Apify vs PhantomBuster
Apify
Best for a scraper somebody already built $19/PhantomBuster
Best for running LinkedIn automations from code $56/Apify vs PhantomBuster is a choice between two ways of not paying per record. PhantomBuster launches prebuilt automations through your own platform accounts, LinkedIn chief among them, and bills execution hours, $2.80 an hour on Start down to $1.17 on Scale. Apify runs Store Actors that mostly price per result, so Google Maps places cost from $1.50 per 1,000 whatever the run takes. Pick PhantomBuster when the work happens inside an account your team already runs; pick Apify when you want rows from a public source at a price you can read first.
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 | PhantomBuster |
|---|---|---|
| What sets it apart | A marketplace of scrapers behind one API token | Launch prebuilt automations by API, pay in execution time |
| Entry price | $19/mo | $56/mo annual |
| Unit cost | $0.20 per compute unit | $2.80 per execution hour |
| Billing model | Subscription Pay as you go Free tier | Subscription Credit packs |
| Free tier | Free plan, $5 of platform usage a month, no card. Blocked rather than billed when it runs out. | 14-day trial, no card: 2 hours of execution time and exports limited to 10 rows. |
| GTM motion covered | Source Signal | Source Enrich Engage |
| Data returned | FirmographicsWeb pages | LinkedIn profileWork emailFirmographics |
| MCP server | Yes Hosted at mcp.apify.com, OAuth or token | Yes Hosted at mcp.phantombuster.com, OAuth |
| Interfaces | REST API MCP server Webhooks | REST API MCP server Webhooks n8n node |
| Auth | Bearer API token, or OAuth through the hosted MCP server | API key in the X-Phantombuster-Key header; OAuth for the MCP server |
| Rate limits | 60 requests a second per resource, 400 to run an Actor, 250,000 a minute per account. | No request rate published. Slots cap parallel runs at 5, 15 or 50. |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | SOC 2 GDPR | GDPR |
| Best for | Best for a scraper somebody already built | Best for running LinkedIn automations from code |
Pick each one when
Apify
- The source is public and a Store Actor returns rows at a listed price.
- The job is wide: 32 concurrent runs on Starter and 128 on Scale.
- You want a published API rate limit to design against.
PhantomBuster
- The automation has to run inside your team's own LinkedIn or platform account.
- A configured Phantom should run from a CRM event, with a one-run input.
- Running out of time should pause the work rather than bill overage.
Coverage claims are not comparable here, because these two do not index the same web. Take a hundred of the queries you would really run, send them through one free tier and one trial, and count the answers you could put in front of a rep without editing them. 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 PhantomBuster 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 | PhantomBuster |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan with the API | Starter, $19 | Start, $56 |
| Tiers published | 4 | 4 |
| Free tier | Free plan, $5 of platform usage a month, no card. Blocked rather than billed when it runs out. | 14-day trial, no card: 2 hours of execution time and exports limited to 10 rows. |
| Unit cost at entry | $0.20 per compute unit | $2.80 per execution hour |
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
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
How this plays out once it is running
Neither vendor charges per request. PhantomBuster plans buy execution hours, 20, 80 or 300 a month for $56, $128 or $352 on annual billing, plus slots that cap how many Phantoms run at once and email credits for the enrichment steps. Apify plans buy prepaid platform dollars, $19, $199 or $999 a month, which Store Actors then spend, mostly per result.
That makes the unit costs impossible to line up honestly. An execution hour is not a number of profiles, and how many rows an hour yields depends on the Phantom and the site. Apify's pay-per-event Actors give a price per result, but the Actor you need may not exist, and pay-per-usage ones bill compute units instead.
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 price per result, before the run
Most Store Actors charge per event, so Google Maps Scraper is from $1.50 per 1,000 places on its own page. A pipeline can be costed on paper, which no execution-hour plan allows.
Far more parallel work
32 concurrent runs on Starter and 128 on Scale, against 5 or 15 slots on PhantomBuster's first two plans. When the job is wide rather than long, that is the number that sets the finish time.
Rate limits you can read
60 requests a second per resource and 250,000 a minute per account, returned in the X-RateLimit-Limit header. PhantomBuster publishes no request rate at all.
PhantomBuster
Automation inside your own accounts
Phantoms run through accounts your team already holds on over 15 platforms, LinkedIn among them. That is a different job from scraping public pages, and it is the one PhantomBuster is built around.
A safe default when time runs out
PhantomBuster says automations pause until execution time resets or you upgrade, and no overage is applied automatically. Apify's paid plans bill overage past the prepaid amount.
