Apify competitors, sorted by why you are leaving
People rarely leave Apify because a scraper failed. They leave because the bill is set by whoever wrote the Actor, and the plan is dollars that expire. 4 replacements below, each one matched to a specific reason.
If the job was one marketplace Actor run at volume, Bright Data is the like-for-like: its Web Scraper API publishes $1.50 per 1,000 records on success, the same headline as Apify's Google Maps Actor, but as the vendor's own price rather than a third party's. If the job was reading company websites as text for a model, Firecrawl is simpler to price at 1 credit a page. If it was raw fetching at scale, ScrapingBee is the cheapest page in this group. Among these Apify alternatives, PhantomBuster is the answer only when the Actors you ran were social automations through your own accounts.
Prices and limits for every option below are read off the vendor's own page. These are the Apify alternatives that each answer a named problem.
The 3 reasons people actually leave
If none of these is your situation, the honest answer is that you should probably stay, and the Apify API review covers what you already have. The 28 providers in the Sourcing APIs listing are where these replacements come from.
1 · The price of a scrape belongs to the Actor, not to Apify
Most Store Actors price per result or per event, set by their developer, and pay-per-usage Actors bill compute units at $0.20 each on Starter. Google Maps Scraper is listed from $1.50 per 1,000 places; the Website Content Crawler estimates $0.50 to $5 per 1,000 pages with a headless browser. The same platform gives you a different unit cost for every source.
2 · The plan is prepaid usage that expires every month
Starter at $19, Scale at $199 and Business at $999 each come back as that many dollars of platform usage, and Apify says unused usage is not rolled over. A Scale plan that spends $60 in a month has paid $139 for nothing, so a spiky pipeline either over-buys or runs out.
3 · Published estimates lag the rate card
The pricing page lists $0.20 a compute unit on Starter, falling to $0.13 on Business, while the Website Content Crawler page still works out its estimates at a $0.25 baseline. A team forecasting a crawl from published numbers is reading an estimate at a rate it will not pay, and only a test run settles it.
4 Apify alternatives, and what each one fixes
Ordered by how closely each one answers the reasons above, not by price.
| Provider | Entry price | Unit cost | Free tier | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apify | $19/mo | $0.20 per compute unit | Free plan, $5 of platform usage a month, no card. Blocked rather than billed when it runs out. | Baseline |
| Bright Data | $1.50/1K requests | $0.0015 per request | 5,000 credits a month across the SERP, Unlocker and Scraper APIs, no card. A hard stop, not a bill. | Best for search results and pre-built scrapers at volume |
| Firecrawl | $16/mo annual | $0.0032 per credit | Free plan, 1,000 credits a month, no card. Keyless scrape and search too. | Best for turning sites into model input |
| ScrapingBee | $19/mo | $0.00025 per credit | 1,000 free API credits to try it, no card. | Best for cheap rendered pages at volume |
| PhantomBuster | $56/mo annual | $2.80 per execution hour | 14-day trial, no card: 2 hours of execution time and exports limited to 10 rows. | Best for running LinkedIn automations from code |
Read from each vendor's own pricing page on 24 October 2026.
The case for each one
Each one below is matched to a reason rather than scored, and each one names what you give up by taking it. A replacement with no downside is a replacement nobody has actually run.
Bright Data
Pre-built scrapers priced by the vendor itself: $1.50 per 1,000 records on success, 5,000 free a month, and unlimited concurrency.
Bright Data is the closest of these Apify competitors in shape, because it also sells pre-built scrapers rather than a crawler you configure. Its Web Scraper API covers more than 1,500 targets, and its SERP and Web Unlocker APIs sit on the same meter: $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests or records, charged on success only.
The difference that matters is who sets the price. On Apify a Store Actor's rate is its developer's decision and can change with the Actor; on Bright Data the rate card is the vendor's own and it is the same for all three API products. Scale at $499 a month buys about 380,000 requests, which beats pay as you go only above roughly 333,000 a month.
