Skip to content
effecthub

Apify vs Axiom

Two fact sheets from our own research, side by side — pricing, platforms, API access and status re-checked by us rather than quoted from the vendors. Apify starts at $29, Axiom at $15. Only Apify has a free tier. Both ship a public API.

ApifyMarketplace and cloud platform of ready-made scrapers ('Actors') plus infrastructure to run your ownAxiomNo-code Chrome bot builder for clicking, scraping and filling web forms on a schedule

Side by side

FactApifyAxiom
CategoryWeb Scraping & Data ExtractionBrowser Automation Agents
Pricing modelFreemiumPaid
Starts at$29 month$15 month
Public APIYesYes
PlatformsWeb, APIWeb, Chrome Ext, API
CompanyApify Technologies s.r.o.Axiom Ai Limited
Launched2015—
Last verifiedSep 6, 2026Sep 6, 2026

What our research says

Apify

The Actor marketplace is the draw: for most popular sites someone has already built and maintains the scraper, and agent-facing interfaces (API, MCP) are first-class. Costs need watching, since compute units plus per-Actor fees stack on top of the subscription and are hard to predict before you run at volume.

Pros

  • Huge catalog of maintained scrapers for common targets
  • Real free tier with $5 of usage and no card required
  • SDKs, CLI, proxies and scheduling in one platform
  • Published discounts for startups, universities and nonprofits

Cons

  • Two-layer pricing (subscription plus usage plus Actor fees) complicates forecasting
  • Marketplace Actor quality varies by author
  • Large-scale scraping raises site-terms and legal questions the platform leaves to you

Axiom

The split between unmetered desktop runs and metered cloud hours is Axiom's most useful design decision: long jobs can stay on your own machine while only scheduled work consumes quota. The catch is that the cheapest tier gives five cloud hours and no API, so anything you want automated end to end starts at $50.

Pros

  • Desktop runs have no runtime or concurrency limit on any plan
  • Stored logins and TOTP support so bots can pass two-factor prompts
  • Playwright and Puppeteer can connect to their hosted browsers
  • Registered UK company with a company number published in the terms

Cons

  • No free plan, only a two-hour trial
  • Webhooks and API access require the $50 Pro tier or higher
  • Starter is limited to one cloud bot with a one-hour cap per run

Which one fits

Choose Apify if you need

  • Teams that would rather rent a maintained scraper than babysit their own
  • AI builders feeding agents live web data through the API or MCP server
  • Developers monetizing crawlers without running infrastructure

Choose Axiom if you need

  • Ops and marketing staff automating repetitive site work without code
  • Scheduled scraping and form-filling jobs that must run unattended
  • Teams that want a visual builder but occasional code-level control

More comparisons

All Axiom alternatives →Browse all Web Scraping & Data Extraction →