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Apify vs WebCrawlerAPI

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

Entry price
Apify from $19/mo, WebCrawlerAPI from $0.002/request — different billing units, so no direct winner
Free plan
Only Apify (WebCrawlerAPI has paid plans only)
Public API
Both have one
Best fit
Apify: Teams that would rather rent a maintained scraper than babysit their own · WebCrawlerAPI: Feeding documentation into a retrieval index
Trust score
About even — Apify 94, WebCrawlerAPI 90

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 ownWebCrawlerAPICrawl API that renders JavaScript and returns pages as clean markdown, HTML and metadata.

Side by side

FactApifyWebCrawlerAPI
CategoryWeb Scraping & Data ExtractionWeb Scraping & Data Extraction
Pricing modelFreemiumPaid
Starts at$19/mo$0.002/request
Public APIYesYes
Trust score94 / 10090 / 100
PlatformsWeb, APIAPI, Web
CompanyApify Technologies s.r.o.103 Labs
Launched20152023
Last verifiedOct 16, 2026Oct 15, 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

WebCrawlerAPI

Usage-based crawling with JavaScript rendering and markdown output covers the common retrieval-ingestion job without a subscription, and the per-page rate is low enough to test cheaply. Prices are now published on the home page and the operator is named, so the main question left is scale: it is a small Dutch team rather than an infrastructure vendor.

Pros

  • JavaScript rendering rather than raw HTML fetch
  • Markdown, HTML and metadata output formats
  • Pay-per-page with no monthly minimum
  • Starting credit for new accounts

Cons

  • LLM-cleaned markdown triples the per-page price
  • Small founder-led company, so support depth at scale is unproven
  • Discounted per-page rates require a $99 or $499 monthly commitment

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 WebCrawlerAPI if you need

  • Feeding documentation into a retrieval index
  • Agents that need clean page text on demand
  • Low-volume crawling without a monthly plan

Apify vs WebCrawlerAPI: the questions people ask

Is Apify cheaper than WebCrawlerAPI?

They charge in different units, so there is no like-for-like answer: Apify starts at $19/mo, WebCrawlerAPI at $0.002/request. Entry price is the lowest paid plan as we last verified it.

Does Apify or WebCrawlerAPI have a free tier?

Apify has a free tier; WebCrawlerAPI has paid plans only.

Which has a public API, Apify or WebCrawlerAPI?

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

More comparisons

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