Apify alternative
Looking for a simpler alternative to Apify?
These are not the same kind of product, and a comparison that pretends otherwise is not worth reading. Apify is a cloud platform for running Actors, which are containerised programs. It also has a marketplace, schedulers, datasets and a developer revenue share. ScrAPI is one scraping endpoint.
So this page compares them on one specific job: you have a URL and you want its content. If that is all you need, Apify asks you to learn a platform first. If you need more than that, ScrAPI will run out of room long before Apify does.
Apify pricing and features last checked: 10 September 2026. Compare ScrAPI with other providers.
Quick comparison
Apify figures are from its pricing page and platform documentation, listed at the bottom of this page. Note that Apify publishes different compute-unit rates on some individual Actor pages; the rates used here are from the main pricing page.
What it actually costs
Apify's cost per page cannot be stated as a single number, and inventing one would be dishonest. It depends on how long the run takes and how much memory it was allocated. Cost equals memory in gigabytes, multiplied by runtime in hours, multiplied by the compute-unit rate. Apify's own guidance is to do a test run and measure.
So rather than a false equivalence, the table below shows how the figure moves as runtime and memory change. Proxy, storage and data transfer are billed on top of everything shown.
Apify compute cost per 1,000 pages, by run profile
Formula: memory (GB) × runtime (hours) × $ per compute unit. Shown at the $0.20 rate that applies on the Free and Starter plans.
Assumptions
- 1 compute unit = 1 GB of memory for 1 hour, billed at second granularity.
- $0.20 per CU on Free and Starter; $0.16 on Scale; $0.13 on Business.
- Compute only. Proxy, data transfer and storage are separate line items, listed below.
- Runtimes are illustrative. Your actual figure depends on the Actor and the target site.
Lightweight HTTP Actor
1 GB, ~5 seconds per page
1 × (5 ÷ 3600) × $0.20 × 1,000
≈ $0.28
Lightweight HTTP Actor, slower target
1 GB, ~15 seconds per page
1 × (15 ÷ 3600) × $0.20 × 1,000
≈ $0.83
Browser Actor
4 GB, ~15 seconds per page
4 × (15 ÷ 3600) × $0.20 × 1,000
≈ $3.33
Browser Actor, protected target
4 GB, ~30 seconds per page
4 × (30 ÷ 3600) × $0.20 × 1,000
≈ $6.67
The spread between the top and bottom rows is roughly 24 times, for the same 1,000 pages. Compute-time billing works that way by design. An efficient Actor costs less and a slow target costs more, and you cannot know which you have until you run it.
Apify's metered add-ons, on top of compute
These are the line items that most often surprise people budgeting an Apify job.
Assumptions
- Rates fall on higher plans; the first figure is the entry rate.
- Page-weight assumptions are illustrative, not measured.
Residential proxy
$8 per GB
1,000 pages at ~500 KB each = 0.5 GB
≈ $4.00
Residential proxy, heavier pages
$8 per GB
1,000 pages at ~1 MB each = 1 GB
≈ $8.00
Apify Unblocker
$1.50 per 1,000 requests
1,000 requests
$1.50
SERP proxy
$2.50 per 1,000
1,000 searches
$2.50
The same workloads on ScrAPI
For reference, at fixed credit costs that do not vary with how long the page took.
Assumptions
- ScrAPI charges by feature, not by duration. A slow page and a fast page cost the same.
- No bandwidth metering; ScrAPI's documentation states unlimited bandwidth.
1,000 plain HTTP pages
Pay as you go, 1 credit each
1,000 × 1 × $0.00019
$0.19
1,000 browser-rendered pages
Pay as you go, 5 credits each
1,000 × 5 × $0.00019
$0.95
1,000 browser + residential pages
Pay as you go, 15 credits each
1,000 × 15 × $0.00019
$2.85
1,000 browser + residential pages
Growth $79/month, 15 credits each
1,000 × 15 × $0.000079
$1.18
The point of this pairing is not that one number is smaller. It is that ScrAPI's figure is known before you run the job and Apify's is not. If you are scraping a handful of well-understood sites with an efficient Actor, Apify can be very cheap. If you are pointing a browser Actor at protected pages through residential proxies, you pay for compute time and for bandwidth.
Where Apify is stronger
The Actor marketplace
Several thousand ready-made scrapers, many maintained by people who care about one site in particular. If someone has already built and kept working the exact scraper you need, that is worth more than any per-request price. ScrAPI has nothing comparable and does not try to.
Running your own code
Actors are containers you write, deploy and version. Crawl logic, pagination, deduplication, custom parsing and post-processing all live next to the fetching. With ScrAPI, that code lives in your application and calls out to an API. Neither is wrong; they are different places to put the same logic.
Scheduling, storage and alerting
Cron scheduling down to ten-second intervals, webhooks on run events, datasets and key-value stores as first-class storage, and a four-type alerting system. ScrAPI has a per-request callbackUrl and a hosted ecommerce monitor, which covers one use case rather than being a general scheduler.
A renewing free tier
$5 of platform usage every month, no card. For an efficient Actor that is a meaningful number of pages, month after month. ScrAPI's starter credits are a one-off grant.
Where ScrAPI is simpler
The concept count is the real difference. To fetch one page on Apify you have to understand Actors, runs, datasets, key-value stores, compute units, memory allocation, the Apify Proxy, and a synchronous endpoint with a 300-second ceiling. To fetch one page on ScrAPI you send a URL to /v1/scrape and read the response.
