Apify vs Bright Data
Apify
Best for a scraper somebody already built $19/Bright Data
Best for search results and pre-built scrapers at volume $1.50/Apify vs Bright Data is closer than it looks: an unblocked request is $1.50 per 1,000 on both entry tiers, and a pre-built scraper record is $1.50 per 1,000 on Bright Data against from $1.50 per 1,000 places on Apify's Google Maps Scraper. Bright Data is the cheaper SERP, $1.50 per 1,000 against $2.50 on Apify Free and Starter, with unlimited concurrency and a charge only on success. Apify is the better place to run your own code, with schedules, webhooks, datasets and thousands of Store Actors around it. Search results at volume go to Bright Data; a crawl you want to own goes to Apify.
Where they actually differ
Every value comes from the same record that drives the Sourcing APIs listing, so this table cannot disagree with the cards. Accented tags are data one provider returns and the other does not.
| Compare | Apify | Bright Data |
|---|---|---|
| What sets it apart | A marketplace of scrapers behind one API token | SERP, unblocking and 1,500 scrapers on one meter |
| Entry price | $19/mo | $1.50/1K requests |
| Unit cost | $0.20 per compute unit | $0.0015 per request |
| Billing model | Subscription Pay as you go Free tier | Pay as you go Subscription Free tier |
| Free tier | Free plan, $5 of platform usage a month, no card. Blocked rather than billed when it runs out. | 5,000 credits a month across the SERP, Unlocker and Scraper APIs, no card. A hard stop, not a bill. |
| GTM motion covered | Source Signal | Source Signal |
| Data returned | FirmographicsWeb pages | FirmographicsJob postingsLinkedIn profileSearch resultsWeb pages |
| MCP server | Yes Hosted at mcp.apify.com, OAuth or token | Yes Hosted, inside the 5,000-credit free pool |
| Interfaces | REST API MCP server Webhooks | REST API MCP server Bulk or async Webhooks n8n node |
| Auth | Bearer API token, or OAuth through the hosted MCP server | Bearer API key, plus a zone for the SERP, Unlocker or Browser API |
| Rate limits | 60 requests a second per resource, 400 to run an Actor, 250,000 a minute per account. | SERP API 1,000 a minute on an unfunded account, raised by adding funds. Concurrency unlimited. |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | SOC 2 GDPR | ISO 27001 SOC 2 Type II GDPR CCPA |
| Best for | Best for a scraper somebody already built | Best for search results and pre-built scrapers at volume |
Pick each one when
Apify
- You want to run your own scraper code next to the Store ones, on one token.
- Schedules, webhooks and datasets should come with the platform.
- A spend cap per call matters: maxTotalChargeUsd on every run.
Bright Data
- Search results are the job, at $1.50 per 1,000 rather than $2.50.
- You want unlimited concurrency and a charge only on success.
- ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and CCPA should be on the vendor's list.
Neither of these indexes anything: they fetch pages. Take a hundred URLs you really need, the hardest ones included, run them through both free tiers, and count the pages that came back usable and what each one cost, retries and multipliers included. That ratio is the number you are actually buying.
What each one costs, tier by tier
Both publish a full rate card, so this comparison runs on numbers rather than on adjectives. Apify lists 4 tiers and Bright Data lists 4. Every figure is read off the vendor's own pricing page, and the pages they came from are listed at the foot of this one.
| The short version | Apify | Bright Data |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan with the API | Starter, $19 | Pay as you go, $1.50 per 1,000 requests |
| Tiers published | 4 | 4 |
| Free tier | Free plan, $5 of platform usage a month, no card. Blocked rather than billed when it runs out. | 5,000 credits a month across the SERP, Unlocker and Scraper APIs, no card. A hard stop, not a bill. |
| Unit cost at entry | $0.20 per compute unit | $0.0015 per request |
The cheapest paid plan is rarely the plan you end up on, because what moves you up a tier is usually volume rather than a feature. The two rate cards below are what you are choosing between.
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
What Apify and Bright Data cost at your volume
Put your own volume in. The model picks the cheapest published plan that covers it on each side, which is the question a rate card cannot answer and the one that decides the bill.