The free tier is 5,000 credits a month shared across the three APIs, with no card, and it stops hard when spent. Concurrency is advertised as unlimited, and the only published ceiling is 1,000 SERP requests a minute on an account that holds no funds.
What you give up
The long tail. Apify Store is a marketplace, so a niche directory or a regional marketplace often has an Actor somebody already wrote; Bright Data covers what it chose to build. You also give up the 128 to 256 concurrent runs of Apify's larger plans for a model where the question is wallet balance rather than run slots.
When it is the wrong answer
A team whose sources are niche enough that only a community Actor reaches them. Check that Bright Data has a scraper for each target before moving anything.
Read the review · Apify vs Bright Data
Firecrawl
One credit a page, rendered, returned as Markdown. The simpler price when the job is reading company websites for a model.
A lot of Apify usage in go-to-market is the Website Content Crawler pointed at company sites to feed a model. Firecrawl is built for exactly that job and prices it flatly: 1 credit per page on a basic scrape, crawl or map, with JavaScript handled, and 4 more credits only if you ask for the JSON, Question or Highlight formats.
At the published rates that is $0.0032 a page on Hobby, $16 a month billed annually for 5,000 credits, and $0.00083 on Standard at $83 billed annually for 100,000. Against the crawler's own estimate of $0.50 to $5 per 1,000 headless pages, Standard lands at $0.83 per 1,000 with no compute unit to estimate first.
The free plan is 1,000 credits a month with no card, and some endpoints answer without a key at all. A scrape that returns nothing is not charged; a 403 or 404 page is returned and costs 1 credit.
What you give up
Every source that is not a website you can point at. Firecrawl reads pages; it has no marketplace of platform-specific scrapers, so Google Maps listings or a marketplace's structured records are not a Firecrawl job.
When it is the wrong answer
Structured records from a specific platform. If the output you need is rows with named fields from one site, an Actor or a pre-built scraper gets you there and a page of Markdown does not.
Read the review · Apify vs Firecrawl
ScrapingBee
The cheapest rendered page in this group: 5 credits for a default rendered fetch at $0.000099 a credit on Startup, about $0.0005.
ScrapingBee is a single fetching endpoint with the proxies and the browser handled for you, and it is on this page for teams that used Apify mainly as compute for their own scrapers. You send a URL, it returns the HTML, and the bill is credits whose cost depends on the configuration.
A default call costs 5 credits, because JavaScript rendering is on unless you turn it off; a plain fetch is 1, premium proxies 10 or 25, stealth 75. On Startup at $99 for 1,000,000 credits a default rendered page is about $0.0005, and on Hobby at $19 for 75,000 it is about $0.0013.
Concurrency rises with the plan, from 25 requests in flight on Hobby to 200 on Business, and a 429 when you exceed it is not billed. There is no pay as you go option; the 1,000 free credits are the test.
What you give up
Everything above the fetch. Parsing, pagination, retries across a whole site and the structured output an Actor gives you are your code now, and ScrapingBee publishes no per-minute limit beyond concurrency to plan a crawl around.
When it is the wrong answer
A team that never wrote a scraper and does not want to. Apify's value was that somebody else maintains the extraction; ScrapingBee hands that job back to you.
Read the review · Apify vs ScrapingBee
PhantomBuster
If the Actors you ran were social and LinkedIn automations, this runs the same jobs through your own accounts, metered in execution hours.
PhantomBuster belongs on this page for one kind of Apify user: the one running automations against platforms such as LinkedIn rather than scraping public pages. Its Phantoms are prebuilt automations across more than 15 platforms, and the API launches a configured Phantom and reads what it produced.
The meter is execution time and slots rather than results. Start is $56 a month on annual billing for 5 slots and 20 hours, Grow is $128 for 15 slots and 80 hours, Scale is $352 for 50 slots and 300 hours, which is $2.80, $1.60 and $1.17 an hour. How many rows an hour yields depends on the Phantom, so nobody can convert that to a per-row price in advance.
