Skip to content
effecthub

Apify vs Webscrape AI

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, Webscrape AI at $27. Only Apify has a free tier. Both ship a public API.

ApifyMarketplace and cloud platform of ready-made scrapers ('Actors') plus infrastructure to run your ownWebscrape AINo-code scraper that extracts fields from URLs you describe

Side by side

FactApifyWebscrape AI
CategoryWeb Scraping & Data ExtractionWeb Scraping & Data Extraction
Pricing modelFreemiumPaid
Starts at$29 month$27 month
Public APIYesYes
PlatformsWeb, APIWeb, API
CompanyApify Technologies s.r.o.—
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

Webscrape AI

A thin indie scraper priced per URL: fine for a few hundred pages a month, badly priced the moment you need volume. Anyone comfortable holding an API key should price Firecrawl or Apify first.

Pros

  • Describe-the-fields interface removes CSS and XPath work entirely
  • REST endpoint accepts a schema, page count and JS instructions, so it can sit inside a script
  • Proxy support and JavaScript wait arrive at the mid tier, not enterprise
  • CSV, JSON and text output covers both spreadsheet and code consumers

Cons

  • No free plan and no pay-as-you-go top-up: the entry point is $27/month
  • No company name, address or contact page published anywhere on the site
  • Only three fixed tiers with hard caps, the largest at 1,000 URLs/month
  • No scheduling, no login-gated scraping, no built-in deduplication or diffing

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 Webscrape AI if you need

  • One-off competitor, listing or price pulls a non-developer needs in a spreadsheet
  • Small research jobs where writing a custom scraper is not worth the hour
  • Prototyping an extraction schema before committing to a real pipeline

More comparisons

Browse all Web Scraping & Data Extraction →