patchright, Rebrowser, Camoufox, Firefox, WebKit. Chrome with stable, beta and dev channels and pinned previous majors; headful by default.Cloud-hosted Chrome (version not published). The viewport, window size and user agent are fixed to match its fingerprint: calls such as page.setViewportSize() are blocked.
How you connectPlaywright protocol (connect(wsUrl), client 1.60) from Node.js, Python, Java, C# and Go — or "cdp": true for a cdpUrl (Puppeteer, connectOverCDP). SDKs for Node.js, Python and Go (C# and Java build from source).A CDP WebSocket (wss://browser.zenrows.com?apikey=…) for Puppeteer or Playwright connectOverCDP; examples in Node.js and Python.
Session lengthUp to 24 h (shared threads: also capped by your remaining daily minutes). Idle timeout 120 s by default, up to 10 min on shared threads and 24 h on dedicated.session_ttl from 60 s to 15 minutes, 3 minutes by default.
Browser timeFree Community plan: 2 threads, 60 browser-minutes per thread a day, 15-minute sessions, proxies included. Per second, as thread-seconds. Shared: $0.02–$0.05 per browser-hour at full use; dedicated $0.01/hour ($8.50/month for a browser around the clock). A headful session takes 2 threads.5 credits per minute. Credits cost $0.00042 (Build, $19/month for 45,000) down to $0.00007 (Scale, $2,999/month for 45 million), so a browser-hour is about $0.02–$0.13 depending on the plan (our arithmetic from the published credit prices).
TrafficFree through your own proxies — HTTP, HTTPS or SOCKS5, single, pools or per-host rules, with live swap.All traffic goes through ZenRows' residential proxies and is billed: 25,000 credits per GB, about $1.67–$10.56 per GB depending on the plan. No bring-your-own proxy in the Browser docs.
Residential proxycdpfleet residential: 4 tiers from $0.50/GB ($5/GB at Tier 1), $5 free credit, by country, device OS and sticky session — or none, with your own proxy.Included and mandatory: 55 million+ IPs in 190+ countries, a world region or one country per session, automatic IP rotation.
ConcurrencyThe threads you buy: 5 to 10,000 (more on request).Free 5, Build 20, Launch 50, Growth 100, Scale 200–400, Enterprise 500+.
StealthReal browsers by default (genuine Chrome, Edge, Brave…), headful by default, and three stealth builds — Patchright, Rebrowser, Camoufox (compare them).Residential IPs and rotation, and a window size kept consistent with the fingerprint; no further stealth details published for the browser.
Captcha solvingNot built in. Use any solver through Playwright, or hand over to a person with live view.The browser "doesn't include built-in CAPTCHA solving" (Browser docs). Fetch can solve reCAPTCHA or Turnstile in its JavaScript instructions with your own 2Captcha key.
Watching and keeping sessionsLive view with human takeover — Watch / Take control in the dashboard, or a link from the API — and Launch interactive: open any browser on a start page straight into live view from the dashboard's code generator (start_url over the API). Session recordings as MP4 (480p free, 720p or 1080p on a plan), and JPEG frames to your code with page.screencast. Persistent profiles keep cookies, local storage and IndexedDB between sessions (paid plans); Playwright storageState; keep_alive to reconnect to the same browser on dedicated threads.No live view, recordings or saved profiles in the Browser docs; the Academy keeps a login with Playwright's storageState in your own file.
Scraping in one callFunctions: screenshot, PDF, Markdown, scrape (HTML, Markdown, text, links, screenshot, XHR calls, cookies; wait_for, actions, extract by CSS selector), map, geo compare and a live tab — in a pooled browser, or in a browser and device of your choice on paid plans. Billed like a session (one thread while the call runs, one per country for geo compare); the Community proxy and your own proxies cost nothing extra. Free tools at /functions.Fetch (GET api.zenrows.com/v1/): HTML, Markdown, plain text, a PDF or a screenshot; JSON with the page's XHR/fetch calls; css_extractor selectors or outputs filters; js_render, wait/wait_for, js_instructions (click, fill, select, check, scroll, wait, evaluate, iframe steps — 40 seconds in all), premium_proxy with a country, session_id to keep an IP for 10 minutes, custom headers; mode=auto escalates to rendering and premium proxies only when a site needs them. Only successful requests are billed (a 404 or 410 counts): 1 credit, 5 rendered, 10 with premium proxies, 25 with both — so 1,000 rendered pages cost about $2.11 (Build B1) to $0.33 (Scale S5), $10.56–$1.67 with premium proxies, our arithmetic. Agents can also buy Fetch without an account, at $0.50 per 1,000 credits over x402, MPP or a card. A per-page cost for a Function depends on how long the page takes, which we haven't measured against these.
Crawling and bulkJobs on paid plans: batch (any number of URLs), crawl and map, with no size or time limit — runs continue past the 24-hour session limit by themselves; results as JSON lines or a zip archive, kept 14 days; stop and resume; signed webhooks. Plus watch (live XHR/WebSocket/DOM events), warmup and monitors (scheduled change detection with diffs).Crawl (new, POST /v1/crawls): from a start URL across one domain by its links, up to 100,000 pages (100 by default), include/exclude patterns, the URLs alone — the Academy's way to map a site — or each page as HTML or Markdown, results as NDJSON, signed webhooks; each page billed as a Fetch with mode=auto, 1–25 credits. Batch: up to 100,000 URLs a job with Fetch options per URL (screenshots excepted), retries, results kept 14 days, signed webhooks, reruns of failed tasks, and schedules — one-shot, every 60 minutes or more, or calendar times in a time zone. 3 crawl or batch jobs at once by default, 5 scheduled jobs per account. No change detection of its own: the Academy's recipe diffs Fetch results in your code.
Screenshots and PDFsScreenshot (PNG/JPEG, viewport or full page) and PDF Functions — a text PDF from a Chromium-based browser.On Fetch with js_render: screenshot — the viewport, the full page or one element, PNG or JPEG with a quality, at a fixed viewport size — and response_type=pdf for the rendered page as a PDF. Billed as a rendered request: 5 credits, 25 with premium proxies.
Search and site APIsNone — no search-engine or per-site APIs; a scrape or a session reads whatever page you point it at.No search endpoint or per-site APIs. Extract (extract=auto on a Fetch) returns per-site structured JSON for the domains ZenRows has prepared, listed by GET /v1/extract/domains; each account can have a set number of new domains prepared a month, at no credit cost, and each request is billed like its Fetch. The Academy reads Google and Bing results pages this way.
Agent toolingA hosted MCP server at cdpfleet.com/mcp — add it in Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini and sign in with OAuth — or npx cdpfleet-mcp; SDKs for Node.js, Python and Go.A hosted MCP server (mcp.zenrows.com/mcp, OAuth 2.1 or a Bearer key) or a local one (npx -y @zenrows/mcp, which signs up a Free account on first use) with scrape, extract, Crawl, Batch and browser tools — navigate, click, fill, cookies, local storage, tabs, screenshot, PDF; a CLI with agent skills, templates and workflows; Fetch SDKs for Python, Node.js and Go; integrations for Claude, Cursor, LangChain, CrewAI, n8n, Zapier and others.
Examples89 cases run on production in five languages, all on GitHub with their output.Docs guides for Puppeteer and Playwright, and an Academy of recipes and pipelines, each with a prompt for an AI agent.