Running out pauses the automations rather than billing an overage, which protects a budget and stalls a pipeline. The MCP server is hosted with OAuth and listed on every plan, the 14-day trial included.
What you give up
Public-web scraping at volume and a price per row. PhantomBuster works through your own accounts on each platform, so throughput is bounded by what those accounts can do, and it publishes no request rate limit.
When it is the wrong answer
Anyone whose Apify runs were maps, directories, marketplaces or company websites. That is not what Phantoms are for.
What you would actually pay, on each one
Every provider on this page publishes a rate card, so the real numbers can sit next to each other rather than behind a summary. The plan you want is the one whose included volume covers a normal month for you, not the cheapest one on the page.
Apify
Apify publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $19 to $999.
Free
- No credit card
- Compute at $0.20 a CU, 16 GB of RAM
- 5 concurrent runs
- Blocked, not billed, when the $5 runs out
Starter
- $19 of prepaid usage a month
- Compute at $0.20 a CU, 64 GB of RAM
- 32 concurrent runs
- Bronze discount on Store Actors
Scale
- $199 of prepaid usage a month
- Compute at $0.16 a CU, 256 GB of RAM
- 128 concurrent runs
- Silver discount on Store Actors
Business
- $999 of prepaid usage a month
- Compute at $0.13 a CU, 512 GB of RAM
- 256 concurrent runs
- Gold discount and an account manager
Bright Data
Bright Data publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and pay as you go with no minimum above the free allowance.
Free tier
- No credit card
- Shared across SERP, Unlocker and Scraper APIs
- Renews on the 1st, never rolls over
- Stops hard when spent, no surprise bill
Pay as you go
- Charged on success only
- Monthly spend limits you set
- Unlimited concurrency
- A prepaid wallet, so only deposited funds are spent
Scale
- $1.30 per 1,000 above the allowance
- 383,000 on the Unlocker plan, 384,000 records on Scraper
- About $1.31 per 1,000 when the allowance is used
- Cancel anytime
Enterprise
- Volume discounts
- Account manager and premium SLA
- SSO
- Priority support
Firecrawl
Firecrawl publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $16 to $333.
Free
- No cost, no card
- 1,000 pages or 500 searches
- 2 concurrent browsers
- Plus the keyless endpoints, which need no account
Hobby
- $19 a month paying month to month
- 2,500 searches or 5,000 pages scraped
- 5 concurrent requests
- $0.0032 a credit
- 1,000 extra credits per $5
Standard
- $99 a month paying month to month
- 50,000 searches or 100,000 pages scraped
- 25 concurrent requests
- $0.00083 a credit, four times better than Hobby
- 2,000 extra credits per $5
Growth
- 50 concurrent requests
- Scale is $599 a month for 1,000,000 credits
- Enterprise above that
ScrapingBee
ScrapingBee publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $19 to $249.
Hobby
- 25 concurrent requests
- 15,000 default rendered calls
- $0.000253 a credit
Freelance
- 50 concurrent requests
- 50,000 default rendered calls
- $0.000196 a credit
Startup
- 100 concurrent requests
- 200,000 default rendered calls
- $0.000099 a credit
Business
- 200 concurrent requests
- 600,000 default rendered calls
- Business + is $599 for 8,000,000
PhantomBuster
PhantomBuster publishes 4 tiers, one of them a free trial, and the paid ladder runs from $56 to $352.
Trial
- 5 slots, 2 hours of execution time
- 50 email credits, 1,000 AI credits
- 100 URL finder credits
- Exports limited to 10 rows
Start
- 5 slots, 20 hours a month
- 500 email credits, 10,000 AI credits a month
- 1,000 URL finder credits a month
- Unlimited users and exports
Grow
- 15 slots, 80 hours a month
- 2,500 email credits, 30,000 AI credits a month
- 10,000 URL finder credits a month
- Unlimited users and exports
Scale
- 50 slots, 300 hours a month
- 10,000 email credits, 90,000 AI credits a month
- 20,000 URL finder credits a month
- Unlimited users and exports
Read the included volume before the headline price. A plan that costs twice as much and carries five times the credits is the cheaper plan, and on this page that is the usual case rather than the exception.
