TL;DR: Apify takes this one overall, mostly on range. It runs a marketplace of ready-made scrapers, covers almost any target site, and adds enterprise compliance and fine-grained control. The trade, though, is a bill you have to watch. Firecrawl is the better buy if you want one clean API that turns pages into LLM-ready markdown at a price you can forecast. So choose Apify for many different sites, social and marketplace data, or scheduling and custom code in one place. Firecrawl, on the other hand, suits a RAG pipeline or an AI agent you want live this week. Either way, Rewardio pays 15% recurring cashback on Apify, which trims a usage-based bill every month.
Apify vs Firecrawl: the matchup
Web data got expensive in 2026, and not because bandwidth got dearer. Every AI feature now needs fresh pages, clean text and structured fields. As a result, two very different products keep landing in the same search results.
Apify is the veteran. It launched in 2015 out of the Y Combinator Fellowship, and it now runs a scraper marketplace on its own cloud. Firecrawl is the challenger, built by the team behind Mendable and funded with a $14.5 million Series A in August 2025. It does one job: point it at a URL, then get back markdown a language model can read.
If you are searching Firecrawl vs Apify, you are deciding between breadth and simplicity. So this Apify vs Firecrawl comparison covers pricing, coverage, speed, user sentiment and the tradeoffs neither vendor advertises.
Apify vs Firecrawl at a glance
| Category | Apify | Firecrawl |
| What it is | Full scraping and automation platform with a marketplace | Web data API built for AI pipelines |
| Founded | 2015, Prague | 2022, San Francisco |
| Free tier | $5 of platform credit a month, no card | 1,000 credits a month, 2 concurrent requests |
| Entry paid plan | Starter, $29 a month plus usage | Hobby, $16 a month |
| Mid plan | Scale, $199 a month plus usage | Standard, $83 a month for 100,000 credits |
| Billing model | Compute units, plus per-Actor fees, plus proxies | Flat credits, 1 credit per standard page |
| Pre-built scrapers | Tens of thousands of Actors | None, API first |
| Output | JSON, CSV, Excel, markdown via specific Actors | Markdown, HTML, JSON, screenshots, summaries |
| Proxies | Datacenter allowance, residential billed separately | Included in credits, stealth pages cost 5 credits |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, CCPA, 99.95% uptime | Certified SOC 2 Type 2, zero data retention on Enterprise |
| Credit rollover | None | Only on auto-recharge and annual top tiers |
| Cashback | 15% recurring through Rewardio | Not a Rewardio merchant |
Apify in brief
Think of Apify as two products stacked together. The first is Apify Store, a marketplace of Actors. Actors are containerised scrapers and automations, built by Apify and by thousands of outside developers. Counts vary by source, from the 15,000-plus figure in Apify’s own listings to a tally of 29,248 in May 2026. Either way, someone has probably already built a scraper for your target site.
The second product is the cloud that runs them. Proxies, headless browsers, retries, anti-bot handling, scheduling, storage, and a full API sit underneath. You fill in a form, hit run, and clean data lands in a dataset. If nothing in the Store fits, you write a custom Actor with Crawlee, Apify’s open-source library.
Billing is the part people get wrong. Your plan is a prepaid pool of usage measured in compute units, one unit being roughly a gigabyte-hour of runtime. Many Store Actors also charge their own fee per result or per event on top. Residential proxy bandwidth costs extra again, at around $8 per gigabyte. Credits then expire at the end of the cycle. Our Apify pricing breakdown works through the maths.
Firecrawl in brief
It sells one thing, and it sells that thing well. You call an endpoint with a URL, and it returns clean markdown, HTML, schema-shaped JSON, links, screenshots or a summary. JavaScript rendering, proxy rotation, and anti-bot work happen on their side with no configuration.
The endpoints cover the obvious jobs. Scrape handles a single page, while crawl walks a whole site. Map lists every URL it finds, and search queries a curated index for full page content rather than snippets. Finally, an agent endpoint takes a plain-language prompt and gathers data with no URLs at all.
Firecrawl is open source, and the repo ranks among the most starred in the category. Star counts published during 2026 range from roughly 97,000 to the 150,000 Firecrawl now cites. The company itself claims over 1.25 million developers and 150,000 companies, including teams at Zapier, Shopify, and Replit.
Head to head, category by category
Pricing and real cost
Firecrawl vs Apify cost is where most decisions land, and the two models barely resemble each other. Take Firecrawl first, since its tiers are flat monthly prices with credits attached. Free gives you 1,000 credits a month. Hobby costs $16, while Standard costs $83 for 100,000 credits and 50 concurrent requests. Growth costs $333 for 500,000 credits, and Scale sits near $599 on annual billing. At Standard, a plain page works out at $0.00083.
