Apify vs ScrapingBee
Apify
Best for a scraper somebody already built $19/ScrapingBee
Best for cheap rendered pages at volume $19/Apify vs ScrapingBee is a fetcher against a platform. ScrapingBee prices every page on its rate card, 1 credit plain, 5 rendered by default, up to 75 for stealth, so a rendered page on Startup is about $0.50 per 1,000. Apify estimates its Website Content Crawler at $0.20 per 1,000 raw HTTP pages and $0.50 to $5 in a browser, and its Store Actors return rows a fetcher cannot. Pick ScrapingBee for many pages from many sites at a known price; pick Apify when the source has an Actor or the job needs a schedule and storage around it.
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 | ScrapingBee |
|---|---|---|
| What sets it apart | A marketplace of scrapers behind one API token | One endpoint, credits priced by how hard the page fights |
| Entry price | $19/mo | $19/mo |
| Unit cost | $0.20 per compute unit | $0.00025 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. | 1,000 free API credits to try it, no card. |
| GTM motion covered | Source Signal | Source Signal |
| Data returned | FirmographicsWeb pages | FirmographicsIntent and newsWeb pagesSearch results |
| MCP server | Yes Hosted at mcp.apify.com, OAuth or token | Yes Hosted, with the key in the URL |
| Interfaces | REST API MCP server Webhooks | REST API MCP server n8n node |
| Auth | Bearer API token, or OAuth through the hosted MCP server | Bearer API key; the api_key query parameter is deprecated except for MCP |
| Rate limits | 60 requests a second per resource, 400 to run an Actor, 250,000 a minute per account. | Concurrency per plan, 25 to 900 requests at once. No per-minute cap published for scraping. |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | SOC 2 GDPR | GDPR DPA |
| Best for | Best for a scraper somebody already built | Best for cheap rendered pages at volume |
Pick each one when
Apify
- A Store Actor returns structured rows for your source.
- You want a free plan that runs real jobs, $5 of usage a month.
- Schedules, webhooks and datasets should be part of the platform.
ScrapingBee
- Many sites, one endpoint, and a price per page you can read first.
- Concurrency from 25 to 900, with a 429 that costs nothing.
- An auto mode that climbs to the cheapest tier that works, under a cap you set.
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 ScrapingBee 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 | ScrapingBee |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan with the API | Starter, $19 | Hobby, $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. | 1,000 free API credits to try it, no card. |
| Unit cost at entry | $0.20 per compute unit | $0.00025 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
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
What Apify and ScrapingBee 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.
ScrapingBee
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.
None of these prices moves with volume, so one row says it all. Apify and ScrapingBee publish only an entry price, so those columns are the floor for a year, not a forecast.
| A year at | Apify | ScrapingBee |
|---|---|---|
| At any volume | $228 | $228 Hobby |
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
ScrapingBee sells credits whose cost depends on the configuration. JavaScript rendering is on by default, so a default call is 5 credits; turning it off makes it 1, premium proxies are 10 or 25 and stealth 75. Hobby is $19 for 75,000 credits, which is 15,000 default calls, and Startup $99 for 1,000,000.
Apify does not price a page; it prices a run. Its estimate for Website Content Crawler is about $0.20 per 1,000 pages over raw HTTP, between ScrapingBee's plain fetch on Hobby at $0.25 and on Startup at $0.10. In a headless browser Apify estimates $0.50 to $5 per 1,000, against $0.50 for ScrapingBee's default rendered page on Startup.
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
Rows where a Store Actor exists
A maintained Actor for a directory, a marketplace or a job board hands back named fields. ScrapingBee returns the page and leaves the parsing, or its AI extraction at 5 more credits, to you.
A platform around the fetch
Datasets, key-value stores, schedules, webhooks and scoped tokens come with the account. ScrapingBee is one endpoint, and the storage and scheduling are yours to build.
Monthly usage, free to start
$5 of platform usage a month on Free, blocked rather than billed when it runs out, then $19 a month. ScrapingBee gives 1,000 credits once to try it and has no pay-as-you-go option.
