Apify vs Browse AI
Apify
Best for a scraper somebody already built $19/Browse AI
No-code robots that monitor a page, with the API and webhooks on every plan $19/Apify vs Browse AI is a question of who builds the scraper. Browse AI trains no-code robots in its app and sells credits, a standard page or ten list rows each, at $0.019 a credit on Personal with the year paid up front, or $0.024 month to month. Apify runs code, yours or a Store developer's, on prepaid usage billed monthly, with Actors that mostly price per result. Pick Browse AI when the person maintaining the scraper is not a developer; pick Apify when the scrape is part of a pipeline engineers own.
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 | Browse AI |
|---|---|---|
| What sets it apart | A marketplace of scrapers behind one API token | Robots, not requests, billed monthly or a year up front |
| Entry price | $19/mo | $19/mo annual |
| Unit cost | $0.20 per compute unit | $0.019 per credit |
| Billing model | Subscription Pay as you go Free tier | Subscription Credit packs Free tier |
| Free tier | Free plan, $5 of platform usage a month, no card. Blocked rather than billed when it runs out. | Free forever: 50 credits a month, 2 websites, no card. |
| GTM motion covered | Source Signal | Source Signal |
| Data returned | FirmographicsWeb pages | FirmographicsJob postingsIntent and newsWeb pages |
| MCP server | Yes Hosted at mcp.apify.com, OAuth or token | No |
| Interfaces | REST API MCP server Webhooks | REST API Webhooks Bulk or async |
| Auth | Bearer API token, or OAuth through the hosted MCP server | API key as a Bearer token in the Authorization header |
| Rate limits | 60 requests a second per resource, 400 to run an Actor, 250,000 a minute per account. | Not published in the API reference. Robot runs are capped at 60 minutes on every self-serve plan. |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | SOC 2 GDPR | None published |
| Best for | Best for a scraper somebody already built | No-code robots that monitor a page, with the API and webhooks on every plan |
Pick each one when
Apify
- Engineers own the pipeline and want code, versioning and an API first.
- You want monthly billing without paying a month-to-month premium: Browse AI's monthly Personal plan is $0.024 a credit against $0.019 on annual.
- An MCP server for an agent is part of the plan.
Browse AI
- The person who maintains the scraper is not a developer.
- Monitoring a page for changes is the job, with webhooks on every plan.
- List pages dominate: ten rows cost one credit.
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 Browse AI 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 | Browse AI |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan with the API | Starter, $19 | Personal, $19 |
| Tiers published | 4 | 4 |
| Free tier | Free plan, $5 of platform usage a month, no card. Blocked rather than billed when it runs out. | Free forever: 50 credits a month, 2 websites, no card. |
| Unit cost at entry | $0.20 per compute unit | $0.019 per credit |
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
Browse AI
Browse AI publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $19 to $500.
Free
- 50 credits a month, 2 websites
- REST API, webhooks and bulk runs included
Personal
- 12,000 credits a year, all up front, so 1,000 a month
- 5 websites, 3 team members
- $0.019 a credit, top-ups at $0.024
Professional
- 60,000 credits a year, all up front, so 5,000 a month
- 10 websites, 10 team members
- $0.014 a credit, top-ups at $0.017 to $0.013
Premium
- Managed: their engineers build and run the robots
- 98% data-accuracy SLA, from $0.010 a credit
What Apify and Browse AI 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.
Browse AI
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 | Browse AI |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $228 | $228 Personal |
| 10,000 a month | $228 | Quoted |
| 50,000 a month | $228 | Quoted |
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
Browse AI is built around robots you train in its app to extract or monitor a site, with the REST API, webhooks and bulk runs on every plan, the free one included. A credit is a standard page or ten list rows, a premium site costs 2 to 10 credits a run, and paid plans bill monthly or annually: Personal is $48 a month for 2,000 credits, or $228 a year for 12,000 granted up front.
Apify is the opposite trade. The scraper is code, written by you or by a Store developer, and the plan is monthly prepaid usage from $19. On a like-for-like job the two land close: Apify's Google Maps Scraper lists 1,000 places from $1.50, and 1,000 list rows on Browse AI are 100 credits, $1.90 at the Personal rate and $1.40 at Professional.
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 free plan with real usage, and no annual premium
$5 of usage a month free, then $19 a month with nothing paid in advance. Browse AI's cheapest paid way in is $48 for a month of Personal, and its $19 rate needs $228 paid for the year.
