Apify alternative: Web Scraper vs Apify
Apify is a developer platform: you write an Actor or run one from Apify Store, and pay for the compute, proxy, and storage it consumes or the per-event prices its author sets. Web Scraper Cloud runs sitemaps you build visually in a free browser extension, with an AI wizard for listing pages, on a plan priced by concurrent scraping capacity.
Reviewed October 2026 Every claim below links to a current vendor page.
You want a visual builder instead of Actor code, and unlimited URL credits rather than a metered compute bill.
Your team writes its own crawlers in JavaScript or Python and wants to run them on a hosted platform.
Web Scraper vs Apify: features and pricing
Compare how Web Scraper and Apify handle setup, Cloud automation, integrations, proxies, and scaling. Web Scraper Scale is compared with Apify Business, the highest self-service plan each vendor prices publicly.
| CAPABILITY | Web Scraper Scale, $200 per month | Apify Business, $999 per month |
|---|---|---|
| Setup and creation | ||
| Where scrapers are built | Visual sitemap builder in a browser extension Free extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, with no code or desktop application required. | Code-first Actors Actors are built with the JavaScript or Python SDK, or taken from the Apify Store. |
| Time to a working scraper | Faster than writing code Point at the data on the live page, or let the AI Sitemap Wizard map it, then check the result in the data preview. | Actor code, or a Store Actor Custom Actors are written and tested in JavaScript or Python; Store Actors run from an input form. |
| Skills needed | Browser skills No programming language or HTML parsing to learn. | Programming JavaScript or Python, with the Apify SDK or Crawlee. |
| AI-assisted setup | AI Sitemap Wizard Maps repeated listing data, detects pagination and infinite scrolling, and follows item links to collect fields from detail pages. | Apify AI (beta) A chat in Console finds a Store Actor and runs it from a plain-language description. |
| Manual selector control | Advanced Sitemap Builder Point and click, AI selector generation for listing and detail pages, and 10+ selector types for data, navigation, and clicks. | Full code control Selectors and crawl logic are written in the Actor source. |
| Logins and site setup | Website State Setup Signs in or sets location, language, or currency before scraping, only when that state is missing, with passwords encrypted in Cloud. | Cookies or login code Paste session cookies or script the login in Actor code; secret inputs are stored encrypted. |
| Ready-made starting points | Sitemap Marketplace Ready-made sitemaps maintained by Web Scraper, available at no additional cost. | Apify Store Thousands of community and vendor Actors, many priced per event or result by their authors. |
| When a website changes | Update a selector Fix the sitemap by point and click and sync it to Cloud, with nothing to redeploy. | Patch and rebuild the Actor Changes go through the Actor source and a new build; Store Actors are kept up by their authors. |
| Cloud automation | ||
| Cloud execution | Web Scraper Cloud Runs sitemaps created in the Web Scraper extension remotely after sync or import. | Apify platform runs Actors run in containers on Apify infrastructure. |
| Queue, link following, and storage | Built into every job Cloud queues URLs, follows links and pagination, retries failed pages, and keeps results for 60 days. | Platform queues and storage, used from code Request queues, link following, and datasets come with the platform and Crawlee, driven from Actor code. |
| Scheduling | Daily, interval, and custom CRON Intervals as short as 1 minute, with a selectable time zone and driver, proxy, and priority set per schedule. | Scheduled Actor tasks Cron-based schedules are included. |
| Rendering and execution modes | Full JS and Fast drivers Full JS loads pages in a full browser environment; Fast skips page JavaScript to scrape faster. | Chosen in code or Actor input Cheerio for plain HTML or Playwright and Puppeteer for rendering; Store Actors such as Website Content Crawler offer the choice as an input. |
| Retry behavior | Automatic retries of empty or failed pages Retries use a different proxy IP and browser fingerprint, and do not consume URL credits. CAPTCHAs and bot check pages are solved automatically. | Configurable in the crawler Retry counts and session handling are set in Actor code, and retried requests still consume compute. |
| Concurrency model | Concurrent scrapers Starts at 2 concurrent scrapers and scales with no set ceiling; add capacity at any time. A single job can expand to up to 5 concurrent scrapers. | 256 concurrent runs Up to 512 GB of total Actor memory across them. |
| Data and integrations | ||