ScrapingBee
Every page priced on the rate card
1 credit plain, 5 rendered, 10 or 25 premium, 75 stealth, and 5 more for AI extraction. Read the Spb-cost header on a test call and the job is priced.
Auto mode with a ceiling
mode=auto climbs from 1 credit to 75, charges only the configuration that succeeds, costs nothing if every tier fails, and stops at the max_cost you set.
Concurrency that scales a long way
25 concurrent requests on Hobby, 100 on Startup and up to 900 on Enterprise. A request over the limit is a 429 and costs nothing.
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
A run is priced after it finishes
Pay-per-usage Actors bill compute units at $0.20 on Starter, and the crawler page's estimate was worked out at an older $0.25 baseline. Run a sample before trusting either figure.
A Store scraper is fixed on its developer's schedule
When a target site changes, an Actor someone else wrote waits for them to update it. A fetcher like ScrapingBee leaves the parser in your hands, which is more work and more control.
ScrapingBee
The default call costs five
render_js is on unless you turn it off, so 75,000 Hobby credits are 15,000 default calls, not 75,000. Many company sites need no rendering, and that flag is the biggest saving available.
No pay as you go
Plans start at $19 for 75,000 credits a month and there is no metered option, so a spiky workload pays for capacity in its quiet months too.
The MCP key sits in the URL
ScrapingBee's hosted MCP server takes the API key in the URL, a form its own API docs deprecate everywhere else.
Using Apify and ScrapingBee together
Teams comparing these two often end up running both, and the arrangement below is the one they settle on.
ScrapingBee works well as the fetcher inside an Apify Actor: Apify holds the schedule, the input list and the dataset, and ScrapingBee fetches each page at a price on its rate card. The Actor's own compute then goes on parsing rather than on fighting the site.
Use auto mode with a max_cost on the defended sites and render_js=false on the rest. That keeps the expensive tiers for the pages that need them.
Keep Store Actors for the sources they cover. A maintained directory Actor returning rows beats a fetcher plus your own parser, until its per-result price stops making sense at your volume.
Apify or ScrapingBee, for you
Two 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 |
| ScrapingBee | Firmographics, Intent and news, Web pages, Search results | Global | GDPR DPA | 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 ScrapingBee
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
ScrapingBee 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. ScrapingBee uses a bearer API key; the api_key query parameter is deprecated except for MCP.
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.
ScrapingBee's limits: concurrency per plan, 25 to 900 requests at once. No per-minute cap published for scraping. 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, Firecrawl vs ScrapingBee and Apify vs PhantomBuster.
And: Apify vs Browse AI and Apify vs Browserbase. 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 ScrapingBee, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is Apify or ScrapingBee 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 ScrapingBee for free?
Apify: Free plan, $5 of platform usage a month, no card. Blocked rather than billed when it runs out. ScrapingBee: 1,000 free API credits to try it, no card.
What are the rate limits on Apify and ScrapingBee?
Apify: 60 requests a second per resource, 400 to run an Actor, 250,000 a minute per account. ScrapingBee: Concurrency per plan, 25 to 900 requests at once. No per-minute cap published for scraping.
Do Apify and ScrapingBee both have MCP servers?
Both do. Apify: Hosted at mcp.apify.com, OAuth or token. ScrapingBee: Hosted, with the key in the URL.
Which is better, Apify or ScrapingBee?
Apify vs ScrapingBee is a fetcher against a platform. Pick ScrapingBee for many pages from many sites at a known price; pick Apify when the source has an Actor or the job needs a schedule and storage around it.
What are the downsides of Apify and ScrapingBee?
Apify: a run is priced after it finishes; a Store scraper is fixed on its developer's schedule. ScrapingBee: the default call costs five; no pay as you go; the MCP key sits in the URL. The Limits section above has each one in full.
Can you use Apify and ScrapingBee together?
ScrapingBee works well as the fetcher inside an Apify Actor: Apify holds the schedule, the input list and the dataset, and ScrapingBee fetches each page at a price on its rate card. The Actor's own compute then goes on parsing rather than on fighting the site.
Can I migrate from Apify to ScrapingBee without losing data?
The fields survive: ScrapingBee 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.