Apify Review 2026: Is It Worth It? 7 Apify Alternatives

Last updated: October 27, 2026. Benchmark figures come from the September 16, 2026 run of the Web Data Frontier Benchmark. Apify's prices were re-checked on October 27, 2026; the other vendors' prices were last checked against their published pages on August 29, 2026.

What is the best Apify alternative?

Apify has earned its position. It has the biggest commercial mindshare in scraping communities, a marketplace with more than 100,000 prebuilt Actors covering everything from Google Maps to TikTok, and a full platform underneath: scheduling, storage, proxies, webhooks, a queue system. If you need a maintained scraper for a specific site and someone has already built the Actor, you can be pulling data in ten minutes without writing code.

The reasons people go looking for alternatives are just as concrete. Apify is a platform, and platforms have to be learned. You think in Actors, runs, datasets, key-value stores, and request queues before you get your first page back. Billing follows the same shape: paid plans start at $19 per month for the Starter tier, and usage is metered in compute units (1 GB of RAM for one hour, at $0.20 per CU on Starter), plus separate line items for proxies ($8 per GB residential on Starter), storage, and data transfer. Store Actors add their own per-event or per-usage fees on top. Apify's own pricing FAQ states that unused usage credits "are not rolled over to the next billing cycle, and they expire at the end of the billing cycle." None of this is hidden, but predicting what a job will cost means understanding how much RAM an Actor uses, for how long, through which proxy type.

If your actual requirement is "fetch this URL reliably and give me the content," you are paying for, and learning, a lot of machinery you don't need. That is the case this post covers. Here are seven alternatives, starting with ours.

Is Apify worth it in 2026?

Our Apify review for 2026 comes down to one line: Apify is worth it when a maintained Actor already does your job, and a per-request web scraping API is the better buy when all you need is the page behind a URL.

Who Apify is worth it for. Teams that need data from a site with a maintained Actor in Apify Store, which listed 100,454 Actors on October 27, 2026. Teams that want scheduling, storage and run history without building them. Teams whose scrapers are run by people who do not write code.

Who should look elsewhere. Teams that fetch pages from many different sites and parse them in their own code. That job pays for Actors, memory settings and datasets it never uses, and the benchmark numbers below show where Apify's general fetch path drops off.

Apify pricing in 2026

Prices from apify.com/pricing, checked October 27, 2026, billed monthly:

Annual billing takes 10% off. No Apify plan sits near $100 a month: Starter is the closest, and Scale is the next step up. Some review sites still list Starter at $29, G2's pricing panel among them on October 27. Apify's own page says $19.

The free plan gives $5 of usage a month with no card, which covers about 3,333 Web Fetch calls. When the $5 runs out, Apify pauses the account until the next cycle and does not bill it. The free plan's proxy works only inside the Apify platform. On paid plans, unused prepaid usage expires at the end of each billing cycle, and usage above it goes on the next invoice.

What a compute unit costs

A compute unit is 1 GB of memory for one hour, metered by the second. Apify's docs give the example of a 4 GB Actor that runs for 15 minutes: that is 1 compute unit. Run it every hour for a month and it uses 720 compute units, which is $144 on Starter or $115.20 on Scale, before proxies, storage and any Actor fee. Starter's $19 covers 95 compute units.

The same docs say a plain-HTML crawler can run up to 20 times faster than one that launches a browser, so two jobs of the same size can bill very differently. Store Actors priced per event let you set a maximum charge per run. For pay-per-usage Actors, Apify's docs say the cost is "quite difficult to estimate" before a test run. Our build vs buy cost check lists what the most-used Store Actor charges per 1,000 results on 70 benchmark sites.

What the benchmark shows

The Web Data Frontier Benchmark added Apify in its September 16, 2026 run. The harness calls Apify's Web Fetch Actor, which sends every request through Apify Proxy's Unblocker (adapter source). Apify passed 77.4% of requests, 387 of 500, fifth of 16.

That average hides a split. We ranked the 100 sites by how often all 16 APIs together returned them and cut the list in half. On the 50 easier sites, Apify passed 92.8% of requests (232 of 250), fourth of 16. On the 50 hardest sites, it passed 62.0% (155 of 250), a drop of 30.8 points. String passed 94.8% (237 of 250) on the same hard half, the highest of the 16.

