Six competitors maintain a page about this exact pair, Bright Data itself among them. That is the strongest demand signal we measured, and it is also why this page exists: the two products do not share a unit, and almost every comparison quietly invents one.
We sell neither a marketplace nor a proxy network, so we have no side to take between them. What we have is the arithmetic, read at the source today.
What Apify costs
| Plan | Price/month | Usage included | Max concurrent | Max RAM | CU rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $5 | 5 | 16 GB | $0.2 / CU |
| Starter | $19 | $19 | 32 | 64 GB | $0.2 / CU |
| Scale | $199 | $199 | 128 | 256 GB | $0.16 / CU |
| Business | $999 | $999 | 256 | 512 GB | $0.13 / CU |
The unit, in their words: "1 CU = 1 GB of RAM running for 1 hour." And the expiry, also theirs: "unused usage credits are not rolled over to the next billing cycle, and they expire at the end of the billing cycle."
⚠️ Search results will tell you Apify starts at $29. Their own pricing page said $19 when we read it today, and said $19 when we read it on 2 October. Second time the same discrepancy appeared, and it is the whole argument for reading prices at the source.
What Bright Data costs
⚠️ This half is one grade weaker, and we are saying so before the table.
brightdata.com refused a direct page read for the second time — the fetch
came back "unable to verify if domain is safe" — so these figures come from
search restricted to their own domain. Primary source, but not the rendered
table.
| Product | Price, as published |
|---|---|
| Residential proxies, pay-as-you-go | $8/GB |
| Residential proxies, with commitment | $7/GB down to $5/GB by volume |
| Web Unlocker API | from $1 per 1,000 requests |
| SERP API | from $1 per 1,000 requests |
Pay-as-you-go exists across the line: datacenter, residential, ISP and mobile proxies, Web Unlocker, the self-service Web Scraper IDEs and the SERP API.
⚠️ There is a 50% discount advertised on the $8/GB, taking it to $4/GB, and we are not publishing it as a price. An offer is not a rate card: we do not know who it applies to or for how long. The $8 is the number you can plan on.
⚠️ And do not mix this with the $1.50 per 1,000 on our Bright Data page. That one is per delivered dataset record. The $1 here is per request to Web Unlocker or the SERP API. Different products, different units — joining them in one row is precisely the table that reads tidier than reality.
The unit problem, which is the actual answer
A compute unit is RAM × time. A gigabyte is bytes delivered. A request is one call. To convert any of these into another you need to know how slow the target was, how much memory the Actor's author allocated, whether a retry fired, and how heavy the page is — four things you do not control and cannot estimate before running.
So the honest comparison is not a number. It is this:
| Apify | Bright Data | |
|---|---|---|
| You are buying | compute, on their platform | bandwidth and unblocking |
| Unit | compute unit (1 GB RAM × 1 h) | GB, or 1,000 requests |
| Forecastable before you run? | no | per-GB, yes if you know page weight |
| Cheapest way in | $0, $5 of credit | pay-as-you-go, no monthly floor |
| Credits expire | yes, every cycle | pay-as-you-go does not expire |
| Catalogue | tens of thousands of Actors | ~120 site-specific APIs plus proxies |
| Who maintains the scraper | whoever wrote that Actor | Bright Data |
Where each one wins, stated plainly
Apify wins when the thing you need already exists as an Actor. For a one-off job against an awkward target, somebody has probably already written it, and $19 with 32 concurrent runs is hard to beat for throughput at that price. It also wins on scheduling, datasets and exports, which are a product and not an afterthought.
Bright Data wins on the hardest targets. A residential pool that large, plus Web Unlocker, is what you buy when a site actively fights you — and nothing in our catalogue or Apify's marketplace substitutes for it. It also wins on not having a monthly floor: pay-as-you-go means an idle month costs nothing, which is the opposite of Apify's expiring credit.
Neither wins the question what gained traction last week. See below.
Where we fit, narrowly
We are not a third marketplace and not a proxy vendor. We sell
read access to twelve social platforms in one response shape, billed
per API call, with a published per-field contract — the
same field in the same place on all twelve, or null with a stated reason.
| Unit | Entry | Expiry | Scope | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apify | compute unit | $19/mo · free tier $5 | credits expire monthly | marketplace, any target |
| Bright Data | GB · 1k requests | pay-as-you-go, no floor | pay-as-you-go does not expire | proxies, unblocking, ~120 APIs |
| HonestHook | API call | free, 1,000 credits/mo | purchased never expire | 12 social platforms |
If your target is not a social platform, we have nothing for you and the two above do. That is most of the web, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
The one thing none of the three sells
An hourly archive of what is rising, kept and never deleted.
Apify and Bright Data both answer what is this page now, extremely well and at any scale. Only an archive answers what accelerated, and that cannot be added later: the past was not photographed. It is also why we cover twelve platforms instead of the whole web — capturing hourly across twelve is already the entire job.
Deeper on each one: Apify · Bright Data · and if you are leaving Apify specifically, the four reasons people do.
Get a free key — 1,000 credits a month, no card. Start here.
Apify plan prices, included usage, concurrency, RAM limits, compute-unit rates and the credit-expiry wording read from apify.com/pricing on 3 October 2026 — primary source, read directly from the page. Bright Data's $8/GB pay-as-you-go, the $7–$5/GB commitment range, the $1/1,000 Web Unlocker and SERP API rates and the pay-as-you-go product list read from brightdata.com on 3 October 2026 via search restricted to that domain, because the site refused a direct page read — one grade below a rendered table, and flagged as such in the body. The 50% residential discount they advertise is mentioned but not published as a price. Verify before deciding.