| Data cleaning | Parser, with no code Regex, replace, HTML stripping, virtual columns, and timestamp conversion, previewed on sample records and applied in Cloud. | Field selection at export Pick, omit, rename, and flatten fields on export; changing values needs code. |
| Data quality checks | Thresholds on every job Minimum records, maximum failed or empty pages, and minimum filled fields, with suggested values from a previous run. | Run monitoring Limits you set on result counts, run status, and field statistics; field checks need a dataset schema. |
| API | Cloud API with an OpenAPI description Manage sitemaps, jobs, and schedules, and download results, with code examples for every programming language. | Full platform API Start, monitor, and read runs, datasets, and key-value stores. |
| Webhooks | Job status webhooks Sent when a job finishes, stops, or fails, with job and sitemap IDs and an optional custom ID, and retried if your endpoint does not respond. | Run event webhooks Webhooks fire when a run is created, succeeds, fails, aborts, or times out. |
| Data export formats | CSV, XLSX, JSON Each scraping job's data can be downloaded in all three formats. | JSON, CSV, XML, Excel, and more Datasets also export as an HTML table, RSS, or JSONL. |
| Export integrations | Google Sheets, Google Drive, Dropbox, S3, Google Cloud, Azure The complete dataset is sent after each job finishes. | Zapier, Make, n8n, Google Drive, and more Also email, Airtable, Snowflake, Keboola, and vector databases; some run as Actors that use account credits. |
| Notifications | Email and in-app alerts Alerts when a job fails or misses its data quality thresholds, with email and in-app channels set per alert type. | Email, Slack, and in-app alerts Monitoring alerts cover failed runs and thresholds on results, duration, and cost. |
| Image and file handling | Image export Downloads images during the scraping job using the Image selector and delivers the files to Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage. | Key-value store Files are saved to storage by the Actor, and storage operations and data transfer are metered. |
| Scale and pricing | ||
| Plan compared | Scale, $200 per month $2,000 per year billed annually, $167 per month. | Business, $999 per month Highest self-service plan Apify prices publicly; 10 percent off with annual billing. |
| What the plan fee buys | Unlimited URL credits The fee buys concurrent scraping capacity, and page volume does not change it. | Prepaid usage equal to the fee The fee is a usage budget drawn down by compute units at $0.13 each, proxy bandwidth, storage, and Actor fees. |
| Cost per 1,000 URLs no JS, DC proxies | From $0.03 Fast driver on the included datacenter proxies; two scrapers at $200 per month cover about 4.3M URLs. | About $0.10 Apify's own estimate for its Website Content Crawler over raw HTTP, at $0.13 per compute unit, on the included datacenter proxies. |
| Cost per 1,000 URLs JS, DC proxies | From $0.05 Full JS driver on the included datacenter proxies; two scrapers at $200 per month cover about 2.2M URLs. | $0.26 to $2.60 Apify's estimate for the same crawler in a headless browser; storage operations come on top. |
| Cost per 1,000 URLs JS, Residential proxies | From $0.681 Full JS driver plus residential traffic, sold separately at $2.50 per GB. | $2.01 to $4.351 Adds residential traffic, sold separately at $7 per GB. |
| Unused capacity | No credit ceiling Unlimited URL credits leave no balance to forfeit at the end of a cycle. | Credits expire monthly Unused prepaid usage does not roll over to the next cycle. |
| Included datacenter proxies | US, GB, and DE datacenter proxies Included at no additional cost. | 500 datacenter IPs included Additional IPs are $0.60 each as a plan add-on. |
| Residential proxies | Available at $2.50 per GB In 47 locations, billed on bandwidth used. | $7 per GB Billed per GB of bandwidth, drawn from the prepaid usage. |
| Third-party fees | Marketplace sitemaps at no extra cost They run on your own plan, with no separate per-result charge. | Pay-per-event Actors set their own prices Pay-per-event Store Actors charge per event or result, usually with platform usage included; pay-per-usage Actors bill platform usage only. |
| Cloud data retention | 60 days Scraped data stays available to download from Cloud for that period. | Set by plan and storage settings Dataset retention depends on the plan and on how storages are configured. |
1 Proxy traffic is sold separately, so the price is calculated based on a 250 KB page size.
Reasons to choose Web Scraper
No crawler code to write or maintain
Sitemaps are built against the live page in the browser extension, with the AI Sitemap Wizard or point and click, then run in Cloud. Nobody has to learn an SDK or keep an Actor building.
