Home › Comparisons › Apify vs Zyte
✓ last verified 2026-08-07 · every rate below was read from the provider’s live pricing page on that date · how we verify
Two platform-shaped alternatives to raw scraping APIs. Apify’s plans are verified (Free with $5 usage, Starter $29/mo, Scale $199/mo, Business $999/mo); Zyte’s current tiers are not — its pricing page didn’t yield to our checks, so this page compares what we can prove and flags what we can’t.
At a glance
| Residential/plan pricing | Apify | Zyte |
|---|---|---|
| Scraping API plans | $29.00/mo entry → $29.00/mo top tier | pricing page truncated — needs browser check |
| Products offered | scraping-api | scraping-api |
| Verification status | verified 2026-08-07 | pricing page truncated — needs browser check |
Pricing in detail
Apify — every verified tier
| Product | Plan | Rate | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| scraping-api | Starter | $29.00/mo | $29 platform usage incl; Free $0 w/ $5 usage; Scale $199; Business $999; -10% annual |
Zyte pricing is not yet verified: pricing page truncated — needs browser check. We publish no unverified numbers.
Which should you pick?
Pick Apify for marketplace actors and scheduling
You’re buying a platform: pre-built scrapers, scheduled runs, storage, team features, and an API around all of it. Verified entry is $29/mo, with a free tier carrying $5 of monthly usage — enough to evaluate properly.
Consider Zyte for managed extraction
Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub) sells automatic extraction and a managed API for teams that would rather not maintain parsers. Pricing verification is pending; treat any figures you see elsewhere as unconfirmed.
If you only need HTML, both are overkill
A request-based API is cheaper for plain fetch-and-parse work — Scrape.do at a verified $29/mo for 250k successful credits, or ScrapingBee at $49/mo for the same nominal credits.
Also compared, and what Reddit adds
The same shortlisting session usually includes ScraperAPI vs ScrapingBee; Firecrawl, popular in LLM-pipeline threads and unverified by us. Reddit threads on this pairing are worth skimming for the billing and support experiences landing pages omit — weight recent, specific complaints over star averages, then check the dated numbers here.
Neither provider pays for placement here. Both profiles — Apify and Zyte — carry the full verified tier tables and change history.
FAQ
How much does Apify cost?
Verified 2026-08-07: Free ($0 with $5 platform usage included), Starter $29/mo, Scale $199/mo, Business $999/mo, with roughly 10% off on annual billing. Usage beyond the plan allowance is billed as platform consumption.
Why don’t you list Zyte’s prices?
Because we couldn’t read them from the live pricing page, and ProxyPicker publishes no number it hasn’t verified and dated. The page updates the moment we can.
Apify or a plain scraping API?
Apify if you want scheduling, storage and reusable actors; a scraping API if you want the lowest cost per successful request. Many teams run an API for volume and Apify for the awkward jobs.
Why is Apify so expensive?
Verified plans run $29.00–$29.00/month. Premium pricing in this market buys one of three things: platform features beyond raw requests (compute, scheduling, marketplaces), compliance and procurement paperwork, or brand. Whether Apify is expensive *for you* depends on whether you use what the premium buys — the verified cheaper end of the table exists precisely for workloads that don’t.
Is there an alternative to Apify?
the verified field is compared at Apify alternatives. The cheapest flat rate in our dataset is DataImpulse at $1.00/GB, with Webshare ($1.40–$3.50/GB) and Decodo ($2.75–$4.00/GB) the usual self-serve swaps — which one fits depends on volume and billing shape, not a single ‘best’.
Is Apify safe and legit?
Apify is an established commercial operation whose published pricing we verified against its live site on 2026-08-07. No one independently audits performance in this market — including review sites quoting precise success rates — so check its Trustpilot and recent Reddit threads for reputation patterns, weight billing-dispute reports over star averages, then test small against your own targets.
Is Apify legal?
Using Apify is legal in the US and EU — proxies and scraping services are ordinary infrastructure, and being a customer is not the exposure. Risk lives in conduct through the service (authentication bypass, terms breaches at scale, personal data) and, industry-wide, in how residential IPs are sourced — the question the July 2026 NetNut seizure turned from philosophy into precedent.
Is there a free alternative to Apify?
the verified field is compared at Apify alternatives. The cheapest flat rate in our dataset is DataImpulse at $1.00/GB, with Webshare ($1.40–$3.50/GB) and Decodo ($2.75–$4.00/GB) the usual self-serve swaps — which one fits depends on volume and billing shape, not a single ‘best’.
What are Apify’s main competitors?
Apify’s competitors are compared on verified pricing at Apify alternatives. Beyond the paid field, the open-source stack (Scrapy, Playwright) competes for the same budgets — free per request, expensive in engineering time. We rank only what we can price.