Cargo vs Octoparse
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 Octoparse
Octoparse is a point-and-click desktop and cloud scraper aimed at people extracting lists from websites without writing code, priced from a free tier into the low hundreds per month. It ends at a spreadsheet or an export. Cargo starts where that export lands: models, enrichment, scoring, routing, and CRM writeback. A small team that mainly needs a list of prospects from a directory should buy Octoparse and stop there; a team that needs that list continuously refreshed, scored, and routed is the Cargo case.
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.
Choose Octoparse if
Small go-to-market, research, and ecommerce teams that need recurring structured data from websites with no scraping API, have nobody to write and babysit a Python crawler, and want the extraction to run on someone else's infrastructure on a schedule.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Cargo | Octoparse |
|---|---|---|
| Category | GTM Engineering | GTM Engineering |
| Starting price | Free plan with 100 credits per month; paid plans from about $165 per month (free plan available) | Free for 10 tasks and 50,000 exported rows per month; paid plans from $58 per month billed annually ($69 monthly) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | 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. | Per-account subscription priced by number of tasks (saved scrapers) and concurrent cloud runs, not by rows or requests. A permanent free plan covers local extraction only; cloud runs, scheduling, IP rotation, and CAPTCHA solving all sit behind the first paid tier. Annual billing carries roughly a 16 percent discount, and an Enterprise tier is quote-only. |
| Free plan | 100 credits per month, community support, all features included, no SSO | 10 tasks, 1 user, 1 device, 2 concurrent local runs, 50,000 rows exported per month with a 10,000-row cap per export, last 5 run histories, no cloud extraction |
| Free trial | Free plan with 100 credits and no payment method required, plus a 14-day satisfaction guarantee on paid plans | No standalone trial; the free plan serves as the evaluation path, and paid plans carry a 5-day money-back guarantee |
| Best for | 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. | Small go-to-market, research, and ecommerce teams that need recurring structured data from websites with no scraping API, have nobody to write and babysit a Python crawler, and want the extraction to run on someone else's infrastructure on a schedule. |
| Setup time | 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. | Under an hour from download to a first working scraper on a straightforward listing page, largely because auto-detect does the initial configuration. A complex multi-level workflow with logins and conditional branches is a half-day exercise the first time and much faster afterwards. |
| Learning curve | 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. | Low to start, moderate to master. The clicking layer is genuinely accessible. What takes longer is learning the failure modes: when to override auto-detect, how long to set waits on JavaScript-heavy pages, when a loop is matching too many elements, and how to read a run that returned 40 rows instead of 400. |
| Platforms | Web application, cargo-ai command line interface, TypeScript CDK, Hosted Vite apps deployed alongside a workspace | Windows desktop app (Windows 10 64-bit or higher), macOS desktop app, Web dashboard for cloud task management, Browser-based free web tools |
| Compliance | GDPR, SOC 2 | GDPR-aligned data handling, CCPA, Standard cloud infrastructure security controls |
| Founded | 2023 | 2016 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, with a team in Paris | Walnut, California, United States |
| Ownership | Independent, venture-backed | Independent, privately held (Octopus Data Inc.) |
Strengths and limitations
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.
Octoparse
Strengths
- One of the most capable point-and-click builders in the category: loops, branches, detail-page drill-down, and login handling without writing a selector.
- Auto-detect produces a working scraper from a bare URL on most listing pages, which collapses the first hour of work to a minute.
- Cloud extraction with IP rotation, residential proxies, and CAPTCHA solving is bundled into the subscription rather than billed as separate infrastructure.
- Concurrency is a purchasable dial: 20 parallel cloud runs on Professional turns multi-day crawls into overnight ones.
Limitations
- No custom JavaScript injection and no Playwright or Puppeteer style control, so interaction patterns the visual actions cannot express are simply out of reach.
- Workflows live inside the application and are not text you can version, review, or deploy through CI, which is a hard blocker for engineering-led teams.
- The free plan has no cloud runs, no scheduling, and no IP rotation, making it an evaluation sandbox rather than a small working pipeline.
- Support is email and ticket based with no live chat, and response priority is tied to plan tier, which is slow when a scraper breaks on a deadline.
Pricing compared
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.
Octoparse
Per-account subscription priced by number of tasks (saved scrapers) and concurrent cloud runs, not by rows or requests. A permanent free plan covers local extraction only; cloud runs, scheduling, IP rotation, and CAPTCHA solving all sit behind the first paid tier. Annual billing carries roughly a 16 percent discount, and an Enterprise tier is quote-only.
- Free$0
- Standard$58
- Professional$209
- EnterpriseCustom
At $58 per month annually, Standard is priced roughly where a mid-tier scraping API or a single seat of a sales database sits, and for a team running a handful of recurring extractions it is straightforwardly cheaper than the engineering time it replaces. The value case weakens in two directions. Downward, the free plan's lack of cloud runs means many small users get nothing usable without paying, unlike tools whose free tier is a working, if small, pipeline. Upward, the $209 Professional tier is a large step for what is mostly concurrency, and a team comfortable with code can rent the same throughput from a request-level API for less. Octoparse is worth its price precisely when nobody on the team wants to write or maintain a scraper, and it stops being worth it the moment someone does.
Editorial verdict on each
Cargo
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 profileOctoparse
Octoparse is the mature answer for a team that needs recurring web data and has nobody to write a scraper. The visual builder is genuinely more capable than the browser extensions it competes with at the low end, auto-detect removes most of the setup friction, and the cloud tier bundles proxies, CAPTCHA solving, scheduling, and concurrency into one predictable subscription rather than four separate infrastructure bills. The May 2026 MCP server is a real addition rather than a press release, because it lets an agent call the tool instead of a person opening it. The honest caveats are that the free plan is an evaluation sandbox and not a working pipeline, that workflows are trapped in the app with no version control or custom JavaScript, that support is email-only when a scraper breaks on a deadline, and that the hardest anti-bot targets still defeat it. Buy it at Standard when the alternative is a spreadsheet and a copy-paste habit; look at an API-first tool the moment an engineer is available to use one.
Read the full Octoparse profileCargo profile last reviewed 2026-08-23; Octoparse last reviewed 2026-08-23. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.