What each one costs at your volume
Apify first, then every replacement. The model picks the cheapest published plan that covers your volume on each one, which is the comparison a row of entry prices cannot make.
Apify
Its plans are not metered in records, so the figure below is the entry plan rather than a forecast.
Bright Data
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
Firecrawl
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
ScrapingBee
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
PhantomBuster
Its plans are not metered in records, so the figure below is the entry plan rather than a forecast.
Plans are read from each vendor's own pricing page and the model picks the cheapest one that covers you, so these are list prices on the billing term each vendor publishes, annual where that is how it prices, before any discount you negotiate. Apify and PhantomBuster publish plans that are not metered in records, so the figure shown is the entry plan rather than your bill.
What a year costs at three volumes
The same plan-fit arithmetic as the model above, run out to a year, because an annual number is what a budget actually asks for.
Apify, ScrapingBee and PhantomBuster publish only an entry price, so those columns are the floor for a year, not a forecast.
| A year at | Apify | Bright Data | Firecrawl | ScrapingBee | PhantomBuster |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $228 | $0 Free tier | $0 Free | $228 Hobby | $672 |
| 10,000 a month | $228 | $180 Pay as you go | $996 Standard | $228 Hobby | $672 |
| 50,000 a month | $228 | $900 Pay as you go | $996 Standard | $228 Hobby | $672 |
These are list prices on the published plan that covers each volume, on the billing term each vendor publishes, so they are the number before you negotiate.
Where the data comes from, and what you may do with it
The question that arrives late and expensively is who is allowed to hold the data. A migration is the moment to check it, because you are signing a new contract anyway.
| Provider | Fields returned | Coverage | Compliance | Redistribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apify | Firmographics, Web pages | Global | SOC 2 GDPR | Not stated |
| Bright Data | Firmographics, Job postings, LinkedIn profile, Search results, Web pages | Global | ISO 27001 SOC 2 Type II GDPR CCPA | Not stated |
| Firecrawl | Firmographics, Technographics, Intent and news, Web pages | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II | Not stated |
| ScrapingBee | Firmographics, Intent and news, Web pages, Search results | Global | GDPR DPA | Not stated |
| PhantomBuster | LinkedIn profile, Work email, Firmographics | Global | GDPR | Not stated |
None of these states a redistribution position on its pricing or docs pages. Internally that never matters. Put the rows in something your customers can see and it becomes the question your legal team asks first.
Two practical notes that apply to every provider on this page. A compliance badge describes the vendor rather than your use of it, so a GDPR DPA does not give you a lawful basis for the outreach you send. And every one of these vendors runs its own opt-out, which means a person who asks you to delete their record has to be removed from your copy as well as from theirs.
Moving off Apify
Written against Bright Data, the first pick above, because the steps are the same whichever one you take and the specifics are what make them useful. Swap the name and the order still holds.
Measure the thing you are about to lose
Replay 100 of the queries, URLs or lookups you really send through Apify and record the usable results, the failures and what each one cost. Without that baseline every provider looks cheaper per call than the one you are paying for today.
Check which fields change
Bright Data returns every field Apify does, so nothing downstream has to change shape. Confirm the values rather than the keys: the same field can be named, typed or formatted differently on the other side.
Rewrite the auth and the limits, in that order
Apify authenticates with a bearer API token, or OAuth through the hosted MCP server. Bright Data uses a bearer API key, plus a zone for the SERP, Unlocker or Browser API.
The limits are the part that bites later. Apify's limits: 60 requests a second per resource, 400 to run an Actor, 250,000 a minute per account.
