Apify vs ScrapingBee: Scraping Platform or Scraping API?

Apify vs ScrapingBee compares two different ways to get web data. Apify is a platform for running scrapers: you pick a ready-made scraper from its Store, or deploy your own, and collect the results. ScrapingBee is a scraping API: your code sends it a URL and gets the page or extracted data back. Choose Apify when a ready-made scraper already covers your target, and ScrapingBee when you're writing the scraper yourself and want one endpoint to fetch pages.

How They Work

Apify runs programs it calls Actors. Apify Store lists thousands of them, built by Apify and by community developers, for search results, social networks, maps, e-commerce and general crawling. You give an Actor its input, it runs on Apify's cloud, and the results land in a dataset you can download as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or HTML. You can also deploy your own scrapers and use Apify's storage, scheduling, proxies and API.

ScrapingBee is one endpoint. You send a target URL with options, and it fetches the page through its proxies and a headless browser, then returns HTML, JSON, Markdown, extracted fields or a screenshot. Your code decides which URLs to fetch and what to do with the results.

Here's the same idea in each, from their docs. With ScrapingBee, you fetch a page:

curl "https://app.scrapingbee.com/api/v1?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com&render_js=false" \
     -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR-API-KEY"

With Apify, you run a scraper and read its results, here with the official JavaScript client:

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: process.env.APIFY_TOKEN });
const run = await client.actor('apify/website-content-crawler').call({
    startUrls: [{ url: 'https://example.com' }],
    maxCrawlPages: 1,
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();

Our Apify review has the full Quick Start in JavaScript and Python.

Pricing

Apify plans include usage credit equal to their price. Runs spend it on compute units ($0.20 down to $0.13 per unit, where one unit is 1 GB of RAM for an hour), proxies and storage, or on per-result prices set by the scraper's developer. On paid plans you can go over the included usage and pay the difference on your next invoice, up to a limit you set.

ScrapingBee plans include a fixed number of credits, and each request uses a set number:

The per-1,000 figures assume you use all of the $99 plan's 1 million credits. Unused credits expire after a month, so the real cost is higher if you don't. Our scraping cost calculator helps you model your own volume.

Two Jobs, Side by Side

Google search results. Apify's Google Search Results Scraper is priced from $1.80 per 1,000 result pages, with platform usage included, and returns one record per results page. ScrapingBee's Google API uses 10 credits with light_request or 15 without, returning organic results, ads, questions and related searches as JSON. On ScrapingBee's $99 plan that's about $0.99 to $1.49 per 1,000 searches, if you use the whole allowance. For Google at volume, also compare Scrape.do and the Bright Data SERP API.

Crawling a site into Markdown for AI. Apify's Website Content Crawler has no scraper fee: you pay for platform usage, which Apify estimates at $0.20 per 1,000 pages with a plain HTTP crawler, and about $0.50 to $5 with a headless browser. It follows links across a site for you. With ScrapingBee, your code finds the URLs and requests each one, at 1 credit for a plain request or 5 with JavaScript rendering, about $0.10 or $0.50 per 1,000 on the $99 plan.

What Each Does That the Other Doesn't

Only Apify:

• Ready-made scrapers for thousands of sites and jobs, maintained by Apify or community developers. Quality varies by scraper, so check each one's rating, usage and success rate in the Store.
• Hosting for your own code, with storage, scheduling and an API. Crawlee, Apify's open-source crawling library (Apache 2.0), runs with or without Apify.
• Raw proxies: residential at $8 to $7 per GB depending on plan, plus datacenter IPs included with each plan.

Only ScrapingBee:

• A published credit cost for every request option, and no charge for failed requests.
• Browser actions in one request: click, scroll, fill fields and wait for elements before the page is returned.
• Screenshots and extraction (CSS, XPath or AI-described fields) from the same endpoint.

Both offer an MCP server for AI assistants, official Python and Node.js libraries, and a dedicated Google search scraper.

Verdict: Apify vs ScrapingBee

These are different tools more than direct rivals. Choose Apify when a ready-made scraper already does what you need, when you want to host your own crawlers without running servers, or when you want an ongoing free plan. Choose ScrapingBee when you're writing your own scraper and want one endpoint with predictable per-request costs and no charge for failures.

We rate Apify 4.6/5 and ScrapingBee 4.1/5. Apify scores higher for its breadth and its free plan; ScrapingBee scores lower on value, because JavaScript rendering is on by default and credits expire monthly. See where both rank in our scraping API rankings, and compare other single-endpoint APIs in ZenRows vs ScraperAPI.

FAQ

What is the difference between Apify and ScrapingBee?

Apify is a platform for running scrapers: you use ready-made scrapers from its Store or deploy your own code, and it stores the results. ScrapingBee is a scraping API: your own code sends it URLs, and it returns the page or extracted data, handling proxies and JavaScript rendering.

Is Apify or ScrapingBee cheaper?

It depends on the job. Both start at $19 a month. For Google results, Apify's Google Search Results Scraper starts at $1.80 per 1,000 result pages, while ScrapingBee's Google API uses 10 or 15 credits a search, about $0.99 to $1.49 per 1,000 searches if you use all of the $99 plan's credits. For general pages, ScrapingBee costs from about $0.10 per 1,000 plain requests on that plan, and Apify estimates $0.20 per 1,000 pages for its Website Content Crawler using a plain HTTP crawler.

Which has a better free option?

Apify's free plan includes $5 of usage every month with no card. ScrapingBee gives 1,000 free API credits once, also with no card.

Do Apify and ScrapingBee charge for failed requests?

ScrapingBee charges only for successful requests, meaning those that return a 200, 404 or 410 status code. On Apify it depends on the scraper: pay-per-event scrapers charge for events such as results, while pay-per-usage scrapers charge for the compute, storage and proxies a run uses.