Home › Alternatives › Apify Alternatives
✓ last verified 2026-10-02 · every figure read from the provider’s live pricing page on that date · how we verify
Apify is a full scraping platform — marketplace actors, scheduling, storage — billed as platform usage (Starter $19/mo, Scale $199/mo, verified). If what you actually need is a request-in, HTML-out scraping API, a leaner service is usually cheaper per successful request.
Apify alternatives with verified pricing
| Provider | Best verified rate | Plan | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| ScrapingBee | $19.00/mo | Hobby | 75k credits; Freelance $49 for 250k; ex VAT |
| Scrape.do | $29.00/mo | Hobby | 250k credits ($0.11/1k) |
Which one, for what
- Scrape.do — verified $29/mo for 250k credits down to $0.06/1k at volume — the aggressive price-per-request pick.
- ScrapingBee — verified $49/mo for 250k credits; long-standing API with solid docs — the stable default.
- ScraperAPI — 50% recurring affiliate aside, pricing verification is pending a browser check; its plans compete directly with the two above — treat as shortlist, verify at checkout.
- Zyte — pricing page resisted machine reading (verification pending); relevant if you want managed extraction rather than raw HTML.
The open-source route (and the names Reddit will give you)
Every paid-API alternatives thread eventually lands on the free option: run it yourself. Scrapy (the Python crawling framework, stewarded by Zyte), Playwright and Puppeteer (browser automation for JS-heavy targets), Firecrawl (crawler output shaped for LLM pipelines) and no-code tools like Octoparse replace the API fee with your time: you own proxy sourcing, retries, CAPTCHA handling and the maintenance every site change forces. Against a verified $19–$29/month API entry, open source usually wins only when scraping is core to the product rather than a task. We name these because they are the real competitor, and we rank none of them because there is no price to verify.
What Reddit adds: r/webscraping and r/proxies threads on this comparison surface the failure stories landing pages omit — billing surprises, support latency, silent limit changes. Weight recent, specific complaints over star averages, then verify prices here, where every number carries a date and source.
Rankings here are computed from verified pricing and published terms. Performance benchmarking is on the methodology roadmap; until it ships, we say so rather than invent scores.
FAQ
What is the cheapest Apify alternative?
On verified rates, Scrape.do’s Hobby plan ($29/mo, 250,000 successful credits, $0.11/1k) costs $10 more than Apify’s Starter ($19/mo), but Apify’s $19 is metered as platform usage rather than requests. At scale Scrape.do reaches a verified $0.06 per 1,000 credits.
When is Apify actually the right choice?
When you’re buying the platform, not the requests: pre-built marketplace actors, scheduling, storage and team features. For pure fetch-and-parse workloads a scraping API is leaner.
Do these services charge for failed requests?
Scrape.do and ScrapingBee bill successful requests only, per their published plans. We verify billing behavior as part of ongoing testing.