Apify did best on real estate, where it returned all 35 attempts across 7 sites, and on job sites at 96%. Its lowest groups were search engines and gaming at 50% and ticketing at 55%. Web Fetch bills only successful fetches, so a miss costs time and a retry, and Apify does not charge for it.

What Apify users say

Apify holds 4.7 out of 5 from 687 reviews on G2 and 4.8 from 822 on Trustpilot, both read on October 27, 2026. G2's review summary names pricing and the learning curve as the most common complaints. Some recent Trustpilot reviews disclose that Apify offered the reviewer a reward.

A reviewer who uses Apify for app-store research summed up the trade on Trustpilot on October 26, 2026: "pay-as-you-go adds up. Still, for the time it saves, it's worth it."

Cost is also what stalls new buyers. A founder planning a SaaS product wrote on r/SaaS that it was "hard to understand exactly how much it would cost with apify" before building a proof of concept.

Apify pros and cons

Verdict. Buy Apify when an Actor already returns the fields you need, or when you want one managed platform for many scheduled jobs. For fetching protected pages at volume, String passed 97.0% of requests in the same run, its standard fetch costs $0.16 per 1,000 on the $99 Growth plan, blocked requests are free, and paid credit rolls over. The first 20,000 standard fetches are free with no card.

1. String (Web Access API)

String is a single API call: send a URL, get the page back as clean Markdown, JSON, or the raw body. Proxy rotation, browser fingerprinting, CAPTCHA solving, and JavaScript rendering are handled behind the endpoint. There are no Actors to pick, no memory settings to tune, and no platform concepts between you and the response.

Two things distinguish it. First, pricing: you only pay when String returns content. A block, a timeout, or an empty shell costs nothing. Requests are billed per thousand ($0.25 per 1,000 standard requests on the $19-per-month Starter plan, $0.16 on the $99-per-month Growth plan; pages that need a premium proxy or a browser bill higher, up to $3.25 per 1,000 on Growth), credits roll over, and the first 20,000 standard fetches are free.

Second, measured reliability. String publishes the Web Data Frontier Benchmark, an open-source harness that ran 8,000 live requests across 16 providers against 100 bot-protected sites (Amazon, Zillow, Ticketmaster, and 97 others) in September 2026. String passed 97.0% of requests (485 of 500), the highest of the providers tested, including 100% against Cloudflare, PerimeterX, AWS WAF and Fastly targets and 98.0% against Akamai. Its latency score, 7.06 seconds, was the fastest of the 16. The target list, pass criteria, and per-provider adapters are all in the repo, so you can rerun it with your own keys rather than take the number on faith. The same run includes String's failures: Temu and Idealista went 0 for 5, and five more targets dropped a single attempt each.

For agent workflows there is an MCP server, listed on the official registry and hosted at mcp.usestring.ai, which gives Claude or any MCP client fetch, search, and sitemap tools directly. The API reference covers the endpoints.

What String does not have: a marketplace of prebuilt site-specific scrapers, or built-in orchestration. You bring your own scheduler and parsing logic. If you want structured feeds without writing that code, String's Composer product is aimed there, but the Web Access API itself is deliberately just fetching.

2. Firecrawl

Firecrawl is the best-known scraping API in the AI tooling world. It converts pages to LLM-ready Markdown, adds crawl and search endpoints, and has a hosted MCP server. If your pipeline ends in a RAG index or an agent's context window, Firecrawl's developer experience is genuinely good, and its docs and SDKs are polished.

Pricing is credit-based: a free tier of 1,000 credits per month, then Hobby at $19 per month ($16 billed annually) for 5,000 credits and Standard at $99 ($83 annually) for 100,000, up to Scale at $749 ($599 annually) for 1,000,000. A plain scrape costs 1 credit per page, and as of August 29, 2026, Firecrawl's docs say an enhanced-proxy request costs the same 1 credit, so a protected page and an easy page cost the same. Structured JSON output adds 4 credits per page. Firecrawl charges the credit when its infrastructure processes a request, including when the target returns a 403 or 404, and plan credits do not roll over except on annual Scale (one month) and annual Enterprise (two months).

