Apify Alternatives: What Developers Switch To (2026)

Apify quotes you one price. The invoice arrives with a different one. A scraping job you expected to cost maybe $20 shows up at $140, and you’re left guessing which of its meters did it to you.

That gap, between the quote and the real bill, is the single biggest reason developers go looking for Apify alternatives. The culprit usually isn’t requests. It’s compute units, plus Actor rental, plus proxy charges, three meters running at once and none of them easy to predict.

“Why is my Apify bill so high” is a recurring thread on Reddit, and the answer is always the same stack of charges. Once you’ve felt it, you start hunting for a way out.

TL;DR: Apify alternatives are the managed APIs, full scraping platforms, and open-source frameworks developers move to when Apify’s stacked compute-unit pricing gets unpredictable. This post compares 9 of them. The core trade-off: Apify bills on compute units plus Actor rental plus proxies (the layering that turns an expected $20 into a $140 bill), while a flat per-request API like FlyByAPIs charges one fixed price per call. Pick a managed API for fixed targets, a platform for arbitrary crawling, and Scrapy or Crawlee if you want free and self-hosted.

I run scraping infrastructure for a living. We process millions of API calls a month at FlyByAPIs, and a big chunk of our new users arrive straight from Apify, usually after a bill spike or a broken community Actor. So I know exactly why people leave, and where they land.

This post is the honest version of that map. I’ll show you why developers switch, how Apify’s pricing actually works, and the nine tools worth moving to depending on what you’re scraping. Some are cheaper. Some are free. And one of them is Apify’s own SDK without the platform attached.

Why developers leave Apify

Let me be fair first. Apify is a genuinely good platform. The Actor marketplace is huge, the SDK is excellent, and for arbitrary “scrape this random site and automate a workflow” jobs, it does things a single-purpose API can’t.

But three frustrations come up again and again. If any of these is your reason, you’ll know which tool fits before you finish this post.

That third one is the quiet killer. A lot of Apify usage is just “scrape Google search results” or “pull Amazon product data” on repeat. Those are solved problems. You don’t need a serverless runtime and an SDK for them. You need an endpoint.

Read the Apify reviews on G2 and the pattern is consistent: people love the flexibility, then hit the cost-and-maintenance wall once the project becomes routine. The flexibility you paid a premium for stops being an advantage the moment your scraping job stops changing.

How Apify pricing actually works (compute units, explained)

Here’s the part most “best alternatives” roundups skip. To know why people leave, you have to understand what they’re actually paying for. It’s not one number. It’s four.

Side by side, the four meters and what each one does to your forecast look like this:

The one that catches everyone is meter two. A compute unit is one gigabyte-hour: the memory an Actor reserves multiplied by how long it runs. Reserve 4 GB for 15 minutes and that’s the same single unit as 1 GB for an hour. So your cost depends on RAM and runtime, not on how many results you got.

Think about what that means. Two runs that return the same data can cost wildly different amounts depending on how the Actor was built. You’re billed for the machine, not the outcome. That’s great for Apify’s margins and terrible for your forecasting.

You don’t pay for the data you get. You pay for the seconds and the gigabytes it took to get it. That gap between effort and result is exactly where surprise bills live.

Now stack the meters. A marketplace Actor with a $5 rental, running on reserved memory, hitting pages through residential proxies at a dollar a gigabyte, on top of a $29 platform fee. Each piece looks small. Together they’re the $140 invoice that developer didn’t see coming.

Compare that to a flat per-request model. One call, one price, known in advance. If you send 10,000 requests to a real-time Google SERP API priced per request, your bill is 10,000 times a fixed number. No memory math. No rental. That predictability is the whole reason this article exists.

The 9 best Apify alternatives in 2026

Not all of these are the same kind of tool, and pretending they are is how you end up with the wrong one. So I’ve grouped them by what they actually are.

Let’s go through them, starting with the category most ex-Apify users actually need.

1. FlyByAPIs: flat per-request APIs for fixed targets

If you’re using Apify to scrape Google, Maps, Amazon, or jobs on repeat, this is the switch that makes your bill boring again. FlyByAPIs is a suite of managed data APIs on RapidAPI: one subscription, many endpoints, flat per-request pricing.

