Apify is a marketplace, not a single API. It hosts 68,000+ ready-made scrapers — they call them Actors — written by Apify and by third-party developers, covering nearly anything with a URL.
That breadth is its best and worst feature, and most comparisons only mention the first half.
What it costs
| Plan | Price/month | Usage included |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $5 |
| Starter | $19 | $19 |
| Scale | $199 | $199 |
| Business | $999 | $999 |
Annual billing takes 10% off.
⚠️ Credits expire monthly. No rollover. In their words: unused usage credits "are not rolled over... they expire at the end of the billing cycle." Same structural issue as EnsembleData's daily reset, on a monthly clock.
How compute units work
Pricing is by compute unit (CU): 1 CU = 1 GB of RAM running for 1 hour. A typical Actor run at 2 GB for 30 minutes consumes 1 CU.
The per-CU rate varies by plan — check their pricing page for the current figure rather than trusting a number in a comparison post, including this one.
The catch is structural: your cost depends on how efficiently someone else wrote the Actor. A well-built scraper and a sloppy one doing the same job can differ several times over in compute, and you won't know which you picked until the bill arrives.
The fee most comparisons miss
Many Store Actors charge pay-per-result or pay-per-event fees on top of compute. The Actor developer sets those, and they're separate from your plan.
So the real formula is:
your cost = platform compute + whatever the Actor author charges
That's not hidden exactly — it's on each Actor's page — but it means the $19 headline is a floor, not a price.
Who it's for
Good fit if you need to scrape many different kinds of things: social, e-commerce, maps, job boards, a random site nobody else covers. Nothing else in this comparison comes close on breadth.
Good fit if you'd rather adapt an existing Actor than write a scraper. With 68,000 of them, something usually exists.
Good fit if you want to run your own code on someone else's infrastructure — Apify is a platform, not just an API, and that's a genuine difference.
Bad fit if you need one consistent response shape across platforms. Actors are written by different people; a TikTok profile and an Instagram profile come back looking nothing alike. Normalizing them is your job — and that normalization is precisely what the social-specific APIs sell.
Bad fit if you need predictable cost per call. Compute-unit billing plus per-Actor fees makes forecasting genuinely hard.
If you're building an AI agent
This is the case I see asked most often, and it deserves its own answer because the trade-off inverts.
An agent needs data it can reason over. That means predictable shape, not maximum coverage.
Apify's problem for agents: every Actor returns whatever its author decided. Two Actors scraping two platforms produce two different structures, and your agent — or the model behind it — has to reconcile them at runtime. That's tokens spent on plumbing, and a class of failure that's hard to test.
Apify's advantage for agents: it has an MCP server, and it covers things no social API touches. If your agent needs a Brazilian marketplace or a niche forum, breadth wins and normalization is a problem you can solve once.
A rough rule:
| Your agent needs | Pick |
|---|---|
| Two or three social platforms, consistently shaped | A social data API |
| Many different kinds of sites | Apify |
| One platform, cheap | A specialist (twitterapi.io) |
| To run your own scraping logic | Apify — nothing else lets you |
One thing to check before committing either way: does the vendor publish an MCP server and machine-readable docs? If a developer asks Claude or Cursor "how do I get TikTok comments," the model answers from whatever documentation is best structured for machines. Vendors that skipped that layer are invisible in that conversation, regardless of how good their API is.
Where competitors are better
| Better at | |
|---|---|
| SocialCrawl / ScrapeCreators | One unified schema across platforms. That's the whole product, and Apify structurally can't offer it |
| EnsembleData | Predictable monthly cost, if your volume is steady |
Specialists (twitterapi.io) |
~$0.18 per 1,000 profiles for a single platform beats any generalist |
| Bright Data / Oxylabs | Enterprise proxy infrastructure and contracts |
Where Apify is clearly better
Coverage nobody else touches. If you need a Brazilian marketplace, a niche forum, or a site with four hundred users, a social data API has nothing for you and Apify probably has an Actor.
You can write and run your own. The others are closed APIs — you get what they expose. On Apify you can deploy your own scraper and use their infrastructure for proxies and scheduling. For an unusual requirement, that's the difference between possible and impossible.
The trade-off in one line
Apify gives you breadth and hands you the normalization problem. Social data APIs give you normalization and hand you their coverage limits.
Which is worse depends entirely on how many platforms you need and how much your time is worth.
The legal part
Same as everyone: scraping violates platform Terms of Service — civil, not criminal. Meta v. Bright Data (2024) held that logged-off scraping of public data isn't bound by those terms.
One difference worth noting: on a marketplace, the Actor you chose was written by a third party, and you're responsible for what it does. Read what an Actor actually collects before running it at volume, especially anything that requires a login.
Public data is still personal data under GDPR and LGPD. Store it and you're the controller.
Prices and Actor count read from apify.com/pricing and apify.com/store on 5 September 2026. Vendor figures change — verify before deciding.