Apify vs Octoparse(2026)
Apify is better for teams that need huge library of pre-built scrapers (no code needed). Octoparse is the stronger choice if no coding required. Apify is freemium (from $29/month) and Octoparse is freemium (from $119/month).
Full feature breakdown, pricing details, and pros & cons below.
By Bikram NathLast updated
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Apify
Apify is a cloud platform for web scraping, data extraction, and browser automation used by 130,000+ developers. Its Actor marketplace offers thousands of pre-built scrapers, while the SDK and Crawlee library let you build custom crawlers — with proxies, headless browsers, scheduling, storage, and an API all handled for you.
Starting at $29/month
Visit ApifyOctoparse
Octoparse is a no-code, point-and-click web scraping tool that lets non-developers build scrapers visually. It offers cloud extraction, scheduling, IP rotation, and pre-built task templates for popular sites — turning web pages into structured data without writing code.
Starting at $119/month
Visit OctoparseHow Do Apify and Octoparse Compare on Features?
| Feature | Apify | Octoparse |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting price | $29/month | $119/month |
| Actor marketplace (thousands of ready scrapers) | ✓ | — |
| Crawlee open-source crawling library | ✓ | — |
| Datacenter + residential proxies | ✓ | — |
| Headless browser pool (Playwright/Puppeteer) | ✓ | — |
| Scheduling and webhooks | ✓ | — |
| Dataset + key-value storage | ✓ | — |
| REST API and SDK | ✓ | — |
| Anti-blocking and fingerprinting | ✓ | — |
| Visual point-and-click builder | — | ✓ |
| Cloud-based extraction | — | ✓ |
| Scheduled scraping | — | ✓ |
| IP rotation | — | ✓ |
| Pre-built task templates | — | ✓ |
| Auto-detect data fields | — | ✓ |
| Export to CSV/Excel/database/API | — | ✓ |
Apify Pros and Cons vs Octoparse
Apify
Octoparse
Deep dive: Apify
When to choose Apify
Apify is the right choice when the team needs to run web scrapers at scale without managing browser infrastructure, proxy pools, or scheduling logic. Its Actor model, where each scraper is a containerized unit that can be published, versioned, and shared, is a genuine differentiator. The Apify Store contains thousands of pre-built Actors for common targets like Google Search, Amazon product pages, Instagram profiles, and real estate listings, meaning many scraping tasks can be solved without writing a single line of code. For custom scraping, Apify's Crawlee open-source library, which powers most Actors, provides a production-grade crawling framework with automatic retry, request queuing, and browser fingerprint rotation. Choose Apify when the team needs to scrape multiple different sites, when the scrapers need to run on a schedule with monitoring, or when the output feeds into a data pipeline or AI application. Avoid it when the scraping target is a single, simple API that can be called directly, or when the team has existing scraping infrastructure on dedicated servers and the migration cost outweighs the managed benefit.
Real-world use case
A solo developer building a price comparison SaaS deploys 8 Apify Actors to scrape product prices from e-commerce sites every 6 hours. Each Actor is configured via input JSON with the target URLs, CSS selectors, and output format. The scraped datasets are automatically pushed to Apify's Dataset storage and pulled into a PostgreSQL database via a webhook that triggers a Next.js API route. The developer uses 3 pre-built Store Actors for Amazon, Flipkart, and Google Shopping, and writes 5 custom Actors using Crawlee with Playwright for sites that require JavaScript rendering. The free tier's monthly compute credit covers about 50,000 page loads with datacenter proxies. As the product grows to tracking 10,000 products, the monthly cost scales to roughly per month on the Personal plan. The tradeoff: each Actor's compute consumption varies based on the target site's complexity, proxy type, and rendering requirements, making cost prediction difficult until the Actor has run for several billing cycles.
Hidden gotchas
Compute unit pricing is the main source of billing surprises. One compute unit equals one second of Actor runtime with 1 GB of memory. Actors that use Playwright or Puppeteer for full browser rendering consume significantly more compute units per page than those using plain HTTP requests with Cheerio. A Playwright-based Actor can consume 10 to 50 times more compute units per page than an HTTP-based one, and many Store Actors default to browser rendering even when the target page does not require JavaScript execution. Switching an Actor from Playwright to CheerioCrawler can reduce costs by 90 percent but requires understanding the target page's rendering requirements. Residential proxy bandwidth is billed separately from compute units and is not included in any plan's base pricing. A scraping job that routes through residential proxies for anti-bot bypass can generate a proxy bill that exceeds the compute bill. Store Actors maintained by third parties may add per-result fees on top of the platform's compute charges, and these fees are disclosed in the Actor's pricing tab but are easy to miss during initial evaluation. Dataset storage has a retention period tied to the plan: data older than 7 days on the free plan is automatically deleted, which can silently break pipelines that process historical data.
