Apify vs ZenRows
Apify
Best for a scraper somebody already built $19/ZenRows
The finest-grained credit ladder in scraping, and no charge for a failure $19/Apify vs ZenRows is the cleanest price list in scraping against the broadest catalog. ZenRows charges only for successful pages, 1 credit standard and 5 rendered, on rungs from $19 for 45,000 credits, so a rendered page on the $99 Launch rung is about $0.99 per 1,000. Apify charges by run or by Actor, with Store scrapers that return rows and a platform around them. Pick ZenRows to fetch pages at a price you can forecast to the credit; pick Apify when you want rows from a source somebody already scraped.
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 | ZenRows |
|---|---|---|
| What sets it apart | A marketplace of scrapers behind one API token | Credits for successful pages only, on fourteen published rungs |
| Entry price | $19/mo | $19/mo |
| Unit cost | $0.20 per compute unit | $0.00042 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, 5,000 credits a month, 5 concurrent requests, no card. |
| 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 at mcp.zenrows.com/mcp, OAuth 2.1 or API key |
| Interfaces | REST API MCP server Webhooks | REST API MCP server Bulk or async |
| Auth | Bearer API token, or OAuth through the hosted MCP server | API key as the apikey query parameter on Fetch; the X-API-Key header on Batch (header only), Crawl and Extract |
| Rate limits | 60 requests a second per resource, 400 to run an Actor, 250,000 a minute per account. | Concurrency by plan: 5 on Free, 20 Build, 50 Launch, 100 Growth, 200 to 400 Scale. A 429 when every slot is busy, with Concurrency-Limit and Concurrency-Remaining headers. |
| Coverage | Global | Global |
| Compliance | SOC 2 GDPR | SOC 2 ISO 27001 GDPR DPA |
| Best for | Best for a scraper somebody already built | The finest-grained credit ladder in scraping, and no charge for a failure |
Pick each one when
Apify
- The source is a directory or marketplace with a maintained Actor.
- Datasets, schedules and webhooks belong with the scrape.
- Generous published API limits: 250,000 requests a minute per account.
ZenRows
- Failed requests should never reach the bill.
- You want to buy close to the volume you need, from fourteen rungs.
- A hosted MCP server with OAuth 2.1, plus a CLI.
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 ZenRows lists 15. 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 | ZenRows |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest paid plan with the API | Starter, $19 | Build 45K, $19 |
| Tiers published | 4 | 15 |
| Free tier | Free plan, $5 of platform usage a month, no card. Blocked rather than billed when it runs out. | Free plan, 5,000 credits a month, 5 concurrent requests, no card. |
| Unit cost at entry | $0.20 per compute unit | $0.00042 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
ZenRows
ZenRows publishes 15 tiers, none of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $19 to $2,999, with a quoted tier above it.
Build 45K
- 45,000 credits a month
- 20 concurrent requests, email support
- $0.00042 a credit
Build 80K
- 80,000 credits a month
- 20 concurrent requests
Build 120K
- 120,000 credits a month
- 20 concurrent requests
Launch 250K
- 250,000 credits a month
- 50 concurrent requests, chat support
Launch 500K
- 500,000 credits a month
- 50 concurrent requests
Enterprise
- 500 to 1,000+ concurrent requests
- SLA, SOC 2, ISO 27001 and DPA
9 steps between the fifth and the last are not drawn here. The cost model below reads all 15.
What Apify and ZenRows 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.
ZenRows
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 | ZenRows |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $228 | $228 Build 45K |
| 10,000 a month | $228 | $228 Build 45K |
| 50,000 a month | $228 | $348 Build 80K |
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
ZenRows publishes its rate card as a Markdown file: fourteen paid rungs from $19 for 45,000 credits to $2,999 for 45,000,000, with 1 credit a standard page, 5 rendered, 10 with premium proxies and 25 for both. Only successful requests are charged, and a 404 or 410 counts as a success.
Apify prices nothing per page. A pay-per-event Store Actor lists a price per result and a pay-per-usage one bills compute units. Apify estimates its Website Content Crawler at about $0.20 per 1,000 raw HTTP pages, against $0.42 for a standard page on ZenRows' first rung and $0.20 on Launch 500K.
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
Structured rows from Store Actors
A pay-per-event Actor lists its price per result, and what comes back is a dataset rather than HTML. ZenRows returns the page, and the fields are your parser's job.
The URL list, the schedule and the results in one place
A request queue holds the URLs, a schedule starts the run, a dataset keeps the output and a webhook fires at the end. ZenRows has a batch API for the fetch and leaves the rest to you.
