A third competitor maintains the page about this pair —
scraperapi.com/comparisons/apify-vs-scrapingbee — which tells you how
settled the demand is. Both vendors enter at $19 a month, and that
coincidence is the most useful thing about the comparison, because it makes
the unit difference impossible to hide behind the sticker.
Both prices below were read directly at the source today.
The same $19, side by side
| Apify Starter | ScrapingBee Hobby | |
|---|---|---|
| Price/month | $19 | $19 |
| What it includes | $19 of usage at $0.2/CU | 75,000 API credits |
| In its own unit | 95 compute units | 75,000 fetches at 1 credit |
| Unit definition | "1 CU = 1 GB of RAM running for 1 hour" | one credit, one basic request |
| Concurrency | 32 | 25 |
| Per unit | $0.2 / CU | $0.2533 / 1,000 credits |
| Unused at cycle end | expires | plan resets |
The 95 is our division: $19 ÷ $0.2 per CU. Ninety-five GB-hours of compute against seventy-five thousand fetches — and there is no exchange rate between them. How many fetches fit in one compute unit depends on how slow the target was, how much RAM the Actor's author asked for, and whether a retry fired. That is the comparison, and anyone publishing a single "winner" number has quietly assumed values for all three.
The full ladders
Apify:
| Plan | Price/month | Usage included | Concurrent | 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 |
ScrapingBee:
| Plan | Price/month | Credits | Concurrent | Per 1,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby | $19 | 75,000 | 25 | $0.2533 |
| Freelance | $49 | 250,000 | 50 | $0.1960 |
| Startup | $99 | 1,000,000 | 100 | $0.0990 |
| Business | $249 | 3,000,000 | 200 | $0.0830 |
| Business+ | $599 | 8,000,000 | 400 | $0.0749 |
⚠️ Two floors, not two prices. Apify's CU rate is the rate; what a job costs depends on RAM and runtime. ScrapingBee's per-1,000 is the rate of a one-credit request, and the page we read does not say how many credits a JavaScript render or a premium proxy consumes. Neither column is a quote.
They are not the same product, and the choice follows from that
Apify is a platform. Tens of thousands of Actors someone else wrote, plus storage, scheduling, retries, webhooks and exports. You pick a scraper or write one, and Apify runs it.
ScrapingBee is a pipe. One endpoint: URL in, HTML or screenshot out, with proxies and rendering handled. There is no scraper to pick, because there is no scraper — you write the parsing.
So the question is not price, it is do you already have the parsing code.
- You have selectors and need them to stop getting blocked → ScrapingBee.
- You need the data and would rather not write selectors → Apify, if an Actor for your target exists.
- An Actor exists but is unmaintained → that is the marketplace risk, and it is the reason people look for Apify alternatives.
Where each one wins
Apify wins on breadth you do not have to build: if the Actor exists, you are done in an afternoon. 32 concurrent runs at $19 is also more throughput per dollar than ScrapingBee's 25.
ScrapingBee wins on a forecastable bill. Credits are countable before you run; compute units are not. It also wins on a free tier that does not expire — 1,000 credits with no card against Apify's $5 of credit that resets monthly and blocks access once spent.
Both win over us on reach: any URL on the web, against our twelve platforms.
Where we fit
Neither sells you a parsed social field. Apify sells a marketplace where someone else's Actor might; ScrapingBee sells the HTML and leaves the parsing to you. Both are the right call for the whole web.
We sell twelve platforms in one response shape, billed per API call, with a published per-field contract — and an hourly archive of what is rising, which is the one thing a fetch-now API cannot sell you after the fact, because the past was not photographed.
| Unit | Entry | Free tier | You get back | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apify | compute unit | $19/mo · 95 CU | $5 credit, expires monthly | whatever the Actor emits |
| ScrapingBee | credit | $19/mo · 75,000 | 1,000 credits, no expiry | HTML, you parse |
| HonestHook | API call | free, 1,000 credits/mo | 1,000/mo, renewing | parsed JSON, 12 platforms |
Deeper on each: Apify · ScrapingBee · and the same pair against a proxy network: Apify vs Bright Data.
Get a free key — 1,000 credits a month, no card. Start here.
Apify plan prices, included usage, concurrency, RAM limits, compute-unit rates, the CU definition and the credit-expiry wording read from apify.com/pricing on 3 October 2026. ScrapingBee plan prices, credit counts, concurrency and the 1,000-credit free tier read from scrapingbee.com on 3 October 2026. Both primary sources, both read directly from the page. The 95-compute-unit figure and the per-1,000 column are our arithmetic on their numbers; the per-request credit cost of JavaScript rendering and premium proxies is not published by ScrapingBee and is not estimated here. Verify before deciding.