Pricing breakdown
The free plan includes worth of compute units per month, which covers roughly 50,000 simple HTTP-based page loads or 5,000 Playwright-based page loads. The Starter plan at per month includes of compute units. The Scale plan at per month includes of compute units plus priority support. Compute unit cost varies: datacenter proxy requests consume the base rate, while residential proxy requests add approximately .50 per GB of bandwidth on top. A realistic workload of scraping 50,000 pages per month with Playwright and datacenter proxies consumes roughly to in compute units. Adding residential proxies for 20 percent of requests adds approximately per month for 2 GB of bandwidth.
Deep dive: Octoparse
When to choose Octoparse
Octoparse is the right choice when the scraping team consists of non-developers who need a visual, point-and-click interface to extract data from websites without writing code. It is strongest for business analysts, marketing teams, and operations teams that need to collect competitor pricing, product catalogs, or lead lists and export the results to Excel or a database. The auto-detect feature attempts to identify data fields on a page automatically, and pre-built task templates for common sites like Amazon, eBay, and Yellow Pages allow extraction to start within minutes. Choose Octoparse when the team has no coding skills and the scraping targets are relatively standard e-commerce or directory pages. Avoid it when the scraping requires custom logic, when the targets use heavy anti-bot protection, or when the team needs an API-first approach that integrates into existing data pipelines.
Real-world use case
A procurement team at a mid-size retailer uses Octoparse to scrape product prices and availability from 15 supplier websites weekly. Each website has a pre-configured task that navigates to the product listing page, paginates through results, and extracts the product name, price, and stock status. The team schedules tasks to run every Monday morning via the cloud scheduler, and results are exported to a shared Google Sheet. The team has no developers and built all 15 tasks using the visual editor in about 2 hours total. The tradeoff: the monthly cost at per month for the Standard plan is higher than API-based tools like ScrapingBee or Firecrawl for the same volume. The team accepts this because they cannot write code and the visual builder eliminates their dependency on engineering.
Hidden gotchas
The pricing structure is confusing: Octoparse lists different prices on different parts of their website, and the actual cost depends on whether the plan is billed monthly, annually, or via the legacy pricing model. The Standard plan at per month includes cloud-based extraction with limited concurrency, and the Professional plan at per month adds more concurrent tasks and advanced features. The desktop application runs on Windows only, which excludes Mac-only teams from local extraction. The cloud extraction service has a queue system that can delay task execution during peak hours, meaning scheduled tasks may not start at the exact configured time. Anti-bot handling is basic compared to Bright Data or Apify: Octoparse rotates IP addresses and adds delays between requests, but sites with sophisticated bot detection like Cloudflare or Akamai will block many extraction attempts. The auto-detect feature works well for simple table-based pages but produces poor results on modern JavaScript-rendered sites with complex DOM structures.
Pricing breakdown
The free plan allows limited local extraction with no cloud features. The Standard plan at per month includes cloud extraction and scheduling. The Professional plan at per month adds more concurrency, advanced scheduling, and API access. A team running 15 scheduled tasks weekly with an average of 500 pages per task, totaling 30,000 pages per month, fits on the Standard plan. For comparison, the same volume on ScrapingBee would cost approximately per month for basic HTML extraction, and on Apify approximately per month using HTTP-based crawlers.
Should You Use Apify or Octoparse?
For most teams, Apify is the better default: it offers huge library of pre-built scrapers (no code needed) and is freemium (from $29/month). Choose Octoparse instead if no coding required matters more than compute-unit pricing can get hard to predict at scale. There is no universal winner — the right pick depends on your budget, team size, and whether you value huge library of pre-built scrapers (no code needed) or no coding required more.
Choose Apify if…
- •Huge library of pre-built scrapers (no code needed)
- •Generous free tier with $5 monthly credits
- •Build custom scrapers or use ready ones
Choose Octoparse if…
- •No coding required
- •Friendly for non-developers and analysts
- •Free plan available