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Apify vs ScrapeGraphAI

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
ScrapeGraphAI — $20/mo vs $29/mo for Apify
Free plan
Both have one
Public API
Both have one
Higher Trust score
Apify — 96 vs 84 for ScrapeGraphAI
Best fit
Apify: Teams that would rather rent a maintained scraper than babysit their own · ScrapeGraphAI: Developers feeding web data into agents or RAG 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

Side by side

FactApifyScrapeGraphAI
CategoryWeb Scraping & Data ExtractionWeb Scraping & Data Extraction
Pricing modelFreemiumFreemium
Starts at$29/mo$20/mo
Public APIYesYes
Trust score96 / 10084 / 100
PlatformsWeb, APIWeb, API
CompanyApify Technologies s.r.o.ScrapeGraphAI, Inc.
Launched20152024
Last verifiedSep 6, 2026Oct 2, 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

ScrapeGraphAI

A sensible choice when you need clean structured data from many differently built sites and would rather describe the fields than maintain parsers. The open-source library is a good way to try the idea locally before paying for the hosted API. If you scrape one stable site at high volume, a conventional parser or proxy-based scraper will be cheaper per page.

Pros

  • MIT-licensed library with a large GitHub following
  • Single API covers scrape, extract, search, crawl and monitor
  • Python and JavaScript SDKs plus LangChain and LlamaIndex integrations
  • Free tier and published top-up pricing make cost easy to predict

Cons

  • Credit-based billing means heavy crawls burn through plans quickly
  • LLM extraction is slower and less deterministic than fixed selectors
  • Free credits are one-time, not monthly

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 ScrapeGraphAI if you need

  • Developers feeding web data into agents or RAG pipelines
  • Teams tracking changes on many pages with scheduled monitors
  • Prototypers who want to self-host the open-source library first

Apify vs ScrapeGraphAI: the questions people ask

Is Apify cheaper than ScrapeGraphAI?

On published entry prices, ScrapeGraphAI starts lower — $20/mo against $29/mo for Apify. Entry price is the lowest paid plan as we last verified it; what each plan includes differs.

Does Apify or ScrapeGraphAI have a free tier?

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

Which has a public API, Apify or ScrapeGraphAI?

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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