Apify vs Zyte(2026)
Apify is better for teams that need huge library of pre-built scrapers (no code needed). Zyte is the stronger choice if built by the creators of scrapy. Apify is freemium (from $29/month) and Zyte is paid (from from $0.13/1K requests).
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 ApifyZyte
Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub) is a web scraping platform from the team behind the open-source Scrapy framework. Its Zyte API unifies proxies, headless browser rendering, and anti-ban handling with usage-based, per-successful-response pricing tiered by site difficulty.
Starting at from $0.13/1K requests
Visit ZyteHow Do Apify and Zyte Compare on Features?
| Feature | Apify | Zyte |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | freemium | paid |
| Starting price | $29/month | from $0.13/1K requests |
| 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 | ✓ | — |
| Zyte API (proxies + browser + anti-ban) | — | ✓ |
| Smart proxy management | — | ✓ |
| Headless browser rendering | — | ✓ |
| Automatic ban detection | — | ✓ |
| Scrapy Cloud hosting | — | ✓ |
| Per-successful-response billing | — | ✓ |
| Difficulty-tiered pricing | — | ✓ |
Apify Pros and Cons vs Zyte
Apify
Zyte
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: Zyte
When to choose Zyte
Zyte is the right choice when the team already uses Scrapy or has Python-based scraping infrastructure and wants managed proxy and anti-ban services without switching frameworks. Built by the creators of Scrapy, Zyte provides the Zyte API, which wraps proxy management, browser rendering, and anti-bot bypass into a single endpoint, and Scrapy Cloud, which hosts Scrapy spiders in the cloud with scheduling, monitoring, and log viewing. The pay-per-successful-response model is a genuine differentiator: the team only pays for requests that return a 200-status response, eliminating the billing risk of failed requests consuming credits. Choose Zyte when the team has existing Scrapy spiders and wants to scale them without managing server infrastructure, or when the target sites vary in difficulty and the team wants pricing that reflects actual difficulty rather than a flat per-request rate. Avoid it when the team does not use Python, when a no-code visual builder is required, or when the team needs structured output formats like Markdown for LLM ingestion.
Real-world use case
A data team at a price comparison startup runs 50 Scrapy spiders on Zyte's Scrapy Cloud platform. Each spider scrapes a different e-commerce site for product prices and availability, running on a configurable schedule from every 2 hours to daily depending on the site's update frequency. The spiders use the Zyte API for proxy management and anti-bot handling, with automatic escalation from datacenter to residential proxies when the target site's protection level requires it. The difficulty-tiered pricing means simple sites cost /bin/zsh.13 per 1,000 requests while heavily protected sites cost up to per 1,000 requests. The team processes approximately 2 million pages per month across all spiders, with an average cost of /bin/zsh.80 per 1,000 requests, totaling about ,600 per month. The tradeoff: the per-request cost is unpredictable until the spider has run against each target site long enough to establish the difficulty tier.
Hidden gotchas
The difficulty-tiered pricing model means costs can vary 30x between easy and hard sites. A spider that scrapes simple HTML pages might cost /bin/zsh.13 per 1,000 requests, while the same spider pointed at a Cloudflare-protected site could cost per 1,000 requests. The difficulty assessment is automatic and not transparent: teams cannot predict which tier a new target site will fall into without running test requests first. Scrapy Cloud uses a proprietary deployment format that requires the shub CLI tool and does not support standard Docker containers, locking the team into Zyte's deployment pipeline. Scrapy Cloud's job monitoring dashboard shows runtime metrics but does not provide cost breakdowns per spider per run, making cost attribution across spiders and projects manual. The Zyte API's browser rendering mode is significantly more expensive than HTTP-only mode, and some target sites that appear to require JavaScript actually serve the required data in the initial HTML response, so testing with HTTP-only first can save substantial costs. Spider-level concurrency and download delays must be tuned per target site, and the default settings can trigger rate limiting or bans on targets that expect slower request patterns.
Pricing breakdown
Zyte API pricing is per successful response, starting at /bin/zsh.13 per 1,000 for easy sites (simple HTML, no protection) and scaling to per 1,000 for the hardest tier (heavy anti-bot, browser rendering, residential proxies required). Scrapy Cloud is priced per compute unit, with the free tier including 1 concurrent spider and limited storage. The Professional plan at per month includes more concurrency and longer data retention. A team running 500,000 easy-tier requests and 100,000 hard-tier requests per month would pay approximately for easy requests plus for hard requests, totaling per month on the Zyte API alone, plus the Scrapy Cloud hosting fee.
Should You Use Apify or Zyte?
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 Zyte instead if built by the creators of scrapy 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 built by the creators of scrapy 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 Zyte if…
- •Built by the creators of Scrapy
- •Pay only for successful responses
- •Very cheap entry tier for simple sites