Apify vs Cargo
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentCargo compared with Apify
Apify is a marketplace and runtime for scrapers and automation actors, billed by compute and actor usage, and it is the better tool when the hard part is acquiring data from many awkward sources. Cargo is the better tool when the hard part is what happens after the data arrives. They compose cleanly: an Apify actor as a Cargo connector feeding a data model, with plays and agents doing the qualification and routing.
Choose Apify if
Growth, RevOps, and data teams that need custom web data at a scale a manual list build cannot reach, and that want ready-made scrapers for the common sources with an escape hatch into custom code when a target is unusual. Also strong for anyone wiring web data into an AI agent through MCP.
Choose Cargo if
Technical revenue operators and GTM engineers at funded startups and mid-market software companies who need enrichment, scoring, routing, and agent workflows to run as one governed system, and who want that logic versioned in code rather than trapped in a visual canvas.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Apify | Cargo |
|---|---|---|
| Category | GTM Engineering | GTM Engineering |
| Starting price | Free with $5 of monthly platform credit; paid plans from $29 per month ($26 billed annually) (free plan available) | Free plan with 100 credits per month; paid plans from about $165 per month (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Prepaid platform credit with usage metered against it. Each plan includes a monthly credit allowance equal to its price, consumed by compute units (memory multiplied by run time), proxy bandwidth, storage operations, and data transfer. Rented or paid Store Actors carry their own fees on top, set by the Actor's developer as a monthly rental, a per-event charge, or a per-result charge. Seats are not the pricing axis; usage is. | Usage-based credits on a subscription plan, with no per-seat charge and no feature gating between tiers. Credits are consumed by integration tasks (priced per integration), orchestration steps (roughly 1 credit per 100 steps), and storage upserts (roughly 1 credit per 1,000 upserts). Enrichment and LLM provider costs are separate, since you connect your own accounts. Prices are quoted as from figures because per-integration credit consumption varies. |
| Free plan | $5 of platform credit per month, community support, limited trial access to rented Actors, and access blocked rather than billed once credit is spent | 100 credits per month, community support, all features included, no SSO |
| Free trial | Free plan with no credit card required, plus limited trials on most paid Store Actors | Free plan with 100 credits and no payment method required, plus a 14-day satisfaction guarantee on paid plans |
| Best for | Growth, RevOps, and data teams that need custom web data at a scale a manual list build cannot reach, and that want ready-made scrapers for the common sources with an escape hatch into custom code when a target is unusual. Also strong for anyone wiring web data into an AI agent through MCP. | Technical revenue operators and GTM engineers at funded startups and mid-market software companies who need enrichment, scoring, routing, and agent workflows to run as one governed system, and who want that logic versioned in code rather than trapped in a visual canvas. |
| Setup time | Minutes for a first Store Actor run: sign up, pick an Actor, fill the form, export a CSV. A scheduled pipeline with proxy configuration, webhooks, and a downstream destination is a half day. A custom Actor is a normal software project, measured in days, and its length depends on how hard the target defends itself rather than on Apify. | A first working Play in a day for someone comfortable with APIs: connect a CRM, define a company model, add one enrichment step, and trigger on record change. A production deployment covering enrichment, scoring, routing, and CRM writeback more realistically takes two to four weeks, most of it spent agreeing on the data model rather than on the tool. |
| Learning curve | Low to run existing Actors, moderate to operate the platform well. The two things that take time are understanding the cost model well enough to predict a bill, and learning which proxy and browser settings a given target requires. Writing Actors requires working JavaScript or Python. | Moderate to steep, and honestly so. The primitives are few but they assume familiarity with data modeling, idempotency, retries, and rate limits. The visual builder lowers the entry cost but not the conceptual one; teams without a technical operator tend to stall after the first workflow. |
| Platforms | Web console, REST API, JavaScript and Python API clients, Apify CLI, Docker-based Actor runtime, Hosted MCP server | Web application, cargo-ai command line interface, TypeScript CDK, Hosted Vite apps deployed alongside a workspace |
| Compliance | GDPR, SOC 2 Type II, CCPA | GDPR, SOC 2 |
| Founded | 2015 | 2023 |
| Headquarters | Prague, Czech Republic | San Francisco, California, with a team in Paris |
| Ownership | Independent, venture-backed | Independent, venture-backed |
Strengths and limitations
Apify
Strengths
- The Store is the moat: for most common data sources, someone has already built, debugged, and now maintains the scraper, which collapses a two-week project into an afternoon of configuration.
- Real infrastructure underneath, with proxies, headless browsers, storage, scheduling, and retries handled rather than left as an exercise.
- Genuinely usable free tier with $5 of monthly credit, no credit card, and full API and MCP access, so evaluation costs nothing.
- Crawlee is open source and runs anywhere, which meaningfully limits lock-in for teams writing their own crawlers.
Limitations
- Compute-unit billing is hard to predict before you run a job, because cost is memory multiplied by time and both depend on how the target site behaves that day.
- Included platform credit expires monthly with no rollover, so buying a tier for occasional heavy months means paying for unused capacity in the quiet ones.
