8 best Apify alternatives in 2026 (pricing, benchmarks)

Apify is the largest marketplace of prebuilt scrapers on the web, and for a lot of teams that is exactly why they start looking for something else. The marketplace is the product. When your job is “get clean pages out of a thousand domains” rather than “run the Google Maps Actor once a week”, you end up paying for a platform you use one corner of, and the compute unit bill is hard to predict before it lands.

This is a comparison of eight tools people move to. I run Spider Cloud, so read the Spider section with that in mind. I have tried to give every tool the same treatment: the pricing ladder as it stood on September 2, 2026, the cost of a 100,000-page month, the place it is better than Apify, the place it is worse, and who should pick it.

Key takeaways

Apify’s compute unit folds memory and wall time into one number, so the same 100,000 pages cost about $19 on a Cheerio Actor and about $67 on a browser Actor, before proxy bandwidth. Spider Cloud is the closest drop-in for teams who want an API rather than a marketplace, at about $8 to $15 per 100,000 pages in smart mode, with credits that never expire. Firecrawl is the closest in developer feel, with an AGPL core you can self-host and a $83-a-month Standard plan covering 100,000 credits. Crawl4AI is the free option if you have engineers and proxies to spare. Bright Data, Oxylabs and Zyte are the picks when the hard part is getting through bot protection at enterprise scale, and they charge like it. Scrapfly and ScrapingBee are the cheapest hosted APIs at 100,000 basic pages, at $30 and $49, with credit multipliers that change that math once you need JavaScript rendering or residential proxies.

What Apify is and why teams look elsewhere

Apify is a cloud platform for running scrapers it calls Actors. You either pick one from the Apify Store, where thousands of community and Apify-built Actors cover specific sites, or you write your own with Crawlee, Apify’s open source crawler library, and deploy it to their runtime. Runs produce datasets you can export as JSON, JSONL, CSV, HTML, XLSX, XML or RSS. There is a hosted MCP server at mcp.apify.com, Node and Python clients are stable, and Java, Rust, .NET, PHP and Go clients are experimental as of September 2026.

The billing unit is the compute unit, or CU, which is 1 GB of memory running for 1 hour. Apify’s own estimate is about 3,000 pages per CU on a Cheerio (HTTP) Actor and about 300 pages per CU on a browser Actor. Plans as of September 2026 are Free ($0, with $5 of prepaid usage that expires), Starter ($19), Scale ($199) and Business ($999), billing CUs at $0.20, $0.20, $0.16 and $0.13. Residential proxy traffic is $8 per GB on Free and Starter, $7.50 on Scale and $7 on Business. Prepaid usage on paid plans does not roll over.

Four things push people off the platform.

The first is that the bill is a function of three variables you set by hand. Memory allocation, run duration and proxy bytes all move the number, and a misconfigured Actor that holds 4 GB of memory while it waits on a slow site burns CUs at four times the rate of a lean one. Most teams find this out from the invoice.

The second is that the Store is only as good as the Actor you picked. A popular Actor for a big site is usually well maintained. A niche one might be abandoned, and paid Actors add their own per-result fee on top of your compute. When it breaks you either fix somebody else’s code or write your own.

The third is that the free plan is a $5 monthly allowance, and the Starter plan is a $19 floor whether you use it or not. Teams with spiky workloads pay for quiet months.

The fourth is that the platform does not self-host. Crawlee is Apache-2.0 and runs anywhere, but scheduling, storage, the proxy layer and the Actor runtime are hosted only. If you want the whole stack under your control, you are looking at a different tool.

Comparison table

Cost at 100,000 pages is the cheapest plan whose included units cover 100,000 basic pages in one month, billed monthly, with one unit per page and no add-ons. Where the vendor bills per compute or per GB, the assumption is stated in the tool’s section. We read every price from the vendor’s own pricing page on September 2, 2026.

How we compared

Every price in this post comes from the vendor’s own pricing page or billing documentation, fetched on September 2, 2026. Where a vendor’s page did not print a number (ScraperAPI’s page returned only navigation on two fetches; Firecrawl’s page rendered only the yearly toggle) we say so and either derive the figure from what the vendor did print or leave it out.

