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Apify vs Browserbase

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, Browserbase at $20. Both have a free tier. Both ship a public API.

ApifyMarketplace and cloud platform of ready-made scrapers ('Actors') plus infrastructure to run your ownBrowserbaseHosted headless-browser infrastructure so AI agents can browse, log in, and fill forms on real websites at scale.

Side by side

FactApifyBrowserbase
CategoryWeb Scraping & Data ExtractionBrowser Automation Agents
Pricing modelFreemiumFreemium
Starts at$29 month$20 month
Public APIYesYes
PlatformsWeb, APIWeb, API
CompanyApify Technologies s.r.o.Browserbase Inc.
Launched20152024
Last verifiedSep 6, 2026Sep 1, 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

Browserbase

Browserbase removes the operational work of running headless Chrome at scale - proxies, fingerprinting, CAPTCHA, session storage - which is exactly the layer most agent-building teams don't want to own themselves. It's infrastructure, not a finished agent, so there's still integration work to do on top of it.

Pros

  • Automatic CAPTCHA solving and proxy/fingerprint handling out of the box
  • Free tier available to test before paying
  • Session replay and observability for debugging agent runs
  • Open-source Stagehand framework for the automation layer

Cons

  • Free tier is capped at just 1 browser hour, not enough for real workloads
  • Requires developer effort to wire into an actual agent - it's infrastructure, not an end-user tool
  • Overage billing on browser-hours can add up for high-volume use

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 Browserbase if you need

  • Developers building browser-using AI agents
  • Teams scraping sites that block plain HTTP requests
  • Products that need agents to log in and act on behalf of users

More comparisons

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