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cdpfleet vs ZenRows
ZenRows Browser Sessions — cloud Chrome over CDP, always on its residential proxies, 15-minute sessions, billed in credits per minute and per GB — against a fleet of twelve real browsers on flat threads with free traffic through any proxy.
ZenRows is best known for its scraping API (fetch a URL, get the HTML back, with JavaScript rendering and "premium" proxies as credit multipliers). Its Browser Sessions product (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. Everything is paid from one monthly credit balance. 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.
| cdpfleet | ZenRows | |
|---|---|---|
| Browsers | 12 — 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), headless. |
| How you connect | Playwright protocol (connect(wsUrl), client 1.60) from Node.js, Python, Java, C# and Go — or "cdp": true for a cdpUrl (Puppeteer, connectOverCDP). SDKs in all five languages. | A CDP WebSocket (wss://browser.zenrows.com?apikey=…) for Puppeteer or Playwright connectOverCDP; examples in Node.js and Python. |
| Session length | Up 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 time | Free Community plan (invite-only for now): 2 threads, 60 browser-minutes per thread a day, 15-minute sessions, proxies included. Per second, as thread-seconds. Shared: $0.02–$0.03 per browser-hour at full use; dedicated $0.0069/hour ($5.00/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). |
| Traffic | Free 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 Sessions docs. |
| Residential proxy | cdpfleet 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: 190+ countries, country and region targeting, automatic IP rotation. |
| Concurrency | The threads you buy: 5 to 10,000 (more on request). | Free 5, Build 20, Launch 50, Growth 100, Scale 200–400, Enterprise 500+. |
| Stealth | Real browsers by default (genuine Chrome, Edge, Brave…), headful by default, and three stealth builds — Patchright, Rebrowser, Camoufox (compare them). | Residential IPs and rotation; no further stealth details published for Browser Sessions. |
| Captcha solving | Not built in. Use any solver through Playwright, or hand over to a person with live view. | "Doesn't include built-in CAPTCHA solving" (Browser Sessions docs). |
| Watching and keeping sessions | Live 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. | Not described in the Browser Sessions docs. |
| Other products | One product: browsers. MCP server and Playwright for any agent framework. | The same credits buy the scraping API (1–25 credits per request), extraction, batch jobs, standalone residential proxies, an MCP server and SDKs. |
| Examples | 58 cases run on production in five languages, all on GitHub with their output. | Docs guides for Puppeteer, Playwright and the scraping API. |
ZenRows facts from its public pricing page and documentation, checked on 13 October 2026; list prices in USD. Tell us if something is out of date.
Which one, when
Pick ZenRows if…
- You mostly fetch pages through a scraping API and occasionally need a real browser, from the same credit balance.
- Sessions are short (under 15 minutes) and you want residential IPs in 190+ countries without managing a proxy.
- Your traffic per session is small, so per-GB billing stays cheap.
Pick cdpfleet if…
- You bring your own proxies — traffic through them is free here, while every byte through ZenRows 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.
- 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.