Performance figures come from three places. Our crawl API benchmark ran 1,000 URLs through Spider, Firecrawl and Crawl4AI in February 2026 and published the corpus split and the methodology. Our Spider Browser dataset records a 100% pass rate on 999 URLs across 254 domains, also February 2026, with the CSVs in the repo. Both are our own benchmarks, not independently verified, and I say so again wherever I cite them. For third-party numbers I use Scrapeway’s August 2026 API benchmark and Proxyway’s August 2026 Oxylabs review, and attribute each in prose.

What we could not verify: Apify’s compute unit price cut in late 2025 is documented only by third-party blogs, and the change log has no pricing entry. Firecrawl’s monthly-billed prices are derived from the printed yearly figures and match two trackers but are not printed on the page today. Crawl4AI’s cloud API is in closed beta with no vendor pricing. Screenshot pricing on Firecrawl, rollover on Scrapfly and ScrapingBee, and Oxylabs’ Starter rate limit are not stated by the vendor and are not quoted here.

1. Spider Cloud

Spider Cloud is a research lab for web data quality that ships its work as an API. Send a URL to the crawl endpoint and you get back HTML, raw bytes, plain text, several markdown flavors or structured JSON, in JSON, JSONL, CSV or XML envelopes. There is no Actor to pick and no memory slider. The crawler is the MIT-licensed spider-rs/spider Rust project, so the engine you would run yourself is the engine the service runs.

Pricing as of September 2026. Pay as you go is $1 per GB of content transferred plus $0.001 per CPU minute, bought as credits from $1 and never expiring. Failed requests cost nothing. JavaScript rendering rolls into compute with no multiplier; residential and ISP proxy pools and AI extraction are priced separately. That works out to about $0.80 to $1.00 for 10,000 pages in HTTP mode, about $8 to $15 per 100,000 pages in smart mode, and about $80 to $160 per million pages in chrome mode with markdown and metadata, per our pricing guide. Unlimited plans buy concurrency instead: any amount from 2 units ($40 a month) upward, with the per-unit price dropping from $20 to $13 as you add units, and over-limit requests get an immediate 429 with a Retry-After header rather than a charge. Every account gets 10,000 core API requests per minute by default. Full detail is on the pricing page.

Where it shines. Spider is fast on ordinary pages and rarely fails on them. In our February 2026 crawl benchmark (our own benchmark, not independently verified), Spider finished the 1,000-URL corpus at 99.9% success and a corpus average of 74 pages per second, against Firecrawl at 95.3% and 16 pages per second. Compared with Apify, the cost model is two numbers, bytes and CPU minutes, and a page that fails is free rather than a CU you still burned. Request modes http, smart and chrome let you pay for a browser only on pages that need one, where an Apify browser Actor bills every page at browser rates. There is a hosted MCP server, Python and JavaScript SDKs, sync and async crawling, webhooks and streaming.

Where it falls short. There are no monthly free credits, so evaluation means putting $1 or more on the account. Geo-targeting is not available on Unlimited plans yet, and Unlimited runs on a smaller flat-rate proxy pool than pay as you go. The community is small next to Apify’s; you will not find a forum thread for every edge case. And there is no actor marketplace. If your Apify workflow is “run the Instagram Actor and download a CSV”, Spider gives you an API and expects you to write the ten lines that call it.

Who it is for. Teams feeding a RAG index, an agent or a fine-tuning corpus who care about the shape of the text that comes back, and anyone who has looked at an Apify invoice and wanted a bill they can compute in advance. Our head to head is at Spider vs Apify.

2. Firecrawl

Firecrawl is the tool most people mean when they say “Apify alternative for LLM projects”. It is an API that scrapes, crawls, maps and searches, returning markdown by default, with an AGPL-3.0 TypeScript core on GitHub that you can self-host.

Pricing as of September 2026. The pricing page prints yearly rates: Free ($0, 1,000 credits a month, no card), Hobby $16 a month (5,000 credits), Standard $83 (100,000), Growth $333 (500,000), Scale $599 (1,000,000), Enterprise custom. Monthly-billed rates are not printed on the page today; derived from the “save” amounts they are about $19, $99, $399 and $749, and two trackers list the same. One credit buys one scraped or crawled page. JSON extraction adds 4 credits per page, PDF parsing adds 1 per PDF page, and stealth proxy requests now cost the same 1 credit as basic ones. Plan credits do not roll over by default; annual Scale rolls unused credits for one month. Overage auto-reloads in $5 batches at the plan rate.

