Apify vs Firecrawl
Apify
Best for a scraper somebody already built $19/Firecrawl
Best for turning sites into model input $16/Apify vs Firecrawl comes down to whether you want a price per page or a price per minute of a machine. Firecrawl is 1 credit a page, $0.83 per 1,000 on Standard, whatever the site does, and returns Markdown with nothing to configure. Apify estimates its Website Content Crawler at $0.20 per 1,000 pages over raw HTTP and $0.50 to $5 in a headless browser, so it wins on easy sites at volume and can lose on hard ones. Pick Firecrawl for an agent that reads arbitrary URLs, Apify when you crawl whole sites or need one of its Store scrapers anyway.
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 | Firecrawl |
|---|---|---|
| What sets it apart | A marketplace of scrapers behind one API token | Any website, as clean Markdown an agent can read |
| Entry price | $19/mo | $16/mo annual |
| Unit cost | $0.20 per compute unit | $0.0032 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 plan, 1,000 credits a month, no card. Keyless scrape and search too. |
| GTM motion covered | Source Signal | Source Signal |
| Data returned | FirmographicsWeb pages | FirmographicsTechnographicsIntent and newsWeb pages |
| MCP server | Yes Hosted at mcp.apify.com, OAuth or token | Yes Hosted, with a keyless tier |
| Interfaces | REST API MCP server Webhooks | REST API MCP server Bulk or async n8n node |
| Auth | Bearer API token, or OAuth through the hosted MCP server | Bearer token, and some endpoints work with no key at all |
| Rate limits | 60 requests a second per resource, 400 to run an Actor, 250,000 a minute per account. | Per team, per endpoint: 10/min scrape on Free to 10,000 on Scale. Concurrency binds first. |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | SOC 2 GDPR | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II |
| Best for | Best for a scraper somebody already built | Best for turning sites into model input |
Pick each one when
Apify
- You crawl whole sites, where about $0.20 per 1,000 raw HTTP pages is the rate that matters.
- A Store Actor already scrapes your source and returns rows.
- Proxies, schedules and webhooks should sit on the same bill as the crawl.
Firecrawl
- An agent reads one arbitrary URL at a time and needs Markdown back.
- You want the price of a page known before the call: 1 credit, 2 per 10 search results.
- Keyless endpoints and an open-source core matter for a quick start or self-hosting.
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 Firecrawl 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 | Firecrawl |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan with the API | Starter, $19 | Hobby, $16 |
| 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 plan, 1,000 credits a month, no card. Keyless scrape and search too. |
| Unit cost at entry | $0.20 per compute unit | $0.0032 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
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
What Apify and Firecrawl 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.
Firecrawl
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 | Firecrawl |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $228 | $0 Free |
| 10,000 a month | $228 | $996 Standard |
| 50,000 a month | $228 | $996 Standard |
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
The two meters answer different questions. Firecrawl charges credits per page, 1 a scrape and 2 per 10 search results, from $16 a month billed annually for 5,000 credits to $83 for 100,000, so the cost of a job is pages times a known rate. Apify charges prepaid platform dollars, and its Website Content Crawler bills compute units, so the cost of a page depends on how long the machine spends getting it.
Apify publishes its own estimate for that crawler: about $0.20 per 1,000 pages with a raw HTTP crawler and $0.50 to $5 per 1,000 with a headless browser, worked out at a $0.25 compute unit baseline that the pricing page now lists at $0.20. Firecrawl Standard is $0.83 per 1,000 pages. On static sites Apify is several times cheaper; on heavily defended ones it can cost more.
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
Raw HTTP crawling at a fraction of a cent
Apify estimates its Website Content Crawler at about $0.20 per 1,000 pages when no browser is needed, against $0.83 on Firecrawl Standard and $3.20 on Hobby. On a crawl of mostly static company sites the gap compounds with every page.
Thousands of scrapers you do not have to write
The same token runs any Actor in Apify Store, from directory and marketplace scrapers to whole-site crawlers. Firecrawl turns a page into Markdown; Apify can also hand back the structured rows a specific source holds.
A bill cap on every call
A run accepts maxTotalChargeUsd and maxItems, so a job cannot spend past a number you set. The Free plan is blocked rather than billed when its $5 of usage runs out.
Firecrawl
A known price per page
1 credit a scrape and 2 per 10 search results, from $0.0032 a credit on Hobby to $0.00083 on Standard. There is nothing to estimate and no machine time to watch, which is what a pipeline forecasting next month needs.
