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Apify vs Browse AI

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, Browse AI at $19. Both have a free tier. Both ship a public API.

ApifyMarketplace and cloud platform of ready-made scrapers ('Actors') plus infrastructure to run your ownBrowse AINo-code robots that scrape and monitor any website

Side by side

FactApifyBrowse AI
CategoryWeb Scraping & Data ExtractionWeb Scraping & Data Extraction
Pricing modelFreemiumFreemium
Starts at$29 month$19 month
Public APIYesYes
PlatformsWeb, APIWeb, API, Chrome Ext
CompanyApify Technologies s.r.o.Browse AI Inc.
Launched20152020
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

Browse AI

The quickest way to get a non-engineer extracting data from a site, but what you are actually buying is a credit meter — monitoring jobs that run often get expensive long before the feature list runs out.

Pros

  • Recorder-based setup needs no CSS selectors or scripting
  • REST API plus webhooks make it usable inside a pipeline, not just as a CSV export
  • Around 250 prebuilt robots cover common sites like Amazon, eBay and LinkedIn

Cons

  • Month-to-month billing is roughly 2.5x the annual rate ($48 versus $19)
  • Credits do not carry over between billing cycles
  • Premium starts at $500/month, so there is a wide gap above the $69 Professional tier
  • Robots still break when a target site restructures its markup

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 Browse AI if you need

  • Marketers tracking competitor prices or listings without a developer
  • Recruiters and analysts pushing structured rows into Sheets or Airtable
  • Alerting when a specific page changes on a schedule

More comparisons

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