There’s no Actor to build or rent, no compute units, no proxy config. You send a query to the Google Search API , you get clean JSON back. The proxies, rendering, and anti-block handling are our problem, not yours.

The lineup covers the targets people most often build Actors for: a real-time Google search scraping API , a Google Maps data API for local business listings, an Amazon product data API , a Crunchbase company data API , a jobs data API , and an AI translation API . One key unlocks all of them.

One honest detail worth knowing on Amazon: every request is country-pinned, so a US marketplace query routes through a US IP and a German one through a German IP. That kills the “inconsistent data across countries” problem that trips up generic scrapers.

Best for: developers who used Apify for Google, Maps, or Amazon and want a flat, forecastable bill. The honest verdict: if your target is fixed and repeating, a managed SERP and data API beats running an Actor on cost and on maintenance, full stop.

2. Bright Data: enterprise infrastructure, per-record billing

Bright Data is the heavyweight. One of the largest proxy networks in the world, a full scraper marketplace, datasets, compliance certifications, the lot. If you need serious infrastructure and have the budget, they deliver.

The catch is the billing model, and it bites in a specific way. Their Scraper APIs bill per record, not per request. One Amazon search returning 50 products counts as 50 records.

Best for: enterprises that also need proxies, datasets, and compliance under one roof. Verdict: brilliant for detail-heavy or proxy-dependent work, but on search-style jobs the per-record meter makes it far pricier than a per-request Amazon data API .

3. Oxylabs: premium scraper APIs, per-result pricing

Oxylabs sits right next to Bright Data: enterprise-grade, big proxy pools, mature dashboard, 24/7 support even on entry plans. Their Scraper API is solid and fast, with 50 requests per second on the cheapest tier.

Billing works per successful result, which is the same trap as Bright Data under a different name. Their Micro plan is $49/mo for up to 98,000 results, and JS-rendered pages cost more.

Best for: mid-to-large teams that want a managed scraper with enterprise support and don’t mind paying for it. Verdict: a strong, dependable option, but the per-result model and JS surcharge make costs climb on anything that returns lists. For a fixed local-data job, a flat Google Maps scraping API is simpler to budget.

4. ScrapingBee: a simpler API for general pages

ScrapingBee is the friendly middle ground. A single clean API that handles headless Chrome, proxy rotation, and anti-bot bypass, with genuinely good docs and developer experience. It’s less infrastructure-heavy than the two above.

It runs on credits, where one basic request is one credit and JS rendering or premium proxies cost more. Plans start at $49/mo for 250,000 credits. The credit model means a JS-heavy job burns through your allowance faster than the headline number suggests.

Best for: developers building their own pipeline who want raw HTML from arbitrary pages without managing proxies. Verdict: a fine general-purpose API, though for named targets you’ll do less parsing with a structured endpoint. There’s a deeper look in my ScrapingBee alternatives breakdown.

5. Firecrawl: the pick for general and AI crawling

Time to be honest about where FlyByAPIs is not the answer. If you need to crawl an entire site or turn arbitrary pages into clean, LLM-ready Markdown, Firecrawl is excellent and I’d recommend it over us for that job.

It’s API-first, open-source, and built for RAG pipelines, with official LangChain and LlamaIndex adapters and around 44,700 GitHub stars. The free tier is 1,000 credits, Hobby is $16/mo, and it gets cheap per page at volume.

Best for: RAG and AI workflows, full-site crawls, and arbitrary-URL extraction. Verdict: the right move when your job is genuinely “crawl anything,” not “hit the same source forever.” I compared it against its rivals in my Firecrawl alternatives post if you want the full picture.

6. Zyte: the Scrapy company’s managed platform

Zyte are the people behind Scrapy, so they’ve forgotten more about scraping than most vendors know. Their Zyte API handles smart proxy management, JS rendering, and AI-powered adaptive parsing, billed per successful request and tiered by site difficulty.