On reliability against protected sites, the benchmark measured Firecrawl at 80.2% (401 of 500), fourth of sixteen. It cleared jobs, ticketing and gaming targets at 100% but passed only 25% on social platforms, returning nothing at all on LinkedIn, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, Facebook, and Pinterest. It posted the second-best latency score in the run, 9.11 seconds, behind String's 7.06. For docs sites, blogs, and moderately protected pages feeding an LLM, it is a strong choice; for the hardest anti-bot targets it will miss more often.

3. Crawl4AI

Crawl4AI is the open-source option: an async Python crawler built on Playwright that outputs clean Markdown and structured JSON, with CSS, XPath, and LLM-based extraction strategies. It is Apache 2.0 licensed, has more than 78,000 GitHub stars, and costs nothing but your own infrastructure.

The trade is that you operate everything. You run the browsers, source and rotate your own proxies, and handle anti-bot escalation yourself; stealth modes and proxy hooks exist, but there is no vendor absorbing the arms race on your behalf. For internal tools, research crawls, and sites without serious protection, it is hard to argue with free and self-hosted. Once targets start deploying DataDome or Akamai, expect to pair it with a paid unblocker anyway.

4. Bright Data (Web Unlocker)

Bright Data is the infrastructure heavyweight: one of the largest proxy networks in the industry, plus the Web Unlocker API, which is the closest architectural comparison to String. You send a URL, Bright Data handles unblocking, and you pay only for successful responses: $1.50 per 1,000 requests pay-as-you-go, $499 per month for 383,000 requests on the Scale plan with $1.30 per 1,000 beyond that, and a free tier of 5,000 requests per month. Some sites are classed as premium domains and billed at a higher rate Bright Data does not publish.

In the benchmark, Bright Data passed 74.6% of requests (373 of 500), sixth overall, though live-event ticketing remains a weak spot at 25% and DataDome fell to 47.4%. Its latency score improved sharply, from the slowest in the August run at 26.14 seconds to 15.62 seconds and fourth fastest in September. The broader platform is enterprise-shaped: zones to configure, many products with separate pricing, KYC onboarding for the residential and mobile proxy networks (Web Unlocker itself does not require it), and an account-manager sales motion. If you need residential proxies at serious scale or datasets as a service alongside unblocking, Bright Data is built for that. If you need one endpoint, it is more surface area than the job requires.

5. ScraperAPI

ScraperAPI has been a default "just give me an API" pick for years: simple GET-style requests with proxy rotation and rendering handled for you. A free plan carries 1,000 API credits; Hobby is $49 per month for 100,000 credits and Startup is $149 per month for 1,000,000.

The credit multipliers are the fine print that matters. A standard page costs 1 credit, but Amazon costs 5, Google 25, and LinkedIn 30, and sites behind Cloudflare, DataDome, or PerimeterX add 10 credits per request when ScraperAPI bypasses them, so the pages people most want are 5x to 30x the advertised rate. Our ScraperAPI alternatives page measures that multiplier gap across the benchmark sites. Credits reset each cycle without rollover, and pay-as-you-go overage only unlocks on the $475-per-month plan and above. Benchmark result: 84.0% (420 of 500), third of sixteen, up 19.8 points on August after the harness corrected its adapter. Kasada, where it failed every attempt in August, is now 66.7%.

6. Zyte API

Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub) maintains Scrapy and sells a serious extraction stack: the Zyte API for unblocking, automatic extraction of typed fields (products, articles), and Scrapy Cloud for hosting spiders. Of everything on this list it is closest to Apify in spirit, a platform for teams who write and operate crawlers, and its Scrapy integration is the best there is.

Pricing is per successful request but varies by a five-tier site difficulty rating: $0.13 to $1.27 per 1,000 HTTP requests pay-as-you-go, and $1.01 to $16.08 per 1,000 with browser rendering, with lower rates at $100, $200, and $500 monthly commitments. Cheap on easy sites, and hard to predict until Zyte scores your target list. Benchmark result: 68.0% (340 of 500), eleventh of sixteen.