Cost predictability follows from the same difference. ScrAPI charges 5 credits for a browser page whether it renders in two seconds or twenty. Apify charges for the twenty seconds. When a target gets slower, ScrAPI's bill does not move and Apify's does.
Data handling differs too, and which product is better depends on what you want. Apify's datasets and key-value stores are the point of the platform: your results live there so you can query, export and re-run against them. ScrAPI keeps no scrape history. Requests are metered as aggregate counters against your API key, so target URLs and page content are not written to its database and responses are not cached. Screenshots, PDFs and video are stored under hash-derived filenames and deleted within 24 hours. Two honest caveats: a saved ecommerce monitor necessarily stores the URL you configured, and diagnostic logs can capture request details when a request fails. If you want your results kept, Apify is built for that. If you would rather they were not, ScrAPI is.
Which one should you pick?
ScrAPI may be a better fit if
- Your requirement really is 'send a URL, get the content'. ScrAPI is one endpoint with no platform concepts to learn first.
- You need to forecast cost before running the job. ScrAPI charges per feature, not per second of runtime.
- You are scraping slow or heavily protected pages, where compute-time billing and metered residential bandwidth both work against you.
- You would rather the service did not retain your targets or their content.
- You want the fetching to sit behind an API call in your own application, rather than as code deployed to someone else's platform.
Apify may be a better fit if
- Someone has already built the scraper you need. The Apify Store has several thousand of them, which no per-request API matches.
- You need to run custom crawl logic in the cloud rather than call an API from your own service.
- You want scheduling, datasets, storage and alerting as platform features rather than things you assemble.
- You want your results retained and queryable after the run, which is what Apify's datasets are for.
Common questions
Is Apify a web scraping API?
Not in the sense that ScrAPI is. Apify is a cloud platform for running Actors, which are containerised programs, plus a marketplace of several thousand of them. You can reach a single page through it, using the run-sync-get-dataset-items endpoint against a lightweight Actor, but that is still an Actor run with a 300-second ceiling rather than a request to a scraping endpoint. If your requirement is 'POST a URL, get the content back', Apify is a larger tool than the job needs.
How does Apify's compute-unit pricing work?
One compute unit is one gigabyte of memory for one hour, billed at second granularity, at $0.20 per CU on the Free and Starter plans, $0.16 on Scale and $0.13 on Business. Proxy, storage and data transfer are metered separately on top: residential proxy starts at $8 per gigabyte and the Unblocker at $1.50 per 1,000 requests. Your cost therefore depends on how long a run takes and how much memory it was given, not on how many pages you fetched.
Which one is cheaper?
It depends entirely on runtime, and that is the honest answer rather than a dodge. A lightweight HTTP Actor at 1 GB finishing a page in about five seconds works out near $0.28 per 1,000 pages in compute, which is cheaper than ScrAPI's $0.19 per 1,000 only if you compare against a heavier ScrAPI configuration. A browser Actor at 4 GB taking 30 seconds a page is closer to $6.67 per 1,000 in compute before proxy costs, and residential bandwidth at $8 per gigabyte can add several dollars per 1,000 on its own. ScrAPI charges a fixed 5 credits for a browser page regardless of how long it takes, which is $0.95 per 1,000 on pay-as-you-go.
Does Apify have a free tier?
Yes, and it renews. The Free plan gives $5 of platform usage every month with no credit card required. Unused credit does not roll over and expires at the end of the cycle. ScrAPI gives 1,000 starter credits once on a verified account, plus 5,000 for completing its ecommerce tutorial.
What does Apify do that ScrAPI does not?
Quite a lot, in a different direction. It runs arbitrary code you write in the cloud, hosts a marketplace of ready-made scrapers for specific sites, schedules recurring jobs down to ten-second intervals, offers a four-type alerting system, stores results in datasets and key-value stores, and lets Actor authors monetise their work. It also publishes SOC 2 Type II. ScrAPI is a single scraping endpoint and does not attempt any of that.
Sources checked
Every Apify figure on this page comes from one of the official pages below, read on 10 September 2026. Scraping providers change pricing often, so check the source before relying on a number for a purchasing decision.
- Apify pricing, https://apify.com/pricing
- Apify platform documentation, https://docs.apify.com/platform
- Apify usage and resources, https://docs.apify.com/platform/actors/running/usage-and-resources
- Apify proxy pricing, https://docs.apify.com/platform/proxy
Plan prices come from ScrAPI's published pricing table and per-feature credit costs from its credit documentation. A few figures on these pages were taken from the service implementation rather than the documentation, because the two currently disagree: the 20-credit Google SERP surcharge, the 1-credit charge for supplying a callback URL, the 200-concurrent-request-per-IP limit, and the 15-minute session window are all read from the code. Where they conflict, the implementation is what you will be billed for.
Start with 1,000 free credits
Sign in with an email address, verify it, and ScrAPI issues an API key with 1,000 starter credits. There is no card to enter and no trial clock. Run your own URLs in the Playground and compare the result against whatever you use today.
Apify and other product names and trademarks referenced on this page belong to their respective owners and are used only to identify those products. ScrAPI is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Apify. Pricing and features were checked against publicly available information on 10 September 2026 and may since have changed.