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.
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 publishes 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 publishes only an entry price, so that column is the floor for a year, not a forecast.
| A year at | Apify | Bright Data |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $228 | $0 Free tier |
| 10,000 a month | $228 | $180 Pay as you go |
| 50,000 a month | $228 | $900 Pay as you go |
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.
How this plays out once it is running
Both are platforms, and both sell three overlapping things: pre-built scrapers, an unblocker for defended pages, and proxies. Bright Data prices its SERP, Web Unlocker and Web Scraper APIs one way, $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests or records, with 5,000 free credits a month and Scale at $499 for about 380,000. Apify prices proxies and its unblocker per plan and leaves Store Actor prices to their developers.
Lined up product by product, the entry tiers meet. Apify's Unblocker is $1.50 per 1,000 requests on Free and Starter and falls to $1 on Business; Bright Data's is $1.50, and $1.30 above the Scale allowance. Apify's SERPs proxy is $2.50 per 1,000 on Free and Starter and $1.70 on Business, against $1.50 on Bright Data, so search is where the two separate.
What each one is genuinely good at
These are the things that keep somebody paying after the first month, which is a different question from what the marketing page leads with.
Apify
A platform for your own code, not only theirs
The same API runs a Store Actor or one you wrote, with datasets, key-value stores, schedules and webhooks around it. Bright Data sells the requests; Apify also sells the place the scraper lives.
Proxy and unblocker prices fall with the plan
Residential proxy runs $8 a GB on Free and Starter down to $7 on Business, and the Unblocker $1.50 per 1,000 down to $1. Each step comes with prepaid usage you were going to spend anyway.
Spend caps travel with every call
maxTotalChargeUsd and maxItems on a run stop a job at a number you choose. That matters most when the job is your own code, which Bright Data's per-request pricing does not cover.
Bright Data
The cheaper SERP, with no concurrency ceiling
$1.50 per 1,000 search results on pay as you go, charged on success only, with concurrency unlimited. An unfunded account is capped at 1,000 SERP requests a minute, lifted by adding funds.
One price shape across three APIs
SERP, Web Unlocker and Web Scraper all run $1.50 per 1,000, with one shared 5,000-credit free pool. A pipeline that mixes search, pages and records forecasts on one number.
The longer compliance list
ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and CCPA, where Apify's record lists SOC 2 and GDPR. If procurement asks first, that difference decides the shortlist.
Where each one falls down
Every provider on this site has a case it handles badly, and the people who find out are the ones who bought it for that case. These are the ones worth knowing before you sign rather than after.
Apify
Search costs more here
$2.50 per 1,000 SERPs on Free and Starter, $2 on Scale and $1.70 on Business. Even at the top tier it sits above Bright Data's pay-as-you-go rate.
Concurrent runs are capped by plan
5 on Free, 32 on Starter, 128 on Scale and 256 on Business, with extra runs at $5 each. Bright Data's SERP API leaves concurrency unlimited, so a wide burst of queries finishes sooner there.
Bright Data
The headline prices are not the plan prices
Bright Data advertises from $1 per 1,000 and a struck-through $0.75 per 1,000 records; neither appears in a published plan column, and the $0.75 needs a promotion code. Price on $1.50, or $1.31 if a Scale plan fills.
Scale only pays above about 333,000 requests
$499 for 380,000 requests beats $1.50 pay as you go only when most of the allowance is used. Below that line the plan costs more than the meter.
Its own documents disagree on the free tier
One llms.txt says the Browser API is outside the free tier and the docs say it is inside; the same file calls the MCP server free and from $1 per 1,000. Read the pricing page for the product you will call.
Using Apify and Bright Data together
Teams comparing these two often end up running both, and the arrangement below is the one they settle on.
A common split is Bright Data for search and Apify for everything around it. An Actor you own on Apify can call Bright Data's SERP API for the queries, crawl the result pages itself and land everything in one dataset, paying $1.50 per 1,000 for the search instead of $2.50.
Keep the unblocker on one side. Both price it at $1.50 per 1,000 on their entry tiers, so the deciding factor is where the rest of the job runs, and splitting one site across two unblockers only doubles the debugging.