At 100,000 basic pages the cheapest fit is Standard at $83 yearly or about $99 monthly. At 1 million pages, Scale at $599 yearly. Turn on JSON extraction and multiply by five.

Where it shines. Firecrawl is the easiest of these to build on. The markdown output is clean, the docs are good, the SDKs cover Python, Node, Go, Java, Elixir, Rust, Ruby, .NET and PHP, and there is an MIT-licensed MCP server. Self-hosting is documented, which Apify cannot offer. The free tier is real: 1,000 credits a month with no card, versus Apify’s $5 of expiring usage. Crawls are async with job IDs and webhooks for started, page, completed and failed events.

Where it falls short. The self-hosted build leaves out the anti-bot engine, screenshots and actions, the Agent, browser interaction and the specialized formats, so the part that gets you past blocked sites stays in the cloud. Hobby’s 5,000 credits do not cover a 10,000-page month, which pushes small projects to Standard or to $5 overage packs. In our February 2026 benchmark (our own benchmark, not independently verified) Firecrawl finished at 95.3% success and 16 pages per second. Scrapeway’s August 2026 test put it at 64% success on their protected-site corpus, fourth of nine.

Who it is for. Teams that want markdown for an LLM, would like the option to self-host the crawler, and run under a million pages a month. Our head to head is at Spider vs Firecrawl, and the hub of alternatives is at best Firecrawl alternatives.

3. Crawl4AI

Crawl4AI is a Python library and Docker server for crawling with LLM pipelines in mind. It is the answer when the question is “what if I just ran the crawler myself”.

Pricing as of September 2026. There is no vendor price. The library is Apache-2.0 with a custom attribution clause, at 81,100 stars on GitHub. The cloud API is a closed beta reached through a form, and the vendor prints no pricing for it. Third-party sites have posted credit packs, which I am not repeating because the vendor has not.

At 100,000 pages the license cost is $0. The real cost is your compute, your proxies (none are bundled) and your LLM tokens if you use the LLM extraction strategy.

Where it shines. You control everything. Markdown comes in raw and “fit” variants, plus HTML, JSON, screenshot and PDF. Extraction strategies cover any LiteLLM provider, CSS selectors to JSON, table extraction and BM25 filtering. The Docker server exposes crawl, html, screenshot, pdf and execute_js endpoints, async job endpoints with webhooks, and a built-in MCP endpoint. Since 0.9.0 the server requires auth by default and binds to loopback unless you set a token. Unlike Apify, you can read every line that runs.

Where it falls short. Everything Apify does for you, you now do. Proxies, retries, scaling out, browser pools and the 3 a.m. page. Success on hard sites depends entirely on the proxies you bring. In our February 2026 benchmark (our own benchmark, not independently verified) Crawl4AI finished at 89.7% success and 12 pages per second, with the drop concentrated in the protected-site slice of the corpus. It is Python only, and Capterra lists zero reviews, so support is GitHub issues and Discord.

Who it is for. Teams with engineers, existing proxy contracts and a compliance reason to keep data on their own machines. Our head to head is at Spider vs Crawl4AI.

4. ScrapingBee

ScrapingBee is a straightforward scraping API: one GET, HTML back, with flags for JavaScript rendering, premium proxies, screenshots and AI extraction. It has been around long enough that most teams leaving Apify have already tried it.

Pricing as of September 2026. Plans on the pricing page are monthly only: Hobby $19 (75,000 credits, 25 concurrent), Freelance $49 (250,000, 50), Startup $99 (1,000,000, 100), Business $249 (3,000,000, 200) and Business+ $599 (8,000,000, 400). The page lists JavaScript rendering, premium proxies, geotargeting and screenshots as not included on Hobby and Freelance. The trial is 1,000 credits with no card. There is no overage; you upgrade or renew early. Only requests returning 200, 404 or 410 are charged.

