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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. Apify starts at $29, Olostep at $9. Both have a free tier. Both ship a public API.

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$29 month$9 month
Public APIYesYes
PlatformsWeb, APIAPI, Web
CompanyApify Technologies s.r.o.Olostep Technologies, Inc.
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

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

More comparisons

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