Apify vs ScrapingBee
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 assessmentScrapingBee compared with Apify
Apify is a platform rather than an API: a marketplace of prebuilt actors, hosted execution, scheduling, storage, and a proxy layer, priced on compute and usage. ScrapingBee does one slice of that and does not host anything. Choose Apify when you want a ready-made scraper for a known target and somewhere to run it; choose ScrapingBee when you have your own infrastructure and want to keep it, paying only for the fetch.
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 ScrapingBee if
Developers and go-to-market engineers who need reliable page fetching as a component inside their own pipeline: a growth team enriching accounts, a pricing analyst monitoring competitors, an agency building a lead-sourcing script, or an AI product that needs fresh web content on demand.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Apify | ScrapingBee |
|---|---|---|
| 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) | $19.99 per month (Hobby, 75,000 credits, 25 concurrent requests) (free trial) |
| 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. | Credit-based subscription. Every plan is a monthly credit allowance plus a concurrency limit, and each request deducts credits according to the options enabled: one credit for a plain fetch, five with JavaScript rendering, ten for a premium proxy alone, twenty-five for premium proxy plus rendering, and seventy-five for stealth proxy. All features are available on every paid tier; higher tiers buy volume, concurrency, and support, not capability. |
| 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 | 1,000 free API credits, no credit card required |
| 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. | Developers and go-to-market engineers who need reliable page fetching as a component inside their own pipeline: a growth team enriching accounts, a pricing analyst monitoring competitors, an agency building a lead-sourcing script, or an AI product that needs fresh web content on demand. |
| 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. | Minutes. Sign up, copy the API key, and change the URL in an existing HTTP call. Getting a difficult target working reliably takes longer, usually an hour or two of tuning render options, wait conditions, and proxy level against real responses. |
| 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. | Low for a developer and impassable for anyone else. The parameter set is small and well documented; the real skill is cost discipline, knowing when a page genuinely needs rendering or a residential IP rather than defaulting to the expensive configuration everywhere. |
| Platforms | Web console, REST API, JavaScript and Python API clients, Apify CLI, Docker-based Actor runtime, Hosted MCP server | REST API over HTTPS, Official SDKs: Python, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, Go, Java, Command-line client, MCP server for AI agents, Make, n8n, and Zapier connectors |
| Compliance | GDPR, SOC 2 Type II, CCPA | GDPR |
| Founded | 2015 | 2019 |
| Headquarters | Prague, Czech Republic | France |
| Ownership | Independent, venture-backed | Acquired by Oxylabs (June 2025) |
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.
ScrapingBee
Strengths
- One endpoint replaces the three hardest pieces of a scraping stack: proxy rotation, headless browsers, and anti-bot handling.
- Billing only on successful responses, which removes the worst cost surprise in the category.
- Documentation and error messages are unusually clear, and the API is small enough to learn in an afternoon.
- Every feature is available on the cheapest paid plan; higher tiers buy volume and support rather than unlocking capability.
Limitations
- The credit multipliers make effective cost hard to forecast. A workload that quietly shifts from rendered to stealth requests multiplies its bill by fifteen with no change to the code except one boolean.
- Credits expire monthly with no rollover, which penalizes bursty and seasonal scraping directly.
- It is a fetch API only: no scheduler, no hosted storage, no dataset browser, no visual builder, so a non-developer cannot use it at all.
- Concurrency limits are tied to plan tier, so a large backfill on a low plan is throughput-bound even when credits are available.
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.
ScrapingBee
Credit-based subscription. Every plan is a monthly credit allowance plus a concurrency limit, and each request deducts credits according to the options enabled: one credit for a plain fetch, five with JavaScript rendering, ten for a premium proxy alone, twenty-five for premium proxy plus rendering, and seventy-five for stealth proxy. All features are available on every paid tier; higher tiers buy volume, concurrency, and support, not capability.
- Free trial$0
- Hobby$19.99
- Freelance$49.99
- Startup$99.99
- Business$249.99
- EnterpriseFrom $999.99
Judged against the alternative of running your own proxy contract plus a Playwright fleet, ScrapingBee is cheap: the Freelance plan costs less per month than a couple of hours of the engineer who would otherwise be maintaining browser infrastructure. Judged against raw bandwidth-priced proxy networks, it is expensive, because you are paying per request for rendering you may not need. The honest rule is that ScrapingBee wins when a meaningful share of your targets need a real browser or residential IPs, and loses when they do not. The successful-requests-only billing and the published enterprise pricing both improve the deal relative to competitors who bill every attempt and hide the top of the range.
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 profileScrapingBee
ScrapingBee is the sensible default for a developer who needs web pages to come back reliably and does not want to run proxy contracts and a browser farm to get them. Its virtues are unglamorous and durable: a small API, honest documentation, billing only on successful responses, and published prices from $19.99 all the way to the top of the enterprise range, which almost nobody else in web data does. The costs it will impose on you are equally predictable. Credit multipliers mean the same code can cost fifteen times more depending on one boolean, credits expire monthly, and the product deliberately stops at fetching, so scheduling, storage, and orchestration remain yours. The Oxylabs acquisition in 2025 has so far been benign, but it does mean the roadmap now belongs to a proxy company rather than to two founders. Buy it as a component, size the plan against your real mix of rendered and stealth requests rather than the headline credit count, and keep a visual tool in mind if anyone non-technical ever needs to run a job.
Read the full ScrapingBee profileApify profile last reviewed 2026-08-23; ScrapingBee last reviewed 2026-08-23. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.