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Apify vs SocialKit

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. Both start at $29. Both have a free tier. Both ship a public API.

ApifyMarketplace and cloud platform of ready-made scrapers ('Actors') plus infrastructure to run your ownSocialKitOne REST API for transcripts, comments, profiles and stats across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, X and LinkedIn

Side by side

FactApifySocialKit
CategoryWeb Scraping & Data ExtractionWeb Scraping & Data Extraction
Pricing modelFreemiumFreemium
Starts at$29 month$29 month
Public APIYesYes
PlatformsWeb, APIWeb, API
CompanyApify Technologies s.r.o.SocialKit
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

SocialKit

The pitch is accurate: one key, one response shape, and none of the per-platform approval processes that make official APIs painful. Credit pricing is transparent and drops with volume, but you are building on scraped endpoints, which means platform changes and terms-of-service exposure are your risk, not theirs.

Pros

  • 40+ endpoints across seven surfaces behind a single access key
  • Derived endpoints like YouTube summarize return summary, key points and topics directly
  • Per-1,000-credit rate is published for every tier, falling from $2.42 to $1.40
  • Free tier and documented sample request and response before you sign up

Cons

  • Free tier is only 20 credits — enough to test, not to evaluate
  • Scraped access means endpoints can break when a platform changes
  • Rate limits are tied to plan tier, so throughput needs a bigger plan even if credits are spare

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 SocialKit if you need

  • Agent and app builders who need social data as JSON without running scrapers
  • Teams blocked by YouTube Data API quotas or TikTok's approval-gated Research API
  • Prototypes that need several platforms behind one authentication key

More comparisons

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