One-run inputs without breaking the setup
The launch call takes a bonusArgument that is merged in for one run only, so a new LinkedIn URL can be fed in without rewriting the saved configuration and its session cookie.
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 scraper is someone else's code
A Store Actor is written and maintained by its developer, who also sets its price. Read the Actor page, run a small input, and treat a dependency on one Actor as a dependency on one more vendor.
Usage that expires and overage that does not stop
Prepaid usage is gone at the end of each cycle, and paid plans keep running past it as overage until the limit you configured. Set that limit before the first scheduled run.
PhantomBuster
No volume model, and no published rate limit
An execution hour is $2.80 on Start and $1.17 on Scale, and how many rows it yields depends on the Phantom. Slots cap parallel runs at 5, 15 or 50, and no request rate is published.
Two meters, not one
Email credits are separate from execution time, so a run can be cheap in hours and dear in credits. Read both counters from the usage endpoints before and after a test.
The trial is a sample, not a test
Fourteen days, 2 hours of execution and exports limited to 10 rows. Enough to see the shape of a Phantom's output, not enough to size a plan.
Using Apify and PhantomBuster together
Teams comparing these two often end up running both, and the arrangement below is the one they settle on.
These two fit together more naturally than most pairs here. Apify pulls the public half, a list of companies from a directory or Google Maps at a listed price per row, and PhantomBuster acts on it inside the accounts your team runs, launched with a bonusArgument per row.
Both ship hosted MCP servers with OAuth, so an agent can hold both. Keep the handoff in a dataset or a sheet rather than chaining the two live, because a Phantom that runs out of hours pauses rather than fails, and the upstream run will not know.
Budget them separately. Apify spends dollars that expire monthly; PhantomBuster spends hours and email credits that reset. A test run on each, with the counters read before and after, is the only way to know what one finished row costs end to end.
Apify or PhantomBuster, for you
Four 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 |
| 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 between Apify and PhantomBuster
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
PhantomBuster does not return web pages, which Apify does. If anything downstream reads that field, the switch changes your pipeline as well as your vendor.
Rewrite the auth and the limits, in that order
Apify authenticates with a bearer API token, or OAuth through the hosted MCP server. PhantomBuster uses an API key in the X-Phantombuster-Key header; OAuth for the MCP server.
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.
PhantomBuster's limits: no request rate published. Slots cap parallel runs at 5, 15 or 50. 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 and PhantomBuster 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 →PhantomBuster alternatives
4PhantomBuster sells execution hours, not rows. People look for PhantomBuster alternatives when they need a price per record, or a run that does not stall when the hours do.
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 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 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 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 PhantomBuster, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is Apify or PhantomBuster cheaper?
Apify is cheaper to start, because its free tier carries the API: free plan, $5 of platform usage a month, no card. Blocked rather than billed when it runs out. PhantomBuster starts at $56/mo annual. Per unit they meter different things, a compute unit against an execution hour, so the cost model above is the comparison, not the rate card.
Can I try Apify and PhantomBuster for free?
Apify: Free plan, $5 of platform usage a month, no card. Blocked rather than billed when it runs out. PhantomBuster: 14-day trial, no card: 2 hours of execution time and exports limited to 10 rows.
What are the rate limits on Apify and PhantomBuster?
Apify: 60 requests a second per resource, 400 to run an Actor, 250,000 a minute per account. PhantomBuster: No request rate published. Slots cap parallel runs at 5, 15 or 50.
Do Apify and PhantomBuster both have MCP servers?
Both do. Apify: Hosted at mcp.apify.com, OAuth or token. PhantomBuster: Hosted at mcp.phantombuster.com, OAuth.
Which is better, Apify or PhantomBuster?
Apify vs PhantomBuster is a choice between two ways of not paying per record. Pick PhantomBuster when the work happens inside an account your team already runs; pick Apify when you want rows from a public source at a price you can read first.
What are the downsides of Apify and PhantomBuster?
Apify: the scraper is someone else's code; usage that expires and overage that does not stop. PhantomBuster: no volume model, and no published rate limit; two meters, not one; the trial is a sample, not a test. The Limits section above has each one in full.
Can you use Apify and PhantomBuster together?
These two fit together more naturally than most pairs here. Apify pulls the public half, a list of companies from a directory or Google Maps at a listed price per row, and PhantomBuster acts on it inside the accounts your team runs, launched with a bonusArgument per row.
Can I migrate from Apify to PhantomBuster without losing data?
Not without losing a field. PhantomBuster does not return web pages, which Apify does, so anything downstream that reads it has to change. Either way, replay a hundred real URLs through both and count the usable pages before you switch.