Alternative to
6 Alternatives to Apify in 2026
Teams leave Apify when a marketplace of community-built Actors is more than the job needs, when billing in platform usage and compute units is hard to forecast, or when nobody on the team writes code. Frequent choices are Firecrawl, ScrapingBee, Zyte, Browse AI, Bright Data and Crawl4AI.
Why people look for an alternative to Apify
Maintenance falls on Actor authors
Much of the Apify Store is built by independent creators, so a scraper you depend on can change pricing or stop being updated. Teams that want one vendor accountable for the endpoint prefer a plain API.
Usage is billed in layers
A bill combines platform usage, compute units, proxy traffic and sometimes the price of a paid Actor. Plans do not roll unused usage forward, and the Free plan blocks access once its monthly allowance is spent.
The workflow assumes a developer
Actors, tasks, datasets and key-value stores make sense to programmers. An analyst who only wants a table of prices from a few pages faces a console built for builders.
The best Apify alternatives
- 1
Firecrawl turns pages into clean markdown or JSON for language model pipelines through one credit balance shared by scrape, crawl, map and search calls. Structured extraction costs several times a plain scrape per page, and failed pages can still cost a credit.
Switch if you feed retrieval or agent pipelines with page text and prefer a single API over browsing a marketplace of programs.
- 2
ScrapingBee, a French company, sells one HTTP endpoint that bundles JavaScript rendering, rotating proxies and geotargeting. Rendering and premium proxies use more credits per call, and unused credits expire each month. It states SOC 2 Type II compliance.
Switch if you already call HTTP APIs from your own code and want proxies and rendering handled behind a single request.
- 3
Zyte bills each request by how hard the target site is, from cheap plain HTTP fetches up to costly browser-rendered pages. Monthly commitments lower the rates, and the same vendor hosts Scrapy spiders in Scrapy Cloud. Your real cost shows only after pricing your URLs.
Switch if you run Scrapy spiders already, or scrape mostly easy sites where paying per request beats paying a flat monthly platform fee.
- 4
Browse AI lets someone train a robot by clicking through a page, then schedule it and watch for changes. Results land in Google Sheets, Airtable or an API. Plans cap domains and credits rather than robots, which makes multi-site projects the pinch point.
Switch if you work without engineers and want recurring price or listing monitoring delivered straight into a spreadsheet.
- 5
Bright Data is a large proxy and data vendor with unblockers, ready datasets and scraper APIs under one roof. Units vary by product, whether records, requests or gigabytes. Only successfully delivered records are billed, and monthly spend limits can be set.
Switch if you need proxy networks, unblocking and prebuilt scrapers for named sites from one supplier at enterprise volume.
- 6
Crawl4AI is an Apache-2.0 Python library that outputs markdown for retrieval work and runs as a library, command line tool or Docker server. No per-page fee applies, but support, proxies and upkeep of browsers are entirely yours.
Switch if you have Python engineers, want every fetch to stay on your own servers, and accept running proxies and browsers yourself.
Before you switch away from Apify
Inventory which Apify Actors your runs depend on, who wrote each one, and what each costs per result. Export datasets you still need, along with task inputs and schedules, because those do not travel to another vendor. If your own Actors use Crawlee, the open-source library keeps working outside Apify, so port the deployment layer rather than the scraping logic. Run a week of real targets through each candidate and compare cost per successful page, including retries on blocked requests, before you cancel the plan.
The full ranking of this category is in Best AI Web Scraping Tools in 2026.
Frequently asked questions
Does Apify train AI models on the data I scrape?
Its privacy policy says personal data it processes as a data processor for customers is not used to train AI models unless the customer has agreed separately. Data is kept no longer than necessary, and processing happens mainly in the EU and the US. No certification page could be opened, so ask for current certificates.
Can my Crawlee or Playwright code run elsewhere?
Yes for the scraping logic. Crawlee is open source and its templates cover Playwright, Puppeteer, Cheerio and Scrapy, so code can run on your own servers or another host. What does not move is the Actor packaging, schedules, datasets and Apify Proxy configuration, which you would rebuild around a new runner.
Which alternative suits someone who does not code?
Browse AI is the clearest fit, since robots are trained by clicking and results go to Sheets or Airtable. The other five here expect API calls or a Python environment. Apify's own Store also offers ready Actors, so test whether a prebuilt one covers your site before switching tools.
How can I test a replacement without paying first?
Firecrawl, Browse AI and Bright Data's Web Scraper API each have a free tier, and Crawl4AI costs nothing beyond your own machine. ScrapingBee and Zyte did not list a free plan on the pages read. Use identical target URLs for every trial so cost per successful page can be compared fairly.