5 Best Apify Alternatives for Reliable Web Scraping in 2026
Blog post from Firecrawl
Apify's actor marketplace provides a robust platform for web scraping and automation, offering over 4,000 pre-built scrapers, called "Actors," for various use cases. Founded in 2015, Apify has evolved into a leading web scraping service with features including cloud infrastructure, proxy management, and integrations with tools like Zapier and Google Sheets. The platform's credit-based pricing model allows users to pay based on compute units, actor usage, and proxy bandwidth. As an alternative, Firecrawl distinguishes itself with a focus on AI applications, offering a transparent 1-credit-per-page pricing model and output in markdown format to reduce token consumption. Firecrawl provides an API-first approach, no-code simplicity, and open-source flexibility, appealing to developers, business users, and technical teams. Other alternatives like Octoparse, Oxylabs, Scrapy, and Browse.AI offer diverse features tailored to specific user needs, ranging from visual interfaces and premium proxy infrastructure to open-source control and automated workflows. These alternatives cater to different requirements based on the user's technical expertise, budget, and specific scraping needs, providing options for API control, no-code access, and open-source solutions.
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