Apify vs Common Room
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 assessmentCommon Room compared with Apify
Different jobs that get confused because both end in structured data about companies. Apify is a scraping and automation cloud: you rent or build actors, crawl sources yourself, pay per compute, and own the pipeline. Common Room does not crawl for you; it ingests through integrations and spends its effort on resolving identities and acting on them. A team with engineers and a tight budget can approximate a slice of Common Room's signal collection on Apify for a few hundred dollars a month, but they will be building the identity graph, the scoring, and the routing themselves. Apify is the buy-the-parts option; Common Room is the assembled platform at fifty times the price.
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 Common Room if
Mid-market and enterprise go-to-market teams, especially product-led and developer-first companies, that already have meaningful signal volume (community activity, free-tier usage, inbound traffic) and enough reps and RevOps capacity to justify a five-figure annual contract and act on what the platform surfaces.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Apify | Common Room |
|---|---|---|
| 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) | About $2,500 per month billed annually (roughly $30,000 per year) on the Essential plan |
| 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. | Annual subscription with three tiers, priced by included seats, tracked contacts, and AI credits (separate research and Prospector meters). Only the entry tier carries a published price; the two above it are quote-only. DataAgent, extra credits, and additional seats are add-ons on every plan. |
| 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 | No |
| Free trial | Free plan with no credit card required, plus limited trials on most paid Store Actors | No |
| 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. | Mid-market and enterprise go-to-market teams, especially product-led and developer-first companies, that already have meaningful signal volume (community activity, free-tier usage, inbound traffic) and enough reps and RevOps capacity to justify a five-figure annual contract and act on what the platform surfaces. |
| 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. | Days to weeks. Connecting the CRM, Slack, and a website tag is quick; getting to trustworthy scoring, clean segments, and routing that reps do not mute takes several weeks of configuration with the assigned customer success manager. |
| 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 for the admin, low for the rep. Reps consume Slack alerts and briefs and need almost no training. Whoever owns scoring models, segments, and workflows is doing RevOps work, and reviewers repeatedly note the UI does not make that work self-explanatory. |
| Platforms | Web console, REST API, JavaScript and Python API clients, Apify CLI, Docker-based Actor runtime, Hosted MCP server | Web application, Slack app, Chrome extension, CLI, MCP server, REST API |
| Compliance | GDPR, SOC 2 Type II, CCPA | GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2 Type II |
| Founded | 2015 | 2020 |
| Headquarters | Prague, Czech Republic | Seattle, Washington, United States |
| Ownership | Independent, venture-backed | Acquired by Zoom (agreement announced July 2026) |
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.
Common Room
Strengths
- The identity resolution layer is genuinely differentiated; collapsing community handles, product events, web sessions, and CRM records onto one person is hard and most competitors only do part of it.
- Community and open-source signals (GitHub, Discord, Discourse, Stack Overflow) are covered better here than anywhere else, a legacy of the company's original product.
- Waterfall enrichment across multiple providers holds match rates up where single-vendor lookups fail.
- Workflows land where reps already are: Slack, the sequence tool, the CRM, and a Chrome extension, rather than asking anyone to live in a new dashboard.
Limitations
- No free plan and no self-serve trial; you cannot evaluate the product without going through a sales process, and the previous entry tiers were removed.
- The published entry price of roughly $2,500 per month billed annually puts it out of reach for small businesses, and only that one tier has a public number.
- DataAgent is an add-on on all three plans, so the CRM hygiene capability shown on the product pages is not in the price you were quoted unless you asked for it.
- Reviewers consistently describe the UI as clunky, particularly navigating between segments and workflows, and report that Prospector filtering is shallower than dedicated prospecting tools.
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.
Common Room
Annual subscription with three tiers, priced by included seats, tracked contacts, and AI credits (separate research and Prospector meters). Only the entry tier carries a published price; the two above it are quote-only. DataAgent, extra credits, and additional seats are add-ons on every plan.
- EssentialAbout $2,500
- AdvancedCustom quote
- EnterpriseCustom quote
For a company with real signal volume and a sales team large enough to work it, Common Room replaces a stack: an enrichment vendor, a visitor identification tool, a signal aggregator, and whatever internal scripts were stitching them together. Against that, $30,000 a year is defensible arithmetic. For everyone else it is not close. There is no way to try the product without a sales cycle, the entry tier is priced above what most small businesses spend on their entire go-to-market stack, and the cheapest meaningful capability, job change tracking, is available from several tools for a fraction of the cost. This is a platform purchase for teams that have already outgrown the point solutions, and saastracker lists it as such rather than as something a small business can buy.
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 profileCommon Room
Common Room built the hardest part of signal-based selling first: an identity graph that can tell you the GitHub contributor, the anonymous pricing-page visitor, and the stale Salesforce lead are all the same person at a company worth calling. Nothing else covers community and open-source signals as well, and the activation layer is sensibly placed where reps already work. Two things changed the recommendation in 2026. The company removed its low-cost entry tiers, leaving a published floor around $2,500 per month billed annually with no free plan and no trial, which puts it beyond what a small business can buy or even evaluate. And Zoom agreed to acquire it in July 2026, so the roadmap now belongs to Zoom Revenue Accelerator. For a mid-market or enterprise team with real signal volume and RevOps capacity, it remains a strong platform worth the sales cycle. For everyone smaller, the honest advice is to assemble the same outcome from cheaper parts and revisit if Zoom reopens a self-serve door.
Read the full Common Room profileApify profile last reviewed 2026-08-23; Common Room last reviewed 2026-08-23. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.