Thousands of scrapers someone already wrote
Apify Store covers sources from Google Maps to whole-site crawlers, priced on each Actor's page. A Browse AI robot has to be trained for each site, by you.
An MCP server and published limits
Hosted at mcp.apify.com with OAuth, and rate limits stated per endpoint: 60 a second per resource, 400 to run an Actor. Browse AI ships no MCP server and publishes no API rate limit.
Browse AI
No developer required to keep it running
Robots are trained by pointing at a page in the app, and the API, webhooks and bulk runs of up to 500,000 pages come on every plan. The person who notices a site changed can fix the robot.
Cheap on list pages
One credit buys ten list rows, so 1,000 rows are 100 credits, about $1.90 on Personal and $1.40 on Professional. That is the shape most prospect lists take.
Monitoring is the native job
Robots extract or monitor, and a monitor fires a webhook when the page changes. On Apify the same thing is a scheduled Actor plus your own comparison of the results.
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
Someone has to write or choose the code
An Actor is a program with inputs. If no Store Actor fits, the scraper is a build, and a pay-per-usage run costs whatever its compute time comes to.
Usage that does not roll over
The monthly usage expires at the end of each cycle, so an idle month is paid for anyway. Size the plan on the months you actually run.
Browse AI
The low rate needs a year paid up front
Personal is $19 a month only on annual billing, $228 for 12,000 credits, and Professional $828 for 60,000. Top-ups cost more per credit than the plan, $0.024 against $0.019 on Personal.
Premium sites cost up to ten times
A site Browse AI classes as premium costs 2 to 10 credits a run rather than 1. Its own llms.txt also lists a different plan ladder from the pricing page, so price from the pricing page.
Robot runs stop at 60 minutes
Every self-serve plan caps a run at an hour, and no API rate limit is published. A long crawl has to be split into many runs.
Using Apify and Browse AI together
Teams comparing these two often end up running both, and the arrangement below is the one they settle on.
The useful pairing is Browse AI for the pages a business user watches and Apify for the volume work. A pricing page or careers page monitored by a robot fires a webhook, and the webhook starts an Apify run that crawls or enriches further on a schedule your engineers own.
Do not point both at the same site. Pick one owner per source, because two scrapers on one site means two places to fix when the layout changes.
The two bill on different calendars: Browse AI is cheapest a year at a time, Apify runs month by month. Prove the Browse AI side on the free plan's 50 credits a month before committing $48 for a month or $228 for a year.
Apify or Browse AI, 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 |
| Browse AI | Firmographics, Job postings, Intent and news, Web pages | Global | None published | 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 Browse AI
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
Browse AI 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. Browse AI uses an API key as a Bearer token in the Authorization header.
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.
Browse AI's limits: not published in the API reference. Robot runs are capped at 60 minutes on every self-serve plan. 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 credit expiry, rollover and the overage rate only show up at renewal 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 starts 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 →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 Bright Data, Apify vs PhantomBuster 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 Bright Data
Two 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
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 →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 Browse AI, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is Apify or Browse AI 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 credit, so the cost model above is the comparison, not the rate card.
Can I try Apify and Browse AI for free?
Apify: Free plan, $5 of platform usage a month, no card. Blocked rather than billed when it runs out. Browse AI: Free forever: 50 credits a month, 2 websites, no card.
What are the rate limits on Apify and Browse AI?
Apify: 60 requests a second per resource, 400 to run an Actor, 250,000 a minute per account. Browse AI: Not published in the API reference. Robot runs are capped at 60 minutes on every self-serve plan.
Do Apify and Browse AI both have MCP servers?
One of them. Apify ships one; Browse AI documents none.
Which is better, Apify or Browse AI?
Apify vs Browse AI is a question of who builds the scraper. Pick Browse AI when the person maintaining the scraper is not a developer; pick Apify when the scrape is part of a pipeline engineers own.
What are the downsides of Apify and Browse AI?
Apify: someone has to write or choose the code; usage that does not roll over. Browse AI: the low rate needs a year paid up front; premium sites cost up to ten times; robot runs stop at 60 minutes. The Limits section above has each one in full.
Can you use Apify and Browse AI together?
The useful pairing is Browse AI for the pages a business user watches and Apify for the volume work. A pricing page or careers page monitored by a robot fires a webhook, and the webhook starts an Apify run that crawls or enriches further on a schedule your engineers own.
Can I migrate from Apify to Browse AI without losing data?
The fields survive: Browse AI 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.