BrowserCat vs Apify(2026)
BrowserCat is better for teams that need no browser infra to manage. Apify is the stronger choice if huge library of pre-built scrapers (no code needed). BrowserCat is freemium (from $0) and Apify is freemium (from $29/month).
Full feature breakdown, pricing details, and pros & cons below.
By Bikram NathLast updated
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BrowserCat
BrowserCat provides a managed headless Playwright/Puppeteer API — run browser automation, PDF generation, and screenshots without managing browser infrastructure.
Starting at $0
Visit BrowserCatApify
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 ApifyHow Do BrowserCat and Apify Compare on Features?
| Feature | BrowserCat | Apify |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting price | $0 | $29/month |
| Hosted Playwright API | ✓ | — |
| Puppeteer compatible | ✓ | — |
| Screenshot API | ✓ | — |
| PDF generation | ✓ | — |
| Scraping infrastructure | ✓ | — |
| Residential proxies | ✓ | — |
| Webhooks | ✓ | — |
| 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 | — | ✓ |
BrowserCat Pros and Cons vs Apify
BrowserCat
Apify
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.
Should You Use BrowserCat or Apify?
For most teams, BrowserCat is the better default: it offers no browser infra to manage and is freemium (from $0). Choose Apify instead if huge library of pre-built scrapers (no code needed) matters more than not for cross-browser ui testing. There is no universal winner — the right pick depends on your budget, team size, and whether you value no browser infra to manage or huge library of pre-built scrapers (no code needed) more.
Choose BrowserCat if…
- •No browser infra to manage
- •Good for scraping pipelines
- •Playwright native
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