7. ZenRows

ZenRows sells a Universal Scraper API plus browser sessions and residential proxies, all drawn from one credit balance and billed only on successful requests. Plans run from a free tier of 5,000 credits per month through Build at $16 per month for 45,000 credits and Launch at $57 for 250,000, up to Scale at $456 for 5,000,000. A standard request is 1 credit; JavaScript rendering costs 5, premium proxies 10, and both together 25, so a protected page uses 25 times the allowance of an easy one. That distinction is worth reading closely, since protected sites drain the credit balance fast.

It is a reasonable budget option for lightly defended targets. Against the benchmark's deliberately hard set, ZenRows passed 41.2% of requests (206 of 500) and went 0% on ticketing and 25% on social-platform sites. If your target list overlaps with serious anti-bot vendors, test before committing.

When Apify is still the right answer

Three cases, and they are not small ones.

The first is coverage. If someone has already published and maintained an Actor for the exact site you need, you are pulling structured data in minutes without writing or maintaining a parser. No API-first vendor on this list offers that. Site-specific parsers rot every time a page changes, and on Apify that maintenance is someone else's job.

The second is orchestration. Scheduling, storage, request queues, webhooks, and run history are built in. If you are standardising many scraping jobs on one system, or the people running them do not write code, that scaffolding is the product, not overhead.

The third is that Apify also sells the thing this post is about. Its platform includes an Unblocker priced at $1.50 per 1,000 requests on Free and Starter, $1.25 on Scale and $1 on Business, alongside a SERP proxy at $2.50 per 1,000. So "leave Apify to get a per-request unblocker" is not quite the right framing. The honest framing is that String's standard request is $0.16 per 1,000 on Growth against Apify's $1.50, that String's rate rises to $3.25 per 1,000 when a page needs a browser on a premium proxy, and that Apify entered the benchmark for the first time in the September 16, 2026 run and scored 77.4%, fifth of sixteen. The harness called Apify's Web Fetch Actor, which sends every request through that Unblocker, as its public adapter shows. If you already run on Apify, test Web Fetch against your own target list before you move anything.

Comparison table

Success rates are from the open-source Web Data Frontier Benchmark, 100 bot-protected targets, 5 attempts each, September 16, 2026 run; see /benchmark. Earlier runs used 99 and 90 targets, so figures across runs are not a like-for-like comparison. Crawl4AI is self-hosted and was not a benchmark subject. Apify's prices were checked on October 27, 2026; the other prices are entry-level published rates as of August 29, 2026.

Which should you pick

If you need reliable fetches of arbitrary URLs, especially bot-protected ones, and want to be billed only when you get content back, use String. That is the exact workload the benchmark measures, and 97.0% against a target set built to be hard is the strongest number anyone has published in a reproducible harness.

If you are feeding an LLM from docs, blogs, and moderately protected pages, and want crawl and search endpoints in one SDK, Firecrawl is the most pleasant developer experience in that lane. Budget for the credits it charges on blocked pages, and check the 17 sites where it returned nothing against your list.

If you have engineering time and no serious anti-bot targets, self-host Crawl4AI or another free web scraping tool and pay nothing. Pair it with an unblocker API for the sites that fight back.

If you are an enterprise that needs proxies, unblocking, and datasets from one vendor with contracts and account management, Bright Data is built for you.

If your team already writes Scrapy spiders, Zyte is the natural home. ScraperAPI and ZenRows are workable budget picks for lightly protected targets; check the multiplier and allowance fine print against your actual site list first.

And pick Apify when its platform is the point: someone has already published an Actor for exactly the site you need, or you want scheduling, storage, and orchestration for a fleet of scrapers without building that scaffolding yourself. Thousands of maintained site-specific scrapers one click away is something none of the API-first vendors offer, and for non-engineers or teams standardizing many scraping jobs on one system, it is a real advantage. The alternatives above win when you would rather make one HTTP call than adopt a platform.

Switching from Apify to String

What carries over. Only the jobs that fetch pages. If you call Apify's Unblocker or a generic scraping Actor to get page content, that call becomes one POST to String's /v1/fetch, and your URL list and parsing code stay. Actor output lands in a dataset; String returns the page in the response, so the step that read a dataset reads the response body instead.