Bright Data's limits: SERP API 1,000 a minute on an unfunded account, raised by adding funds. Concurrency unlimited. A loop tuned to the first will either crawl or get throttled on the second.
Run both for one billing cycle
Keep the old key live and route a slice of real traffic to the new one. A month is the shortest honest test, because the limits and the overage rate only show up under a real month's load, and those are where the surprises live.
Cancel on the renewal date
Annual seats and prepaid usage rarely refund mid-term. Check what the contract says about the time you have already paid for, and time the switch to the renewal date.
The step people skip is the first one, and it is the only one that cannot be done after the fact. Once the old key is off you have nothing to compare the new one against, so a provider that is quietly worse on your workload looks like a provider that is fine.
What practitioners say about Firecrawl
Transcribed as written and linked to the thread. A Reddit claim is a signal rather than a fact, so nothing here is the only source for any figure on this page.
A credit is a page until you turn on the features you came for
The credit inflation thing is crazy. From "1 credit = 1 page" to burning 5-9 per page the second you enable anything actually useful is not an accident, that's a deliberate design choice if you ask me. [...] Product is good, no question. Just know what you're getting into before you start building on it
r/ProxyEngineering · May 2026 · 3 points
The mechanism is confirmed by Firecrawl's own documentation, which states that operations cost different amounts of credits and names JSON extraction and Interact as the dear ones, so heavier usage reaches the credit cap sooner. That is the thing to model before sizing a plan: the rate card above quotes 1 credit a page, and the page you actually want is usually not a basic scrape.
The 5 to 9 multiplier is this commenter's own and nothing here verifies it, and the rest of their comment is about GitHub stars and the self-hosting license rather than about the API. Take the shape of the warning, read the operations table against your own pipeline, and treat the baseline rate as the cheap case rather than the typical one.
14 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page.
Should you actually switch?
The short answer is at the top of this page. Before you act on it, run the test below, because it is the cheapest way to find out whether that answer holds for you.
Scrapers differ on the pages that fight back. Take fifty URLs you actually fetch, the hardest ones included, and run them through a free tier or trial on each. Count the pages that came back usable and what each cost in credits. The easy pages look the same everywhere; the hard ones decide the bill.
Head to head, and in a stack
Apify vs Firecrawl
CompareA marketplace that runs other people's crawlers against one endpoint built to turn a page into Markdown. Raw HTTP is cheaper on Apify; a rendered page is close.
Compare them →Apify vs Bright Data
CompareTwo platforms selling scrapers, an unblocker and proxies, and pricing the unblocker identically on the entry tier. Search is where they part.
Compare them →Apify vs PhantomBuster
CompareBoth bill for running code rather than for rows. PhantomBuster sells execution hours through your own accounts; Apify sells prepaid usage and lets each Actor price its results.
Compare them →All alternatives
57Every provider in the directory that teams regularly try to replace, with the reasons and the replacements for each.
Browse the hub →Before you switch, try the waterfall in Clay.
Clay runs a waterfall across 150+ data providers from one table, without a separate contract with each. A lookup that finds nothing costs no data credit, and the free plan includes 500 actions a month.
Frontal is a Clay Elite Studio Partner.
Switching from Apify, answered
What is the best Apify alternative?
It depends on why you are leaving, which is how this page is organized rather than ranked. The first pick here is Bright Data, which this directory lists as the best for search results and pre-built scrapers at volume, at $1.50/1K requests. The case for it, and what you give up, is in the section above.
Is there a free alternative to Apify?
Yes, 3 of the replacements here do. Bright Data: 5,000 credits a month across the SERP, Unlocker and Scraper APIs, no card. A hard stop, not a bill. Firecrawl: Free plan, 1,000 credits a month, no card. Keyless scrape and search too. ScrapingBee: 1,000 free API credits to try it, no card.
How were these competitors chosen?
By the reason teams leave, not by a score. The page opens with the reasons teams leave and matches a replacement to each one.