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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.

The short answer

Status
Webscrape AI failed our last uptime check (Oct 16, 2026); Apify was up on Oct 16, 2026
Cheaper paid plan
Apify — $19/mo vs $27/mo for Webscrape AI
Free plan
Only Apify (Webscrape AI has paid plans only)
Public API
Both have one
Higher Trust score
Apify — 94 vs 60 for Webscrape AI

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 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$19/mo$27/mo
Public APIYesYes
Trust score94 / 10060 / 100
PlatformsWeb, APIWeb, API
CompanyApify Technologies s.r.o.—
Launched2015—
Last verifiedOct 16, 2026Oct 16, 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

Apify vs Webscrape AI: the questions people ask

Is Apify cheaper than Webscrape AI?

On published entry prices, Apify starts lower — $19/mo against $27/mo for Webscrape AI. Entry price is the lowest paid plan as we last verified it; what each plan includes differs.

Does Apify or Webscrape AI have a free tier?

Apify has a free tier; Webscrape AI has paid plans only.

Which has a public API, Apify or Webscrape AI?

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

More comparisons

All Webscrape AI alternatives →Browse all Web Scraping & Data Extraction →