What you rebuild. Store Actors are the hard part. A maintained Actor is a parser someone else keeps working. On String you write and keep that parser, or describe the fields in jsonSchema and let extraction fill them. Schedules, tasks, request queues, key-value stores, webhooks, and run monitoring also stay behind, because String's fetch API does not schedule or store runs. Many teams keep Apify for the sites with a good Actor and move generic fetching to String. String publishes its own Actors in the Apify Store too, so the choice is not either-or.

Integrations to reconnect. Apify publishes JavaScript and Python clients, a CLI, an MCP server, and integrations for Zapier, Make, n8n, LangChain, LlamaIndex, and dozens of data and AI tools. String ships no language SDK, so an SDK call becomes one HTTP POST. Its hosted MCP server runs at mcp.usestring.ai, n8n calls String through the HTTP Request node, and Zapier, LangChain, and the Vercel AI SDK have setup guides in String's docs.

Test on your own failing URLs first. Take the start URLs of the Actor runs that fail or burn the most compute units and run them through String. Compare pages returned and cost per usable page, counting compute units, proxy traffic, and Actor fees on the Apify side, then move only the targets that improve. Leave custom headers off for the test: String does not bill a blocked request unless that request sent custom headers. The first 20,000 String standard fetches are free with no card. The ranking of 16 web scraping APIs puts every tested API side by side.

FAQ

Is Apify worth it?

Yes, when a maintained Actor already does your job or you need scheduling and storage for many runs. For plain page fetching on protected sites, a per-request API is the better fit. In the September 2026 Web Data Frontier Benchmark, Apify's Web Fetch passed 77.4% of requests on 100 protected sites and 62.0% on the 50 hardest. String passed 97.0% overall and 94.8% on the hardest 50.

How much does Apify cost in 2026?

Free is $0 with $5 of usage a month. Starter is $19 a month, Scale $199 and Business $999, and each plan's fee is prepaid usage, with overage billed on the next invoice. Compute units cost $0.20 on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale and $0.13 on Business. Web Fetch and the Unblocker cost $1.50 per 1,000 on Starter. Prices checked October 27, 2026.

Does Apify have a free plan?

Yes. It includes $5 of platform usage every month with no credit card, about 3,333 Web Fetch calls. When the $5 is spent, the account pauses until the next month, and unused usage does not roll over. String's free tier is a one-time $5 credit that covers 20,000 standard fetches and never expires.

What is the best Apify alternative for simple URL fetching?

String. It replaces the platform with a single API call, returns Markdown or JSON, and charges only for successful responses. In the open-source Web Data Frontier Benchmark (September 2026, 100 bot-protected sites, 16 providers), it passed 97.0% of requests, the highest score in the test.

Is there a free alternative to Apify?

Crawl4AI is fully open source (Apache 2.0) and free to self-host, though you supply your own proxies and anti-bot handling. Among hosted APIs, String includes 20,000 free standard fetches, Firecrawl 1,000 free credits per month, Bright Data's Web Unlocker 5,000 free requests per month, and ZenRows 5,000 free credits per month.

Why is Apify pricing hard to predict?

Apify bills by compute units (1 GB of RAM for one hour, $0.20 on Free and Starter and down to $0.13 on Business), plus proxies, storage, and data transfer, and marketplace Actors add their own per-event or per-usage fees. Cost depends on each Actor's memory use and runtime, so two jobs of the same size can bill very differently. Per-request APIs like String or Bright Data's Web Unlocker price the unit you actually care about: a page returned.

Do Apify alternatives handle anti-bot protection?

The hosted APIs on this list all attempt it, with very different results. Against the same 100 protected sites, measured success ranged from 97.0% (String) to 41.2% (ZenRows). Self-hosted tools like Crawl4AI leave anti-bot work to you.

Which alternatives work with Claude and other AI agents over MCP?

String ships an MCP server (npm i @usestring/mcp, or hosted) with fetch, search, and sitemap tools. Firecrawl, Bright Data, ScraperAPI, ZenRows, Zyte, and Apify itself also publish MCP servers. Zyte's is a remote MCP server at mcp.zyte.com.