Apify vs Firecrawl: Which Web Data Layer Fits?
Pick Firecrawl when you want a hosted context API that returns Markdown or structured data for LLM and agent workflows. Pick Apify when you need an actor platform: a store of scrapers other people maintain, custom long-running jobs, and a bill made of prepaid platform usage plus per-actor event prices.
- Firecrawl, official pricing checked November 6, 2026: Free $0 / 1,000 credits; Hobby $19/month or $16/month billed annually ($190/year) / 5,000 credits; Standard $99 or $83 ($990/year) / 100,000 credits.
- Apify, official pricing checked November 6, 2026: Free $0 with $5 of included usage; Starter $19/month or $17/month billed annually with $19 included; Scale $199 ($179) with $199 included; Business $999 ($899) with $999 included. Unused prepaid usage expires each cycle.
- Do not compare $19 to $19. Firecrawl Hobby buys 5,000 Firecrawl credits. Apify Starter buys $19 of platform usage (and overage after that). They are not the same unit.
By Unfair Advantage · Updated November 6, 2026. Related: Firecrawl review · Firecrawl pricing · Apify review · Firecrawl alternatives.
1. Who should pick which
This is a pairwise decision between a hosted LLM context API and an actor platform. It is not a Firecrawl review, not an Apify review, and not a five-tool landscape — those live on their own URLs.
Choose Firecrawl when…
- The next hop is a prompt, a chunker, a vector store, or an MCP client.
- You want scrape, crawl, map, search, interact, and structured extraction as documented endpoints.
- You would rather pay published page credits than operate actors, compute units, and store event prices.
Choose Apify when…
- You need ready-made store actors, or you will publish and run custom actors yourself.
- The job is a long-running, site-specific workflow that a single
/scrapecall will not cover. - You accept a bill made of prepaid usage, compute units, proxies, storage, and (often) pay-per-event actor prices.
UA did not create accounts at either vendor or run a bake-off. Prices and product claims come from official pricing pages and docs checked November 6, 2026. Firecrawl links on this page are affiliate links. Apify is not an affiliate partner yet, so there is no Apify button and no outbound vendor link.
2. What you are actually buying
| Question | Firecrawl | Apify |
|---|---|---|
| What the vendor sells | A context API for AI agents: search, scrape, and interact, then return Markdown or structured data. | A platform for running Actors — store scrapers and your own jobs — billed as prepaid platform usage plus actor and infrastructure line items. |
| Free start | 1,000 credits/month, no card, no PAYG, HTTP 402 when empty. | $0 with $5 of included usage; no card required on the free plan. Unused usage expires. The free plan blocks further use until the next cycle when the $5 is gone. |
| Published paid entry | Hobby $19/month or $16/month billed annually ($190/year), 5,000 credits, 5 browsers. | Starter $19/month or $17/month billed annually, with $19 of included usage and pay-as-you-go overage up to a limit you set (publicly described as at most $100 on Starter). |
| How extras bill | JSON +4 (JSON scrape = 5); search 2 per 10 results; Interact per browser minute; social fetches in documented ranges. | Most store actors are pay-per-event (price on each actor page). Pay-per-usage actors and your own actors bill compute units, proxy, and storage. Some actors charge both. |
| Compute unit (Apify only) | — | 1 CU = 1 GB of RAM running for 1 hour. Official CU price: $0.20 on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale, $0.13 on Business. |
| Unused balance | Plan credits do not roll over on Free through Growth. PAYG packs persist until used and expire on cancel. | Unused prepaid usage expires at the end of the billing cycle. |
The full Firecrawl hosted ladder (Growth $399 / 500,000 credits; Scale $749 / 1,000,000) lives on Firecrawl pricing. This page uses Free, Hobby, and Standard, which cover the scenarios below. Scrape or crawl is 1 credit per page; JSON scrape is 5.
