Skip to content
effecthub

Apify vs BrowserAct

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 publishes a starting price ($29); BrowserAct does not. Both have a free tier. Both ship a public API.

ApifyMarketplace and cloud platform of ready-made scrapers ('Actors') plus infrastructure to run your ownBrowserActDescribe a scrape in plain language and get a reusable cloud bot with proxies included

Side by side

FactApifyBrowserAct
CategoryWeb Scraping & Data ExtractionWeb Scraping & Data Extraction
Pricing modelFreemiumFreemium
Starts at$29 month—
Public APIYesYes
PlatformsWeb, APIWeb, API
CompanyApify Technologies s.r.o.BrowserAct
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

BrowserAct

Bundles the annoying parts of scraping — proxies, fingerprints, CAPTCHAs, retries — behind a prompt and a credit meter, with API and automation-platform delivery built in. The catch is pricing you cannot compare before signing up, plus a meter that charges per step, per gigabyte and per browser at once.

Pros

  • Bot is built by exploring and testing the live site, then reused
  • Proxies, fingerprinting and CAPTCHA handling are included, not bolted on
  • Documented API, MCP support and Make, n8n and Zapier delivery
  • Self-healing runs and a visual workflow builder as a fallback

Cons

  • Subscription prices are hidden behind registration
  • Multi-axis credit meter makes cost estimation awkward
  • Credit packs expire at the next monthly reset rather than rolling over

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 BrowserAct if you need

  • Recurring competitor, price or listing extraction without maintaining browsers
  • Non-developers who want a scraper from a written brief
  • Piping structured rows into n8n, Make or Zapier flows

More comparisons

Browse all Web Scraping & Data Extraction →