Credits per request: 1 without JavaScript, 5 with JavaScript rendering, 10 for a premium proxy, 25 for premium plus JavaScript, 75 for a stealth proxy. AI extraction adds 5 on top. At 100,000 basic pages the fit is Freelance at $49. At 100,000 JavaScript-rendered pages it is 500,000 credits on Startup at $99, since the lower plans exclude rendering.

Where it shines. The API is simple and the entry price is low. $19 gets 75,000 plain requests, which is a lot of HTML for a side project. The API is a single URL with query parameters, the Python and Node SDKs are MIT, there is a hosted MCP server, and the outputs include markdown, plain text, JSON and screenshots. No compute math.

Where it falls short. The multipliers bite. A stealth request is 75 credits, so a 100,000-page month on hard sites is 7.5 million credits, which is Business+ territory at $599. Scrapeway’s August 2026 test reported a 40% success rate on their protected-site corpus, below their 56.8% industry average. The API is synchronous only; there is no batch or webhook mode for a large crawl. And the features you are most likely to need, rendering and premium proxies, are only available from the $99 plan up.

Who it is for. Small teams scraping mostly unprotected sites who want the cheapest hosted API and do not need a crawler. Our head to head is at Spider vs ScrapingBee, with the hub at best ScrapingBee alternatives.

5. Bright Data

Bright Data is the largest proxy network in the business and sells scraping on top of it: Web Unlocker for single requests, Web Scraper API for prebuilt site scrapers, Scraping Browser for a remote Chrome, and the residential network itself.

Pricing as of September 2026. Each managed product has a free tier of 5,000 units a month with no card, and Bright Data matches a first deposit up to $500. Web Unlocker is $1.50 per 1,000 requests pay as you go, or $499 a month for 383,000 requests with additional requests at $1.30 per 1,000; you pay only for successes. Web Scraper API is priced the same per record. Scraping Browser is $8 per GB pay as you go, or $499 a month for 71 GB. Residential proxies are $8 per GB pay as you go, with committed plans at $499 (141 GB), $999 (332 GB) and $1,999 (798 GB) a month. No annual pricing is shown.

At 100,000 Web Unlocker requests the cost is $150 pay as you go. At 1 million it is $1,301 on the Scale plan. Scraping Browser is billed by traffic, so at an assumed 2 MB per page a million browser pages is roughly 2,000 GB and about $14,000; that assumption is mine, not Bright Data’s.

Where it shines. Bright Data gets through where other tools fail. The network claims 400 million residential IPs across 195 countries, and Web Unlocker charges nothing for a failed attempt, which matters on sites where most tools fail. The MCP server is MIT, ships 69 tools, and includes the same 5,000 free requests a month. The Web Scraper API’s prebuilt scrapers are the closest thing on this list to the Apify Store, with the difference that Bright Data maintains them.

Where it falls short. The per-request rate is 3 to 10 times the hosted API tier. $1.50 per 1,000 is ten times Scrapfly’s Discovery rate and about ten times Spider’s smart-mode band at 100,000 pages. Web Unlocker returns static content, so anything needing a browser moves to the per-GB product and the bill climbs fast. There is no open source core, no self-hosting, markdown output is not in the Unlocker docs, and the Node SDK could not be verified. The buying experience is enterprise: KYC, account managers, product-by-product pricing pages.

Who it is for. Teams whose problem is a handful of heavily protected targets, with budget to match. Our head to head is at Spider vs Bright Data.

6. Zyte

Zyte, formerly Scrapinghub, maintains Scrapy and sells Zyte API, a pay-per-response scraping service where the price of a page depends on how hard the site is.

Pricing as of September 2026. Zyte API is pay per use with a $5 credit in the first month and no subscription. The pricing page lists per-1,000-response rates by website tier and by commitment. Pay as you go: tier 1 HTTP $0.13, tier 3 $0.44, tier 5 $1.27, and browser rendering $1.01, $4.02 and $16.08 for the same tiers. Committing $100 a month drops tier 1 HTTP to $0.10; $500 a month drops it to $0.06, which is the “from $0.06 per 1,000” headline. Usage above the commitment bills at the same discounted rate, and there is no refund for usage under it. Zyte assigns tiers per site, reviews them quarterly and gives two weeks’ notice of a change. Scrapy Cloud is a free half unit with a one-hour job limit, then $9 per unit per month.

