Apify vs ScraperAPI(2026)
Apify is better for teams that need huge library of pre-built scrapers (no code needed). ScraperAPI is the stronger choice if simple to integrate. Apify is freemium (from $29/month) and ScraperAPI is freemium (from $49/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 ApifyScraperAPI
ScraperAPI is a web scraping API that manages proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so you can fetch any page with a single request. It rotates across millions of proxies, retries failed requests automatically, and offers structured data endpoints for search engines and e-commerce sites.
Starting at $49/month
Visit ScraperAPIHow Do Apify and ScraperAPI Compare on Features?
| Feature | Apify | ScraperAPI |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting price | $29/month | $49/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 | ✓ | — |
| Single-endpoint scraping API | — | ✓ |
| Automatic proxy rotation (datacenter + residential) | — | ✓ |
| JavaScript rendering | — | ✓ |
| Automatic retries | — | ✓ |
| Geotargeting | — | ✓ |
| Structured data endpoints (Google, Amazon) | — | ✓ |
| Async scraping for large jobs | — | ✓ |
Apify Pros and Cons vs ScraperAPI
Apify
ScraperAPI
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: ScraperAPI
When to choose ScraperAPI
ScraperAPI is the right choice when the team needs a simple, proxy-based scraping API with automatic retry logic and good success rates, and when the budget is moderate. It sits between ScrapingBee and Bright Data in both complexity and price: simpler than Bright Data's product suite, more capable than ScrapingBee's basic offering for structured data extraction. The auto-retry on failed requests is a genuine differentiator: ScraperAPI automatically retries requests with different proxies and configurations until it gets a successful response or exhausts the retry budget, which significantly improves success rates on moderately protected sites. The structured data endpoints for Google SERP, Amazon product pages, and e-commerce sites return JSON directly, eliminating the need to parse HTML. Choose ScraperAPI when the team wants a reliable scraping API with a free tier for prototyping and structured endpoints for common targets. Avoid it when the targets require premium residential proxies for every request or when the team needs a full scraping platform with scheduling, storage, and workflow orchestration.
Real-world use case
An SEO agency uses ScraperAPI to monitor search rankings for 200 client keywords daily. Each keyword triggers a request to the Google SERP endpoint, which returns structured JSON with the top 10 results including title, URL, and snippet. The agency's internal dashboard processes the JSON and tracks ranking changes over time. The daily workload is 200 requests, all using the structured SERP endpoint at 5 credits each, totaling 1,000 credits per day or 30,000 credits per month. On the Hobby plan at per month with 100,000 credits, the agency has room to scale to 600 keywords before needing to upgrade. The tradeoff: the SERP endpoint costs 5 credits per request compared to 1 credit for basic HTML scraping, so keyword monitoring is 5x more expensive per request than general page scraping.
Hidden gotchas
Credit costs vary by feature flag: a basic HTML request costs 1 credit, JavaScript rendering costs 5 credits, geotargeting costs 5 credits, and premium residential proxies cost 10 to 25 credits. Combining JavaScript rendering with premium proxies costs 25 credits per request, making high-volume scraping of JS-heavy sites unexpectedly expensive. The free tier includes 1,000 credits per month, which is enough for about 200 JS-rendered requests. This is generous for prototyping but misleading if the team assumes it scales linearly. The auto-retry feature is valuable but consumes credits for each retry attempt, and a request that eventually fails after 3 retries has consumed 3 credits, not zero. The async scraping mode for large batch jobs requires polling a status endpoint for completion, and the documentation does not clearly specify the retention period for completed results. Geotargeting is available for 15 countries on the basic plan and all countries on higher plans, and requests targeting unavailable countries silently fall back to a US-based proxy.
Pricing breakdown
The free plan includes 1,000 credits per month. The Hobby plan at per month includes 100,000 credits. The Startup plan at per month includes 250,000 credits. The Business plan at per month includes 1,000,000 credits. A team making 50,000 basic HTML requests and 10,000 JavaScript-rendered requests per month consumes 50,000 plus 50,000 equals 100,000 credits, fitting on the Hobby plan. Adding geotargeting to the JS requests increases consumption to 150,000 credits, requiring the Startup plan.
Should You Use Apify or ScraperAPI?
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 ScraperAPI instead if simple to integrate 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 simple to integrate 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 ScraperAPI if…
- •Simple to integrate
- •Free tier with 1,000 credits/month
- •High success rate with auto-retries