ZenRows facts from its public pricing page and documentation, checked on 11 November 2026; list prices in USD. Tell us if something is out of date.

Which one, when

Pick ZenRows if…

  • You mostly fetch pages through an API — rendered, unblocked, as Markdown, a screenshot or a PDF — paying per successful page, with a real browser on the same credit balance when you need one.
  • Sessions are short (under 15 minutes) and you want residential IPs in 190+ countries without managing a proxy.
  • You want scheduled batch jobs of up to 100,000 URLs, or per-site structured JSON from Extract without writing selectors.

Pick cdpfleet if…

  • You bring your own proxies — traffic through them is free here, while every byte through the ZenRows Browser is billed per GB.
  • Sessions last longer than 15 minutes: logins kept warm, long crawls, monitoring, or a browser around the clock on a flat-priced dedicated thread.
  • You want monitors that check pages on a schedule and keep the diffs, or crawl and batch jobs without a 100,000-page cap or a three-jobs-at-once default.
  • The site must see a specific real browser or version — Chrome channels, Edge, Brave, Firefox, WebKit, Camoufox — or a headful one.
  • You need recordings, live takeover or persistent profiles, or the Playwright protocol from Java, C# or Go.
  • You want to start free — the Community plan includes proxies — and try a browser in live view before writing any code.

Try it

The quickstart is one HTTPS call and five lines of Playwright; the code builder writes the launch for any browser and option set in your language.

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