Best for: teams already invested in Scrapy who want managed proxies and anti-ban without leaving that ecosystem. Verdict: a credible enterprise platform with deep expertise behind it, though pricing leans toward mid-and-large operations rather than weekend projects.

7. Octoparse: no-code scraping for non-developers

Not everyone leaving Apify writes code. Octoparse is a visual desktop scraper where you point, click, and build a workflow without touching a script. It has a free tier with limits and paid plans for higher volume and cloud runs.

Best for: analysts and operators who want data without writing code. Verdict: the friendliest option for non-developers, but it carries the same fragility as any DIY scraper. My Octoparse alternatives post digs into who it suits and who it doesn’t.

8. Scrapy: the free, open-source workhorse

Scrapy is the classic answer to “I want full control and I’ll pay nothing for the software.” It’s a mature Python framework with an enormous ecosystem of middlewares, extensions, and tutorials, and it’s been the backbone of serious scraping for over a decade.

The price is your time. You write the spiders, host the crawlers, manage proxies, and fix things when sites change. There’s no platform fee because there’s no platform.

Best for: developers who want zero software cost and maximum control. Verdict: unbeatable on price if your time is cheap and your targets are stable. Read the Scrapy docs to gauge the learning curve, and see where it lands among my tested Python scraping tools .

9. Crawlee: keep Apify’s SDK, drop the platform

Here’s the clever one. Crawlee is the open-source scraping library built and maintained by Apify themselves, for Node and Python. It handles browser automation, request queues, and anti-blocking out of the box.

The trick: you can run Crawlee entirely on your own servers, for free, without the Apify platform billing attached. You keep the SDK that made Apify pleasant to build on and lose the compute-unit meter.

Best for: developers who like Apify’s SDK but want to escape its billing. Verdict: the most natural exit for current Apify users. You’re not relearning anything, you’re just moving the runtime to your own box.

The full comparison, side by side

Different billing models, different jobs. Here’s how the nine line up on the things that actually decide your bill.

The pattern jumps out once it’s in a grid. Per-record and per-result vendors get expensive on search jobs that return long lists. Frameworks are free but cost you time. Flat per-request sits in the sweet spot for fixed, repeating targets.

Free and open-source ways to replace Apify

“Apify alternatives free” is the search a lot of people actually type, so let’s be precise about what free means here. There are two flavors, and they’re not the same.

For genuinely free, open-source scraping, Scrapy and Crawlee are the two to know. Crawlee is the easier landing spot for Apify refugees since it’s the same team’s library. The Crawlee repo on GitHub shows just how much it handles for you.

The honest tradeoff: open-source saves the subscription, not the work. Proxies, scaling, and the day a site changes its HTML all become your responsibility. For a stable hobby project that’s fine. For anything business-critical, the maintenance cost usually outweighs the saved subscription within a few months.

If you want “free to start” without owning infrastructure, a managed Google search data API with a free tier gets you testing in minutes. You validate the integration on the free 200 requests, then move to a flat paid plan only once it works. No servers, no proxy bills, no surprise compute units.

How to choose the right tool

Forget rankings for a second. The right pick comes down to one question: how fixed is your target, and how much do you want to maintain?

For the majority of people I see leaving Apify, the answer is the first card. They were never doing exotic crawling. They were pulling Google search results or product data on a schedule, and the platform was overhead they didn’t need.

The honest takeaway

Take that $140 bill from the top. On a flat per-request endpoint, the same Google scraping job costs a few dollars, known in advance, with nothing to maintain when Google tweaks its layout.

That’s the whole story in one sentence. Apify is a powerful platform you should keep for genuinely custom, changing work. For fixed targets you hit on repeat, the platform is overhead, and almost anything on this list will serve you better.

If your job is Google, Maps, Amazon, Crunchbase, jobs, or translation, try the flat per-request route first. You can validate the whole thing free, and if it doesn’t fit, you’ve lost nothing but ten minutes. Check the real-time Google Search results API and the rest of the suite on RapidAPI.

P.S. If you’re on Apify mostly because you like Crawlee, you don’t have to break up with the SDK to fix the bill. Self-host it and keep the part you actually love. That’s the move most people miss.

Oriol.