Web Scraper extensionOne line item, not a metered bill
The fee buys concurrent scraping capacity with unlimited URL credits. There is no compute meter, no storage operation charge, and no third-party per-result fee to reconcile.
Web Scraper pricingNothing expires at the end of the month
Capacity is not a prepaid balance, so a quiet month does not forfeit anything and a busy one does not trigger overage on the next invoice. Retries of empty or failed pages cost nothing extra.
Web Scraper pricingWeb Scraper Scale vs Apify Business
Each side is shown at its highest self-service plan with published pricing. The two fees buy different things: one buys scraping capacity, the other buys a prepaid usage budget.
Web Scraper Cloud · Scale
$200 per month
Or $2,000 per year billed annually, $167 per month
- Capacity
- Unlimited URL credits
- Concurrency
- Starts at 2 concurrent scrapers, scales with no set ceiling; a single job can use up to 5
- Proxies
- US, GB, and DE datacenter proxies included; residential in 47 locations at $2.50 per GB
- Plan limitation
- Capacity grows by adding concurrent scrapers, at a lower price per scraper as you add more; residential proxy traffic is billed on usage
- Cost per 1,000 URLs no JS, DC proxies
- From $0.03
- Cost per 1,000 URLs JS, DC proxies
- From $0.05
- Cost per 1,000 URLs JS, Residential proxies
- From $0.681
Apify · Business
$999 per month
10 percent off with annual billing.
- Capacity
- Prepaid platform usage equal to the plan fee
- Concurrency
- 256 concurrent runs, up to 512 GB total Actor memory
- Proxies
- 500 datacenter IPs included; residential at $7 per GB
- Plan limitation
- Unused prepaid usage expires each cycle, overage is billed on the next invoice, and pay-per-event Store Actors charge their own prices
- Cost per 1,000 URLs no JS, DC proxies
- About $0.10
- Cost per 1,000 URLs JS, DC proxies
- $0.26 to $2.60
- Cost per 1,000 URLs JS, Residential proxies
- $2.01 to $4.351
The two prices do not buy the same unit
Web Scraper charges for concurrent scraping capacity, with unlimited URL credits. Apify meters compute units at $0.13 each on Business, where one unit is one gigabyte of memory running for one hour, plus proxy bandwidth and storage operations, and pay-per-event Store Actors charge their own prices. A page count alone does not determine the Apify bill, so its figure is an estimate that moves with the Actor and the target.
- Both prices are monthly list prices from each vendor's public pricing page, with the annual equivalent shown alongside.
- Proxy cost is counted wherever it is billed, inside the plan or as a separate bandwidth line.
- Apify Store Actor fees are excluded because they are set per Actor by its author.
- The Apify figures scale the per-page estimates on its Website Content Crawler Store page to the compute unit price of the compared plan.
- 1 Proxy traffic is sold separately, so the price is calculated based on a 250 KB page size.
Apify suits engineering teams that write their own crawlers and want a platform to host them.
Switching from Apify
Can an Apify Actor be imported?
Scrapers move over as Web Scraper sitemaps built in the free browser extension, where the AI Sitemap Wizard maps listing pages for you. Many common targets also have a ready-made Marketplace sitemap that you can import into Web Scraper Cloud.
Do we lose flexibility by leaving code behind?
Sitemaps cover listing pages, detail pages, pagination, scrolling, clicks, and login flows. Targets that need custom logic beyond that are worth testing during the free trial before switching.
How does the bill change?
A capacity plan replaces a metered usage budget. It is a fixed monthly fee for concurrent scrapers with unlimited URL credits, so page volume no longer moves the invoice. Residential proxies are available at $2.50 per GB when a target website requires them.
How does data reach our systems?
Results are retrieved through the API or delivered to Google Sheets, Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure after each job. Webhook notifications report job status and identifiers.
See it applied to your use case
Compare Web Scraper with other tools
Most teams shortlist two or three tools. These pages cover the same capabilities and plan tiers.
Try it on the website you want to scrape
Use the 7-day free trial, with no credit card required, to run Web Scraper Cloud on the website you need data from.
This comparison reflects publicly available information and our understanding of the products as of October 2026. Features, pricing, and other details may change over time, so we recommend verifying current information directly with each provider before making a decision. All product names, trademarks, logos, and brands belong to their respective owners and are referenced solely for identification and comparison purposes. No affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement is implied.