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Apify vs Olostep

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
Olostep — $9/mo vs $19/mo for Apify
Free plan
Both have one
Public API
Both have one
Higher Trust score
Apify — 94 vs 86 for Olostep
Best fit
Apify: Teams that would rather rent a maintained scraper than babysit their own · Olostep: Developers feeding web content into RAG or agent pipelines

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 ownOlostepScrape, crawl, map and search the web through one API returning markdown, JSON, PDF or screenshots

Side by side

FactApifyOlostep
CategoryWeb Scraping & Data ExtractionWeb Scraping & Data Extraction
Pricing modelFreemiumFreemium
Starts at$19/mo$9/mo
Public APIYesYes
Trust score94 / 10086 / 100
PlatformsWeb, APIAPI, Web
CompanyApify Technologies s.r.o.Olostep Technologies, Inc.
Launched2015—
Last verifiedOct 16, 2026Oct 22, 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

Olostep

A tidy, honestly priced alternative to Firecrawl: seven endpoints behind one key, markdown output that goes straight into a prompt, and a batch mode that actually handles ten thousand URLs at once. Publishing cost per thousand requests is unusually transparent for this category. The usual scraping caveats apply — a crawl of an unknown site has an unpredictable bill, and blocking and legality remain your problem.

Pros

  • Seven endpoints — scrape, crawl, map, batch, search, answer, monitor — behind one key
  • Batch mode handles up to 10,000 URLs concurrently
  • Publishes cost per thousand requests, so tiers are comparable
  • Ships Python and Node SDKs, a CLI and an MCP server
  • 500 free requests is enough to evaluate properly

Cons

  • Priced per request, so crawling an unfamiliar site has an unpredictable cost
  • The $9 Starter allowance of 5,000 requests disappears in one real crawl
  • Blocking, rate limits and scraping legality are left to the customer
  • No named team or public company detail beyond the entity name

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 Olostep if you need

  • Developers feeding web content into RAG or agent pipelines
  • Teams doing large batch extraction where concurrency matters
  • Anyone who wants scraping available as an MCP server to an agent

Apify vs Olostep: the questions people ask

Is Apify cheaper than Olostep?

On published entry prices, Olostep starts lower — $9/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 Olostep have a free tier?

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

Which has a public API, Apify or Olostep?

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

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