- Store Actor quality is uneven; some are abandoned, some break silently when a target site changes markup, and the run-success statistics on the Actor page are the only pre-purchase signal.
- Paid Actors add a second billing layer on top of platform credit, and the total cost of a workflow is not visible from any single number on the pricing page.
Cargo
Strengths
- Revenue logic can be versioned, reviewed, and deployed like software, which is a real answer to the problem of critical scoring rules living inside one person's canvas.
- Agents are steps inside workflows sharing one data model, so multi-agent handoffs stay structured instead of degrading into text passed between prompts.
- Bring-your-own credentials for enrichment and LLM providers means no data resale markup and no vendor lock-in on the data layer.
- No per-seat pricing and no feature gating between tiers, so a small technical team gets the full platform at the entry price.
Limitations
- The credit meter has three dimensions (integration tasks, orchestration steps, storage upserts), so spend is genuinely hard to forecast before a month of real usage.
- No native sequencing: there is no email or LinkedIn sequence builder, so outbound execution always requires a second tool and a handoff step.
- The built-in enrichment provider catalog is smaller than Clay's, which matters if your waterfall depends on a long tail of niche data vendors.
- The step from about 2,500 credits to about 17,000 credits is a jump from roughly $250 to roughly $1,190 a month with nothing in between.
Pricing compared
Apify
Prepaid platform credit with usage metered against it. Each plan includes a monthly credit allowance equal to its price, consumed by compute units (memory multiplied by run time), proxy bandwidth, storage operations, and data transfer. Rented or paid Store Actors carry their own fees on top, set by the Actor's developer as a monthly rental, a per-event charge, or a per-result charge. Seats are not the pricing axis; usage is.
- Free$0
- Starter$29
- Scale$199
- Business$999
Judged against building the same thing yourself, Apify is inexpensive: a residential proxy pool, headless browser fleet, retry logic, and storage would cost more than $29 a month in engineering attention alone, before any infrastructure. Judged against a fixed-price scraping tool, it is harder to compare, because you are buying capacity rather than a defined output, and the honest answer for month one is that you cannot forecast the bill precisely. The mitigation is straightforward: run the job once at a small limit, read the usage breakdown, multiply. Teams that do this usually find the real cost of a recurring list build lands in the tens of dollars a month, and teams that skip it are the ones who write reviews about unpredictable pricing.
Cargo
Usage-based credits on a subscription plan, with no per-seat charge and no feature gating between tiers. Credits are consumed by integration tasks (priced per integration), orchestration steps (roughly 1 credit per 100 steps), and storage upserts (roughly 1 credit per 1,000 upserts). Enrichment and LLM provider costs are separate, since you connect your own accounts. Prices are quoted as from figures because per-integration credit consumption varies.
- Free$0
- StarterFrom $165
- ProfessionalFrom $250
- EnterpriseFrom $1,190
- Premium EnterpriseFrom $3,000
Priced against the alternative of a data engineer maintaining glue scripts, Cargo is inexpensive; priced against the tools a five-person sales team actually buys, it is not an impulse purchase. The seat-free model is genuinely favorable for agencies and for teams where many people benefit from workflows one person builds, and the absence of feature gating means the Starter plan is the whole product rather than a demo. The weak spot is predictability: with credits consumed by integration calls, orchestration steps, and storage writes at once, the first two months are an estimation exercise, and the leap to the Enterprise tier arrives faster than most buyers expect once always-on plays are running.
Editorial verdict on each
Apify
Apify is the most complete web scraping platform a small team can buy without a sales call, and its real asset is the Store: for the sources most go-to-market teams need, someone has already written and is still maintaining the scraper, which is the difference between a two-week engineering project and an afternoon. Underneath it, the proxy pool, browser fleet, storage, and scheduling are the parts people underestimate until they have tried to build them, and Crawlee being open source keeps the lock-in honest. The MCP server has made it one of the more useful data sources to hand an AI agent. The cost of all this is a billing model you have to learn: compute metered by memory times time, credit that expires monthly, and a second layer of fees on paid Actors that no headline price reflects. Budget an hour to measure one representative job before committing, set a spending limit on day one, and check an Actor's success rate before you depend on it. Do those three things and it is very good value; skip them and you will write one of the reviews about unpredictable pricing.
Read the full Apify profileCargo
Cargo is the most convincing attempt yet to treat go-to-market logic as software rather than as a canvas somebody maintains. The primitives are well chosen, agents sit inside workflows instead of beside them, run traces and typed tools make the thing operable, and the seat-free, feature-complete pricing is a genuine kindness in a category full of gated tiers. The costs are equally clear. There is no sequencing, the enrichment catalog is narrower than Clay's, credits are metered along three axes that resist forecasting, and the jump from the $250 tier to the $1,190 tier arrives quickly once plays run continuously. The deciding question is not budget but staffing: with an engineer who wants revenue logic in version control, this is a strong buy at a price a funded small company can absorb; without one, most of what makes Cargo different is out of reach and a spreadsheet-shaped competitor will get further faster.
Read the full Cargo profileApify profile last reviewed 2026-08-23; Cargo last reviewed 2026-08-23. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.