7 Best Apify Alternatives in 2026 (Verified Pricing)

Looking for an Apify alternative usually means one of three things: the compute-unit bill is hard to predict, the developer-first workflow is more setup than you need, or the job is lead generation and raw HTML is not the deliverable you want. This guide covers seven alternatives that fit those cases, and every vendor price below was read from the vendor's public pricing page on 16 October 2026.

For context on the platform you would be leaving: Apify's Free plan includes $5 of usage, Starter is $19/month, Scale $199/month and Business $999/month, and every paid plan bills "+ pay as you go" on top — $0.20 per compute unit on Starter, down to $0.16 on Scale and $0.13 on Business, per apify.com/pricing. The real decision is the billing model: compute units, API credits, rows extracted, or contacts delivered. The table below compares entry plans; the sections after it explain what each tool is genuinely good at.

Quick comparison

These are entry-level list prices from each vendor's public pricing page, checked on 16 October 2026 (links in the sources at the bottom). Scraping vendors change plans often, so re-check before you buy — and compare the effective cost per useful record, not the credit headline.

Why teams look for an Apify alternative

Three patterns come up again and again in community threads and comparison shopping:

• Bills that are hard to forecast. Compute units depend on memory, runtime and retries, so the same job can cost different amounts on different days — a slow target site quietly raises the bill.
• A developer-first workflow. Actors, SDKs and API tokens are the right tools once you are building pipelines; they are less helpful when you just want a contact list by Friday.
• General scraping where the goal is leads. If the outcome you need is contactable emails for outreach, raw HTML still needs enrichment, validation and formatting before it is useful.

What to check before switching

• The billing unit. Requests, credits, compute units and records behave differently when a target slows down or blocks you. Ask what a failed run costs.
• What counts as a result. "10,000 credits" can mean pages fetched or records delivered, depending on the vendor. Compare the cost per useful record.
• Concurrency and limits. Entry plans cap parallel jobs and pages; check the number against your queue before committing.
• Export and integration. CSV export and webhooks are table stakes; native CRM sync is not. Verify what ships in the plan you are buying.
• Compliance posture. How does the vendor source data, and could you explain it to your legal team? Here is how we approach it.

The alternatives, tool by tool

Firecrawl — best for AI and LLM pipelines

Firecrawl turns websites into clean markdown or structured JSON aimed at AI applications. After a free tier of 1,000 credits per month, the Hobby plan is $16/month billed yearly (5,000 credits/month) and Standard is $83/month billed yearly (100,000 credits/month), per firecrawl.dev/pricing.

• Strengths: output designed for LLM consumption; crawl and scrape behind one API.
• Limits: it is developer plumbing — it returns content, not contact lists.

ScraperAPI — best for high-volume request scraping

ScraperAPI takes a URL and handles proxies, retries and rendering. The Hobby plan is $49/month ($44.10/month billed annually) with 100,000 API credits; Startup is $149/month with 1,000,000 credits, per scraperapi.com/pricing.

• Strengths: predictable per-request billing and a small API surface that is easy to script.
• Limits: credits are consumed by page complexity, and there is no no-code UI for assembling lead lists.

ScrapingBee — best budget option for JavaScript-heavy pages

ScrapingBee sells rendering credits on a clean HTTP API. The entry plan is Hobby at $19/month (75,000 credits); Freelance is $49/month (250,000 credits) and Startup $99/month (1,000,000 credits), per scrapingbee.com/pricing. JavaScript rendering and geo-targeting are handled for you.

• Strengths: a low entry price, straightforward docs, good for JS-heavy pages.
• Limits: rendering multiplies credit usage per request, so the effective unit price depends on the target.

ZenRows — best free tier for testing

ZenRows bundles anti-bot handling into a scraping API. The free plan includes 5,000 credits per month; Build is $16/month (45,000 credits), Launch $58/month (250,000 credits) and Growth $166/month (1.2M credits), per zenrows.com/pricing.

• Strengths: a real free tier for evaluation; simple concurrency-based plans.
• Limits: credit consumption rises with anti-bot difficulty, and it returns page data, not leads.

Octoparse — best visual no-code scraper

Octoparse is point-and-click scraping in the browser: no code, templated workflows, scheduled runs. There is a free forever plan with 10 tasks and 50,000 rows of monthly export; Standard starts at $69/month and Professional at $249/month, with residential proxies sold as an add-on ($3 per GB), per octoparse.com/pricing.

• Strengths: genuinely no-code; good for structured, repeating site layouts.
• Limits: complex sites still need careful template work, and you are collecting rows — not contactable people.

Browse AI — best for monitoring pages on a schedule

Browse AI trains a robot on a page and extracts structured fields on a schedule, which suits monitoring (prices, listings, new items). Personal is $19/month billed annually (12,000 credits/year); Professional is $69/month billed annually (60,000 credits/year), per browse.ai/pricing.

• Strengths: fast setup, clean monitoring workflows, usable by non-developers.
• Limits: credits are consumed per extraction; site changes require re-training.

Bright Data — best for enterprise-scale collection

Bright Data is the enterprise option: proxy networks, unblocker APIs and datasets. There is a free tier; access APIs start from $1 per 1,000 requests, scraper APIs from $0.75 per 1,000 records, and datasets from $250 per 100,000 records, per brightdata.com/pricing. Expect a sales conversation for large volumes.

• Strengths: scale, coverage and the most compliance machinery of the group.
• Limits: overkill (and over-budget) for small teams; more moving parts to configure.

Two more names come up in every Apify-alternatives thread: PhantomBuster (browser automation for social platforms, billed by execution time) and Zyte (managed scraping services with enterprise quotes). Both are worth a look, but neither publishes an entry price that makes an apples-to-apples table fair, so check their sites directly.

Which one should you pick?

• Building an AI feature that needs page content → Firecrawl.
• Scraping at request volume with proxies → ScraperAPI or ScrapingBee.
• No-code extraction from repeating site layouts → Octoparse.
• Monitoring specific pages on a schedule → Browse AI.
• Enterprise-scale collection with contracts → Bright Data.
• Building outreach lists from social profiles → Octrieve (next section).

If what you want is leads, not raw HTML

Full disclosure: Octrieve is our product, so read this section with that in mind. It exists because the tools above solve a different job than "give me a list of contactable people" — they collect data your team still has to turn into contacts.

What ours does: you pick a platform — Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, X or YouTube — give it a keyword, hashtag or audience, and it returns a de-duplicated CSV of profiles with the email addresses those profiles make public. It is no-code, runs in the cloud, and the email scraper and lead scraper pages walk through the exact flows. Teams that need both channels often run a social scraper like ours alongside a request-based API like ScraperAPI — one for contacts, one for page data.

What it does not do, said plainly: it does not fetch arbitrary websites (that is Firecrawl and ScraperAPI territory), it cannot find private contact details nobody published, and it is not a name-to-email lookup. If that last one is your job, look at Hunter.io alternatives instead.

Sources and verification

All pricing in this article was read from the vendors' public pages on 16 October 2026. No hands-on vendor testing is claimed — where it says "we checked", it means the pricing page was opened and read.

• Apify — apify.com/pricing
• Firecrawl — firecrawl.dev/pricing
• ScraperAPI — scraperapi.com/pricing
• ScrapingBee — scrapingbee.com/pricing
• ZenRows — zenrows.com/pricing
• Octoparse — octoparse.com/pricing
• Browse AI — browse.ai/pricing
• Bright Data — brightdata.com/pricing