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Apify vs SurfSense

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 publishes a starting price ($29); SurfSense does not. Both have a free tier. Both ship a public API.

ApifyMarketplace and cloud platform of ready-made scrapers ('Actors') plus infrastructure to run your ownSurfSenseOpen-source research workspace whose agents pull live data from Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Maps and search

Side by side

FactApifySurfSense
CategoryWeb Scraping & Data ExtractionDeep Research Agents
Pricing modelFreemiumFreemium
Starts at$29 month—
Public APIYesYes
PlatformsWeb, APIWeb, macOS, API
CompanyApify Technologies s.r.o.SurfSense
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

SurfSense

The self-host option is the real argument here: the same connectors, agents and MCP server, running on your infrastructure with your own model keys and no vendor in the middle of competitive research. The hosted version's pay-per-item billing is honest but hard to forecast, and there is no named company or country behind the project beyond a single contact address.

Pros

  • Full platform is open source and self-hostable with your own model keys
  • Ten connectors each callable as REST or through an MCP server
  • Scheduled and event-triggered agents write results into Notion, Slack, Linear and Jira
  • Hosted billing is per item with failed calls explicitly not charged

Cons

  • No subscription tier means no predictable monthly cost on the hosted plan
  • No company entity, address or country is published anywhere on the site
  • Connectors work by scraping platforms, so breakage and TOS exposure are yours

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 SurfSense if you need

  • Teams that want live-web research agents on their own infrastructure
  • Agent builders who want social and search connectors exposed over MCP
  • Competitive and market monitoring that should not sit on a vendor's servers

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