At 100,000 tier 1 HTTP responses the cost is $13. At 100,000 tier 3 browser responses it is $240 on a $200 commitment. That spread is the point: you have to know your site’s tier to know your price.

Where it shines. The cheapest hosted price on this list for easy sites, and honest tiering for hard ones. You pay for successful responses only. Add-ons are itemized down to the screenshot ($0.002) and the auto-extraction data type. Scrapy is BSD-3 and the scrapy-zyte-api integration means an existing Scrapy project can switch to Zyte’s backend with a settings change. There is a cost estimator in the app.

Where it falls short. No official MCP server (there is a build-your-own tutorial), no official Node client, and markdown output could not be verified, so it is a weaker fit for LLM work than Firecrawl or Spider. The tier system means the same request costs 12 times more on a tier 5 site than a tier 1 site, and the tier can move under you. The self-serve ceiling is $2,500 a month before you talk to sales.

Who it is for. Scrapy shops, and anyone scraping large volumes of easy sites who wants the lowest per-response rate. Our head to head is at Spider vs Zyte.

7. Scrapfly

Scrapfly is a scraping API with an anti-bot layer, a screenshot API, an extraction API, a crawler and a cloud browser, all on one credit pool. It is the one that shows up at the top of third-party success tests.

Pricing as of September 2026. The pricing page lists Free ($0, 1,000 signup credits, 5 concurrent), Discovery $30 (200,000 credits, 5 concurrent, hard-capped), Pro $100 (1,000,000, 20), Startup $250 (2,500,000, 50), Enterprise $500 (5,500,000, 100) and Custom from $1,200. Annual billing gives two months free. Pro and above switch to pay as you go in 10,000-credit batches at the plan rate once included credits run out; Discovery and Free stop at the cap.

Credits per request: 1 for a datacenter request, 25 for a residential proxy, plus 5 for JavaScript rendering, and country selection is free. Bandwidth beyond the first MB costs 3 credits per 100 KB on datacenter and 10 on residential. The anti-scraping protection feature is free when a request is not blocked, but it may auto-upgrade to a residential proxy and a browser, and a cost_budget parameter caps what a single request can spend. Failed requests are not billed unless more than 30% of your traffic fails. Screenshots are 60 credits.

At 100,000 basic datacenter pages the fit is Discovery at $30. At 100,000 rendered pages it is 600,000 credits on Pro at $100. At a million pages with residential and rendering, 31 credits each, it is about $3,560.

Where it shines. Scrapeway’s August 2026 benchmark put Scrapfly first of nine, at 98% success and a $4.90 effective cost per 1,000 on their protected corpus. The cost budget parameter is a good idea nobody else has copied. The MCP server ships nine tools with a hosted option, SDKs cover Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust and Scrapy, and the crawler adds WARC and HAR output. Capterra rates it 4.9 of 5 across 238 reviews.

Where it falls short. The residential multiplier is 25, so the moment a site needs a real IP your cheap plan is 25 times more expensive. Auto-upgrade means the bill can surprise you unless you set the budget. Discovery’s 5 concurrent requests is slow for a real crawl. Scrapeway’s 15.3-second average response time was the slowest in their test. It is closed source with no self-hosting.

Who it is for. Teams scraping a mix of easy and protected sites who want a hosted API with a hard spend limit per request. Our head to head is at Spider vs Scrapfly.

8. Oxylabs

Oxylabs sells a Web Scraper API billed per successful result, with an AI Studio for prompt-driven extraction and a residential network behind both.

Pricing as of September 2026. The Web Scraper API pricing page is monthly only with no annual option. A free trial gives up to 2,000 results with no card. Micro is $49 a month for up to 98,000 results, Starter $99 for up to 220,000, Business $999 for up to 3,330,000, and Custom+ from $0.25 per 1,000. Per-1,000 rates on Micro are $0.50 for Amazon, $1.00 for Google, $1.15 for other sites and $1.35 with JavaScript rendering, dropping to $0.30, $0.60, $0.75 and $1.00 on Business. You are billed for results with a 2xx or 4xx status. Residential proxies start at $30 for 5 GB ($6 per GB) and reach $2.50 per GB at $2,500 a month. AI Studio runs $12 to $250 a month on a credit model.

