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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.

The short answer

Cheaper paid plan
BrowserAct — $16/mo vs $19/mo for Apify
Free plan
Both have one
Public API
Both have one
Higher Trust score
Apify — 94 vs 80 for BrowserAct
Best fit
Apify: Teams that would rather rent a maintained scraper than babysit their own · BrowserAct: Recurring competitor, price or listing extraction without maintaining browsers

From our own records as of each tool's last check. Anything we have not confirmed is left out rather than guessed. How we verify

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$19/mo$16/mo
Public APIYesYes
Trust score94 / 10080 / 100
PlatformsWeb, APIWeb, API
CompanyApify Technologies s.r.o.Hongkong Ziniao Technology Co., Limited
Launched2015—
Last verifiedOct 16, 2026Oct 16, 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, MCP and automation-platform delivery built in. Plans now start at $16 a month for 10,000 credits, but the meter charges per step, per gigabyte and per browser at once, so the real monthly cost depends on how heavy each run is.

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
  • Public plan prices with a free tier and a 7-day trial on every paid plan

Cons

  • Multi-axis credit meter makes cost estimation awkward
  • Credit packs expire at the next monthly reset rather than rolling over
  • Operating entity changed from a Singapore company to a Hong Kong one, per the terms

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

Apify vs BrowserAct: the questions people ask

Is Apify cheaper than BrowserAct?

On published entry prices, BrowserAct starts lower — $16/mo against $19/mo for Apify. Entry price is the lowest paid plan as we last verified it; what each plan includes differs.

Does Apify or BrowserAct have a free tier?

Both: Apify has a free tier, and BrowserAct has a free tier.

Which has a public API, Apify or BrowserAct?

Both ship a public API, so either can be built on; the fact table above shows the platforms each one runs on.

More comparisons

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