ScrapingBee vs Apify(2026)
ScrapingBee is better for teams that need very simple api — fast to integrate. Apify is the stronger choice if huge library of pre-built scrapers (no code needed). ScrapingBee is paid (from $49/month) and Apify is freemium (from $29/month).
Full feature breakdown, pricing details, and pros & cons below.
By Bikram NathLast updated
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ScrapingBee
ScrapingBee is a developer-focused web scraping API that handles headless browsers, proxy rotation, and CAPTCHA avoidance behind a single endpoint. You send a URL and get back rendered HTML or extracted data — no infrastructure to manage.
Starting at $49/month
Visit ScrapingBeeApify
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 ScrapingBee and Apify Compare on Features?
| Feature | ScrapingBee | Apify |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | paid | freemium |
| Starting price | $49/month | $29/month |
| Single API endpoint | ✓ | — |
| JavaScript rendering (headless Chrome) | ✓ | — |
| Automatic proxy rotation | ✓ | — |
| Premium + residential proxies | ✓ | — |
| Google search API | ✓ | — |
| AI-powered data extraction | ✓ | — |
| No-block guarantee on credits | ✓ | — |
| 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 | — | ✓ |
ScrapingBee Pros and Cons vs Apify
ScrapingBee
Apify
Deep dive: ScrapingBee
When to choose ScrapingBee
ScrapingBee is the right choice when the team wants the simplest possible scraping API: a single endpoint that accepts a URL and returns rendered HTML, with proxy rotation and JavaScript execution handled automatically. It fits teams that do not want to manage browser infrastructure, proxy pools, or anti-bot logic, and where the scraping volume is moderate, roughly 10,000 to 500,000 pages per month. The API is stateless and requires no SDK: a simple HTTP GET with the URL and API key returns the page content. This makes it the fastest to integrate into existing codebases. The credit-based pricing is predictable: each request costs 1 credit for basic HTML, 5 credits for JavaScript rendering, and 10 to 25 credits for premium proxies. Choose ScrapingBee when the team needs a drop-in scraping API that works immediately. Avoid it when the volume exceeds 500,000 pages per month where per-credit pricing becomes expensive, or when the team needs scheduling, data storage, or workflow orchestration built into the scraping platform.
Real-world use case
A marketing team at a SaaS startup uses ScrapingBee to monitor competitor pricing pages. A daily cron job in a Next.js API route sends 50 URLs to ScrapingBee's API with JavaScript rendering enabled, parses the returned HTML for pricing table data using Cheerio, and stores the results in Supabase. The entire setup is 40 lines of TypeScript. Each request consumes 5 credits for JS rendering, so the daily cost is 250 credits. On the Freelancer plan at per month with 150,000 credits, the team has ample headroom for growth. The tradeoff: ScrapingBee returns raw HTML, so the team must write and maintain their own parsing logic. Apify or Firecrawl would extract structured data automatically. Additionally, if a competitor site changes its HTML structure, the parsing breaks silently, and the team only discovers the issue when they notice stale data.
Hidden gotchas
Credit consumption varies dramatically based on options selected per request. A basic HTML request costs 1 credit, but enabling JavaScript rendering increases it to 5. Enabling premium proxies on top of JS rendering costs 10 to 25 credits per request. A team that enables both options on all requests will burn through their credit allocation 10 to 25 times faster than one using basic HTML only. The AI data extraction feature, which uses an LLM to extract structured data from HTML, costs additional credits per field extracted. There is no free tier: the trial includes a limited number of credits, and after they are exhausted, a paid plan is required. The Google Search API endpoint costs 5 credits per search and returns SERP results in JSON, but the results are not always identical to what a real browser session returns due to proxy geolocation differences. Rate limiting on the API is not clearly documented for lower-tier plans, and teams that send concurrent requests above the plan limit receive 429 errors without a retry-after header.
Pricing breakdown
The Freelancer plan at per month includes 150,000 credits. The Business plan at per month includes 1,000,000 credits. A team making 10,000 basic HTML requests and 5,000 JavaScript-rendered requests per month consumes 10,000 plus 25,000 equals 35,000 credits, fitting comfortably on the Freelancer plan. The same volume on Apify would cost roughly to in compute units for HTTP-based crawling, making Apify significantly cheaper for high-volume, simple scraping.
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 ScrapingBee or Apify?
For most teams, ScrapingBee is the better default: it offers very simple api — fast to integrate and is paid (from $49/month). Choose Apify instead if huge library of pre-built scrapers (no code needed) matters more than no free tier (trial credits only). There is no universal winner — the right pick depends on your budget, team size, and whether you value very simple api — fast to integrate or huge library of pre-built scrapers (no code needed) more.
Choose ScrapingBee if…
- •Very simple API — fast to integrate
- •Handles JS rendering automatically
- •Good documentation
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