Generous published API limits
60 requests a second per resource and 250,000 a minute per account. On ZenRows the ceiling is concurrency, 20 requests at once on the first rungs.
ZenRows
Only success is billed
A failed request costs nothing, and the multipliers are four numbers: 1, 5, 10 and 25. The bill for a job is successful pages times a known rate.
The finest-grained ladder in this category
Fourteen rungs, so a team that needs 120,000 credits buys 120,000 for $39 a month rather than jumping to the next round number.
Hosted MCP with OAuth 2.1, and a CLI
MCP at mcp.zenrows.com/mcp with OAuth 2.1 or an API key. Apify's server is hosted with OAuth too, so for an agent the two are level.
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 failed fetch still costs compute
Without per-event pricing an Actor bills compute for as long as a page takes, retries included. ZenRows bills only successful pages, so the same failure costs something on one and nothing on the other.
Rows only where an Actor exists
For a source nobody has published an Actor for, the row advantage disappears: you write the scraper and pay compute units to run it. ZenRows prices that page the same whether or not anyone has scraped the site before.
ZenRows
A 404 still costs a credit
ZenRows counts a 404 or 410 as a successful request, so a list of stale URLs is billed in full.
Concurrency is the ceiling
5 on Free, 20 on Build, 50 on Launch and 100 on Growth, with a 429 when every slot is busy. A large job finishes when the slots allow, whatever the credits say.
Compliance sits on Enterprise
ZenRows lists SOC 2, ISO 27001 and a DPA, and its own pricing file ties them to the Enterprise plan. Check what a self-serve rung carries before procurement does.
Using Apify and ZenRows together
Teams comparing these two often end up running both, and the arrangement below is the one they settle on.
ZenRows is a good fetcher inside an Apify Actor. Apify holds the URL list, the schedule and the dataset; ZenRows fetches each page and charges only when it succeeds, which keeps the Actor's own compute to parsing.
Clean the URL list first. ZenRows bills a 404 as a success, so the cheapest saving in this setup is dropping dead URLs before the run rather than after it.
Apify or ZenRows, 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 |
| ZenRows | Firmographics, Technographics, Intent and news, Web pages | Global | SOC 2 ISO 27001 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 ZenRows
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
ZenRows 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. ZenRows uses an API key as the apikey query parameter on Fetch; the X-API-Key header on Batch (header only), Crawl and Extract.
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.
ZenRows' limits: concurrency by plan: 5 on Free, 20 Build, 50 Launch, 100 Growth, 200 to 400 Scale. A 429 when every slot is busy, with Concurrency-Limit and Concurrency-Remaining headers. 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 Browse AI.
And: Apify vs Browserbase and Apify vs Oxylabs. 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 ZenRows, answered
Read from the same records that drive the table above.
Is Apify or ZenRows 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 ZenRows for free?
Apify: Free plan, $5 of platform usage a month, no card. Blocked rather than billed when it runs out. ZenRows: Free plan, 5,000 credits a month, 5 concurrent requests, no card.
What are the rate limits on Apify and ZenRows?
Apify: 60 requests a second per resource, 400 to run an Actor, 250,000 a minute per account. ZenRows: Concurrency by plan: 5 on Free, 20 Build, 50 Launch, 100 Growth, 200 to 400 Scale. A 429 when every slot is busy, with Concurrency-Limit and Concurrency-Remaining headers.
Do Apify and ZenRows both have MCP servers?
Both do. Apify: Hosted at mcp.apify.com, OAuth or token. ZenRows: Hosted at mcp.zenrows.com/mcp, OAuth 2.1 or API key.
Which is better, Apify or ZenRows?
Apify vs ZenRows is the cleanest price list in scraping against the broadest catalog. Pick ZenRows to fetch pages at a price you can forecast to the credit; pick Apify when you want rows from a source somebody already scraped.
What are the downsides of Apify and ZenRows?
Apify: a failed fetch still costs compute; rows only where an Actor exists. ZenRows: a 404 still costs a credit; concurrency is the ceiling; compliance sits on Enterprise. The Limits section above has each one in full.
Can you use Apify and ZenRows together?
ZenRows is a good fetcher inside an Apify Actor. Apify holds the URL list, the schedule and the dataset; ZenRows fetches each page and charges only when it succeeds, which keeps the Actor's own compute to parsing.
Can I migrate from Apify to ZenRows without losing data?
The fields survive: ZenRows 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.