Both ship hosted MCP servers. Bright Data's runs on the Web Unlocker and draws on the 5,000 free credits; Apify's at mcp.apify.com spends the account's prepaid usage. Know which pool an agent drains before you leave it running.
Apify or Bright Data, for you
Three questions, answered from the same records as the rest of this page. Nothing is sent anywhere and there is no result to email yourself.
Each answer leans one way. The recommendation appears here once you have picked at least two.
A tool like this can only weigh what is on the page. It does not know your workload, and the one test that does is the bake-off on this page: your own rows, queries or records, run on the cheapest entry each side offers.
Where an answer leans on a certification or an integration, it means that vendor publishes it on the pages this directory read, which is not the same as the other one lacking it. The sources are listed at the foot of the page.
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. These are the fields each one returns, the coverage it claims and the compliance it publishes.
| 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 |
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 between Apify and Bright Data
Most readers of this page are already on one of these two, and the order below catches the expensive mistakes while they are still free.
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.
The wider field for both
Sometimes the answer is neither, and the reason you are comparing these two points somewhere else entirely: Apify alternatives and Bright Data alternatives both start from the reason people leave.
Apify alternatives
4People 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.
See the alternatives →Bright Data alternatives
4Bright Data is cheap per request and broad in coverage. People leave because the product is the whole web's plumbing, and they only wanted one tap.
See the alternatives →Everything in Source
28The full category these two sit in, filtered by data returned, billing model and entry price.
Browse the category →Related comparisons
The 52 providers behind every pairing here are in the main listing.
Pairings that share a side with this one: Apify vs PhantomBuster, Apify vs Browse AI and Apify vs Browserbase.
And: Apify vs Oxylabs and Apify vs ZenRows. Every comparison in the directory is on the compare hub.
Apify vs Firecrawl
A 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 PhantomBuster
Both 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 →Apify vs Browse AI
A developer platform billed on monthly prepaid usage against no-code robots billed by the page, cheapest when a year of credits is paid up front.
Compare them →Testing providers one at a time? Run 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.
Apify and Bright Data, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is Apify or Bright Data cheaper?
Both have a free tier that carries the API, so neither costs anything to start; what each one includes is in the next answer. Per unit they meter different things, a compute unit against a request, so the cost model above is the comparison, not the rate card.
Can I try Apify and Bright Data for free?
Apify: Free plan, $5 of platform usage a month, no card. Blocked rather than billed when it runs out. Bright Data: 5,000 credits a month across the SERP, Unlocker and Scraper APIs, no card. A hard stop, not a bill.
What are the rate limits on Apify and Bright Data?
Apify: 60 requests a second per resource, 400 to run an Actor, 250,000 a minute per account. Bright Data: SERP API 1,000 a minute on an unfunded account, raised by adding funds. Concurrency unlimited.
Do Apify and Bright Data both have MCP servers?
Both do. Apify: Hosted at mcp.apify.com, OAuth or token. Bright Data: Hosted, inside the 5,000-credit free pool.
Which is better, Apify or Bright Data?
Apify vs Bright Data is closer than it looks: an unblocked request is $1.50 per 1,000 on both entry tiers, and a pre-built scraper record is $1.50 per 1,000 on Bright Data against from $1.50 per 1,000 places on Apify's Google Maps Scraper.
What are the downsides of Apify and Bright Data?
Apify: search costs more here; concurrent runs are capped by plan. Bright Data: the headline prices are not the plan prices; scale only pays above about 333,000 requests; its own documents disagree on the free tier. The Limits section above has each one in full.
Can you use Apify and Bright Data together?
A common split is Bright Data for search and Apify for everything around it. An Actor you own on Apify can call Bright Data's SERP API for the queries, crawl the result pages itself and land everything in one dataset, paying $1.50 per 1,000 for the search instead of $2.50.
Can I migrate from Apify to Bright Data without losing data?
The fields survive: Bright Data returns everything Apify does. What changes is the auth and the limits. Either way, replay a hundred real URLs through both and count the usable pages before you switch.