At 100,000 “other” results the fit is Starter at $99 plus an $11 top-up, so $110. At a million it is Business at $999, whose minimum exceeds the $750 the volume would cost at the per-result rate.

Where it shines. Per-result billing with no compute math, ready-made parsers for Amazon and Google, and a residential pool the vendor puts at 175 million IPs. Proxyway’s August 2026 review scored Oxylabs 9.3 of 10 and measured 99.93% success on residential traffic. The MCP server is MIT with a hosted endpoint. Push-pull async with callbacks handles big batches.

Where it falls short. The minimums hurt at low volume. $49 buys $11.50 of usage at the 10,000-page level, and the Business tier’s $999 floor is above what a million results would cost. There is no open source core, no self-hosting, SDKs cover only Python and Go, and screenshot output could not be verified. The Starter plan’s rate limit is not printed. Like Bright Data, the per-1,000 rate is roughly ten times the cheapest hosted APIs.

Who it is for. E-commerce and search teams that want parsed JSON from big-name targets and are already at a scale where a $999 floor is a rounding error. Our head to head is at Spider vs Oxylabs.

Reasons to consider an Apify alternative

You are scraping arbitrary domains, not a fixed list of big sites. The Store’s value is concentrated in a few hundred popular targets. For the long tail you write your own Actor anyway, at which point you are paying Apify for compute and orchestration you can get cheaper as a plain API.

Your bill is unpredictable. A CU is memory times time, and both depend on decisions inside the Actor. Firecrawl, ScrapingBee, Scrapfly and Bright Data bill per page or per request; Zyte and Oxylabs bill per successful response; Spider bills bytes and CPU minutes and charges nothing for failures. All of those can be estimated from a page count.

You need LLM-ready output. Apify datasets are rows in whatever shape the Actor produced. Spider, Firecrawl and Crawl4AI return markdown built for a context window, and Spider and Firecrawl expose MCP servers an agent can call.

You want to self-host, or at least could. Crawlee runs anywhere but the platform does not. Crawl4AI is fully yours, Firecrawl’s core is AGPL, and Spider’s crawler is MIT.

You have quiet months. Apify’s prepaid usage expires and the paid plans are monthly floors. Spider credits never expire, Zyte has no subscription on pay as you go, and Bright Data’s Web Unlocker is pure pay per request.

How to choose by workload

RAG, agents, fine-tuning corpora. You want markdown, throughput and a success rate you can audit. Spider and Firecrawl are the two built for this; Crawl4AI if you would rather run it yourself. Check the 1,000-URL benchmark and then run your own URLs, because a corpus of news sites behaves nothing like a corpus of SPAs.

A few hard sites at volume. Bright Data, Oxylabs or Zyte’s higher tiers. Expect $1 to $16 per 1,000 depending on how hard the site is and whether it needs a browser. Spider’s unblocker and residential pools cover this too, priced separately from the base rate.

Lots of easy sites, tight budget. Zyte tier 1 at $13 per 100,000, Scrapfly Discovery at $30, ScrapingBee Freelance at $49, or Spider smart mode at about $8 to $15. The differences are in what happens to the price when a site turns out not to be easy.

Prebuilt scrapers for named sites. Stay on Apify, or look at Bright Data’s Web Scraper API and Oxylabs’ Amazon and Google parsers. Nothing else on this list has a store.

Full control, compliance, air gap. Crawl4AI. Then Firecrawl self-hosted with the caveat that the anti-bot layer stays in the cloud. Spider’s crawler is MIT if you want to build on it, and the open source vs cloud page explains what the hosted service adds.

Screenshots and browser automation. Spider Browser, which passed 100% of 999 URLs across 254 domains in February 2026 (our own benchmark, not independently verified, dataset linked above), Bright Data’s Scraping Browser billed per GB, or Firecrawl’s actions at extra credits.

Apify is hard to replace if you live in the Store, and easy to replace if you were only ever using it as a scraping API. If it is the second, pick two tools from this list, run the same 100 URLs through both, and compare the output before you compare the price. You can run any URL through the Spider playground and see the markdown before you spend anything at volume, and the compare page keeps the pricing table above current as vendors change their ladders.