Apify official plans (November 6, 2026)
Annual billing is 10% off. The subscription prepaid amount equals the listed monthly price on each paid tier (Starter includes $19 of usage, Scale $199, Business $999).
| Plan | Monthly | Annual display | Included usage / month | CU price | Max concurrent runs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | $5 | $0.20 / CU | 5 |
| Starter | $19 | $17 | $19 | $0.20 / CU | 32 |
| Scale | $199 | $179 | $199 | $0.16 / CU | 128 |
| Business | $999 | $899 | $999 | $0.13 / CU | 256 |
| Creator | $1 | — | One-time $500 of platform usage for the first 6 months, with Store limited to universal Actors (official creator-plan page) | — | — |
Official extras that show up on “simple” actor runs: residential proxy $8/GB on Free and Starter ($7.50 Scale, $7 Business); datacenter IPs 5 included on Free, then 30 + $1/IP on Starter. SERP proxy and Unblocker have their own published per-1,000 rates on the same table. The official Starter example: an Instagram scraper at $2.30 per 1,000 results makes 10,000 results cost $23 — already over the $19 prepaid slice. A usage-only actor such as Website Content Crawler bills CU, proxy, and storage. A mixed example (Google Trends Scraper) charges $1 per 1,000 results plus usage. Always read the actor page; there is no store-wide average.
3. Real cost by scenario
Same named job, two official bills. No retries. Firecrawl uses Markdown = 1 credit and JSON = 5 unless stated. Apify numbers use published plan fees and the vendor’s own examples; we do not invent CU burn for a crawler we did not run.
Scenario A — 10,000 Markdown pages for a RAG index
Firecrawl: 10,000 credits overflow Hobby (5,000) and fit Standard (100,000). Cost: Standard $99/month (or $83/month billed annually). As JSON: 50,000 credits, still Standard.
Apify has no single “10,000 Markdown pages = $X” line: the invoice depends on the actor (event, usage, or both). Starter prepay is $19, then overage. At the official Instagram example rate of $2.30 / 1,000 results, 10,000 results cost $23. A usage-priced docs crawler could land under or over $19 depending on RAM, duration, and proxy. Firecrawl’s $99 is a known credit step; Apify’s number is “$19 plus the actor and CU meter.” If all you needed was Markdown from URLs you already have, Firecrawl is the clearer bill.
Scenario B — “I need a store scraper that already exists”
Firecrawl does not sell a marketplace of site-specific actors. You would compose scrape, map, crawl, search, and (if needed) Interact or Agent. That may be enough. It is not “click this Instagram actor.”
Apify is the product for this row. Budget the actor’s published event price first, then CU and proxy if the actor charges them separately, then the plan fee that prepay those dollars. Official Starter overage is allowed up to a usage limit you set (at most $100 on Starter). If a single actor run regularly exceeds $19, you are already in overage-or-upgrade territory before you write any of your own code.
Scenario C — A weekly custom job that must log in, paginate, and write a dataset
Firecrawl Interact can drive a browser by the minute (2 credits/min on the pricing page; 7 per prompt-minute in billing docs, one-minute minimum). Agent has 5 free daily runs, then dynamic pricing. That can cover some authenticated or multi-step flows, but it is still “call Firecrawl,” not “run my actor on a schedule with storage and webhooks I control.”
Apify is built for that operating model: schedule an actor, keep a dataset, pay CU × time × RAM ($0.20 per CU on Starter). We will not invent how many CU your login flow burns. We will say the billing shape matches the job better than a per-page Markdown API.
Scenario D — Prototype week
Firecrawl Free: 1,000 credits, no card, no top-up. 200 JSON pages fill the bucket. Apify Free: $5 of usage, no card, then blocked until the next cycle. Which sandbox is larger depends on the actor: $5 at the official Instagram example rate of $2.30 / 1,000 results is only about 2,170 results, while $5 of CU at $0.20/CU is 25 CU — 25 GB-hours. Neither free tier is a production plan.
4. Technical workflow
- Name the output and the reuse pattern. “Give my agent Markdown for these URLs” points at Firecrawl. “Run this site-specific job every night and keep a dataset” points at Apify.
- Firecrawl path: API key,
/scrapefor a URL,/mapor/crawlfor a site,/searchto discover, JSON only with a schema. Watch Hobby’s 5 browsers and Free’s HTTP 402. - Apify path: pick or build an actor, read its pricing model on the actor page (event, usage, or both), set a usage limit, and watch CU, proxy, and storage as separate meters. Do not assume the $19 Starter fee is the monthly invoice.
