Apify vs Hyperbrowser

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

Hyperbrowser

Hyperbrowser is infrastructure and is priced like it: a published per-unit rate card down to $0.001 a page, a free tier of 5,000 credits, and $30 and $100 plans that are really prepaid usage. Sessions, scraping endpoints and agent runners share one credit balance, which makes cost modelling straightforward until proxies enter the picture - proxy data at $10 a gigabyte will dominate any scraping bill.

Pros

• +Full per-unit price list published on the pricing page, down to $0.001 a page
• +A free tier of 5,000 credits - $5 of usage - is enough to run a real test
• +Connects with Playwright, Puppeteer or Selenium, so existing scripts move over unchanged
• +Stealth mode, proxy routing, multi-region sessions, static IPs, profiles and recordings are built in
• +Agent runners (HyperAgent, Browser Use) bill through the same credit balance

Cons

• −Proxy data at $10 per GB can dwarf every other line on the invoice
• −The $30 and $100 plans are usage buckets, not flat fees - a heavy month spills past the included credits
• −No company name, country or team is published on the site
• −Everything is SDK and API driven; there is nothing for a non-developer to click

Is Apify cheaper than Hyperbrowser?

On published entry prices, Apify starts lower — $19/mo against $30/mo for Hyperbrowser. Entry price is the lowest paid plan as we last verified it; what each plan includes differs.

Does Apify or Hyperbrowser have a free tier?

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

Which has a public API, Apify or Hyperbrowser?

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