Markdown for a model, with nothing to configure
Firecrawl runs the browser, waits for the JavaScript and strips the navigation by default. Apify's crawler can save Markdown too, but you choose the crawler type, and Apify itself points single-URL work at a different Actor.
Keyless endpoints and an open-source core
Search, Scrape and Parse work through the hosted MCP endpoint with no key, capped per IP per day. The code is open source and Firecrawl documents self-hosting, which is a real option when data residency is the constraint.
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
The cost of a page is known after the run
Pay-per-usage Actors bill compute units, and a slow or defended site costs more for the same page. Firecrawl charges 1 credit whatever the site does, so only a test run on your own URLs puts the two on one scale.
Unused usage expires
A plan is prepaid usage that does not roll over, so a site crawl you run once a quarter pays for two idle months in between. Size it on the month you actually run.
Firecrawl
Concurrency is small and binds first
2 concurrent browsers on Free, 5 on Hobby and 25 on Standard. Firecrawl says itself that concurrency, not the request rate, is the real ceiling, and a 10-second page on 25 browsers delivers about 150 pages a minute.
Rows from a specific platform are not the product
Firecrawl returns the page. Turning a directory listing into rows with the fields you want is your parser's work, or a call to its extract endpoint, priced separately from a scrape.
Using Apify and Firecrawl together
Teams comparing these two often end up running both, and the arrangement below is the one they settle on.
The split that works is Firecrawl for the long tail and Apify for the sources that matter most. An agent that reads whatever URL a record points at suits Firecrawl's per-page price, while the few sources you pull every day, a directory or a marketplace, are worth a dedicated Actor that returns rows.
Both ship hosted MCP servers, Apify at mcp.apify.com with OAuth and Firecrawl with a keyless tier, so one agent can hold both. Give it the rule rather than the choice: a known source goes to an Actor, an unknown page goes to Firecrawl.
Run the same 1,000 company homepages through both before committing. Firecrawl's cost is 1,000 credits whatever happens; Apify's is whatever the usage chart says afterwards, and that number, not either estimate, is the one to plan on.
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 |
| Firecrawl | Firmographics, Technographics, Intent and news, Web pages | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II | 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 Firecrawl
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
Firecrawl 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. Firecrawl uses a bearer token, and some endpoints work with no key at all.
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.
Firecrawl's limits: per team, per endpoint: 10/min scrape on Free to 10,000 on Scale. Concurrency binds first. 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.
What practitioners say about Firecrawl
The one part of this page that is not a vendor claim. Quotes are transcribed as written, linked to the thread, and nothing here is the only source for a figure in the tables above.
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.
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 Firecrawl 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 →Firecrawl alternatives
3The simplest way to turn a site into model input. Concurrency, not credits, is what people run into.
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, Firecrawl vs ScraperAPI and Apify vs PhantomBuster.
And: Firecrawl vs ScrapingBee and Apify vs Browse AI. Every comparison in the directory is on the compare hub.
Firecrawl vs ScraperAPI
One credit a rendered page as Markdown, against one credit a plain page as HTML. The multipliers decide which is cheaper.
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 Firecrawl, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is Apify or Firecrawl 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 Firecrawl for free?
Apify: Free plan, $5 of platform usage a month, no card. Blocked rather than billed when it runs out. Firecrawl: Free plan, 1,000 credits a month, no card. Keyless scrape and search too.
What are the rate limits on Apify and Firecrawl?
Apify: 60 requests a second per resource, 400 to run an Actor, 250,000 a minute per account. Firecrawl: Per team, per endpoint: 10/min scrape on Free to 10,000 on Scale. Concurrency binds first.
Do Apify and Firecrawl both have MCP servers?
Both do. Apify: Hosted at mcp.apify.com, OAuth or token. Firecrawl: Hosted, with a keyless tier.
Which is better, Apify or Firecrawl?
Apify vs Firecrawl comes down to whether you want a price per page or a price per minute of a machine. Pick Firecrawl for an agent that reads arbitrary URLs, Apify when you crawl whole sites or need one of its Store scrapers anyway.
What are the downsides of Apify and Firecrawl?
Apify: the cost of a page is known after the run; unused usage expires. Firecrawl: concurrency is small and binds first; rows from a specific platform are not the product. The Limits section above has each one in full.
Can you use Apify and Firecrawl together?
The split that works is Firecrawl for the long tail and Apify for the sources that matter most. An agent that reads whatever URL a record points at suits Firecrawl's per-page price, while the few sources you pull every day, a directory or a marketplace, are worth a dedicated Actor that returns rows.
Can I migrate from Apify to Firecrawl without losing data?
The fields survive: Firecrawl 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.