- If you need both jobs, do not force one vendor to impersonate the other. Many teams will call Firecrawl from an orchestration layer for LLM context and keep an Apify actor for a stubborn site-specific extract. That is two bills, each matched to a job — not a failure of this comparison.
Concurrency: Firecrawl publishes concurrent browsers per plan (2 / 5 / 25 / 50 / 100). Apify publishes max concurrent runs (5 / 32 / 128 / 256) plus a paid add-on listed at $5 per extra concurrent run and $1 per extra GB of actor RAM. A wide fan-out can force spend on either side even when the page count looked cheap — upgrade the throughput cap, not the wrong meter.
5. Pitfalls
- Treating Apify Starter $19 as Firecrawl Hobby $19. One is 5,000 crawl credits. The other is $19 of platform usage that expires if you do not spend it.
- Buying Firecrawl because you wanted a store actor. There is no Firecrawl marketplace equivalent to Apify Store.
- Buying Apify to “do RAG cheaper” without reading the actor page. A pay-per-event actor plus residential proxy at $8/GB on Starter can outrun Firecrawl Standard’s $99 before you finish the first site.
- Forgetting that unused Apify usage expires at cycle end — same class of surprise as unused Firecrawl plan credits on Free through Growth.
- Ignoring Creator-plan constraints if you came to publish actors: official materials describe a $1/month Creator plan with a one-time $500 of platform usage for the first 6 months, limited to universal Store actors. That is a builder SKU, not a substitute for Starter.
- Skipping the social-credit and event-price footnotes. Firecrawl lists X/Twitter via Grok around 30 credits and LinkedIn in a 5–40 range. Apify lists event prices per actor. Both will wreck a naive “page × $0.00X” spreadsheet.
6. Decision
| If your situation is… | Pick |
|---|---|
| Hosted Markdown or JSON for agents, RAG, or MCP | Firecrawl |
| Store actors, custom jobs, scheduled runs, datasets you operate | Apify |
| You need both jobs | Use both, each for its job. Do not stretch one invoice to cover the other category. |
| You actually wanted a classic HTML scrape API | Wrong pairwise page — see Firecrawl vs ScraperAPI or Firecrawl vs ZenRows. |
Our hosted pick for LLM context remains Firecrawl. Apify is the tool we would evaluate in this pair when the product you need is a platform and a store. The $19 stickers are a coincidence, not a comparison.
7. FAQ
Is Apify cheaper than Firecrawl?
Not as a general rule. Firecrawl Standard is $99/month for 100,000 credits. Apify Starter is $19/month for $19 of usage, then overage. Which invoice wins depends on the actor, CU, and proxy — or on whether you even needed actors.
Can I use Apify instead of Firecrawl for RAG?
Yes, if you run an actor (for example a content crawler) and convert the dataset yourself. Official Apify materials do not sell “Markdown for agents” as the headline product the way Firecrawl does. Count engineering plus usage, not just the $19 plan fee.
Does unused Apify usage roll over?
No. Official FAQ: unused prepaid usage expires at the end of the billing cycle. Paid plans can continue on overage after the prepaid slice is gone, up to the usage limit you configure.
What is an Apify compute unit?
1 CU = 1 GB of RAM running for one hour. Official prices: $0.20 on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale, $0.13 on Business.
Do you have an affiliate link for Apify?
Not at the time this page was written. A hidden placeholder sits in the HTML for later; it is not visible and it does not point at a live vendor URL.
8. Sources
Vendor pages are named in text so this article does not send click-throughs to non-affiliate destinations. Dates are Europe/Paris verification dates.
- Firecrawl official pricing page and billing documentation (checked November 6, 2026)
- Firecrawl official documentation (checked November 6, 2026)
- Apify official pricing page, including plan table, CU prices, proxy table, actor-pricing FAQ, and worked examples (checked November 6, 2026)
- Apify official creator-plan page as cited from the pricing page (checked November 6, 2026)