Apify charges a monthly plan that doubles as prepaid usage, then meters everything on top. Free includes $5 of credit, Starter costs $29, Scale costs $199, and Business costs $999. Compute unit rates fall as you move up the plans, from around $0.20 on Starter to roughly $0.13 on Business.
Run a real scenario, and the gap narrows. Take 100,000 browser-rendered pages a month. One independent breakdown put Apify at about $100 in compute on Starter, plus roughly $40 of residential proxy traffic, so around $140 all in. Firecrawl Standard, by contrast, covers the same volume for $83 with proxies included. Static sites flip the result, though. Cheerio-based Actors process around 3,000 pages per compute unit instead of 300, which drops Apify’s compute cost to roughly $10.
Neither tool rolls credits over on standard plans, and both attract the same complaint for it. Firecrawl also stacks credit modifiers that catch people out. For example, JSON output adds 4 credits per page, Enhanced Mode another 4, and stealth pages cost 5. So a Hobby plan buying 3,000 “pages” becomes 333 pages once you switch those on.
Coverage and features
This is the widest gap in the whole Apify vs Firecrawl comparison. Apify has ready-made Actors for Google Maps, Amazon, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and thousands of long-tail targets. Firecrawl has no marketplace at all, so anything site-specific you build yourself.
The counter is agentic browsing. Firecrawl’s FIRE-1 agent clicks, paginates, and works through multi-step flows on its own, which saves hours of selector writing on awkward sites. One catch is worth repeating, though: Firecrawl calls that billing non-deterministic, so you learn the cost after the job runs.
Ease of use and setup speed
Firecrawl wins on time to first result. Most teams get a working pipeline running inside an hour, and the SDKs cover Python, JavaScript, Rust and Go. In fact, reviewers repeatedly describe the docs as clear.
Apify is friendlier than its reputation suggests for common jobs, since any Store Actor runs from a form with no code. The difficulty arrives with the cost model. Compute units, per-Actor fees, and a cluttered console still take a few weeks to feel natural.
Performance and reliability
Firecrawl is faster on small AI-facing jobs by design. It keeps browsers pre-warmed and caches recent content, while Apify spins up a container per run. In one benchmark, 20 news articles took 110 seconds on Firecrawl against roughly 8 minutes on Apify.
Heavily protected sites tell a different story. A Proxyway benchmark from December 2025 tested providers against 15 well-defended targets. Firecrawl posted a 33.69% success rate at 2 requests per second, falling to 26.69% at 10, averaging 7.92 seconds per response. Apify sat outside that test, so its results depend on your Actor and proxy setup. Teams pairing browser Actors with residential proxies do better on hard targets, though they pay for the privilege.
Support, compliance and stability
Apify carries SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and CCPA compliance with 99.95% uptime. It lists Intercom, Groupon and the European Commission among its users, and it has stayed profitable on roughly $3.5 million of funding. Firecrawl holds SOC 2 Type 2 and offers zero data retention on Enterprise.
Support splits both ways on Apify. Some reviewers call it excellent even on cheap plans, while others report slow replies and missed follow-ups. Firecrawl, meanwhile, leans on docs, GitHub and community channels rather than support tiers.
Where Apify wins
- Site coverage. If your project touches 20 domains, Apify probably has Actors for most of them.
- Social and marketplace data. Instagram, TikTok, Amazon, and Google Maps have maintained scrapers, while Firecrawl expects you to build those.
- Cheap static scraping. Non-JavaScript pages cost a fraction of Firecrawl’s rate, because Cheerio Actors barely touch compute.
- Control. Crawl depth, selectors, scheduling, deduplication, storage, and custom code live in one platform.
- Enterprise footing. Ten years of trading, published compliance, and named enterprise users all carry weight in procurement.
- Recurring cashback. Rewardio carries Apify at 15% recurring, which counts for more on a variable bill.
Where Firecrawl wins
- Predictable cost. One credit per standard page lets you budget before you start, while nobody says that about compute units.
- LLM-ready output. Markdown comes out clean by default, so it uses far fewer tokens than raw HTML.
- Speed to ship. One API key, four endpoints, and then a working pipeline in an afternoon.
- Agentic extraction. FIRE-1 handles multi-step flows that would otherwise mean hours of custom selectors.
- Search plus scrape in one call. The search endpoint returns full page content, not snippets.
- Open source. You can self-host, though the cloud version keeps some features back.
What users say
Apify has the deeper review record, holding around 4.7 out of 5 on G2 across several hundred reviews and about 4.8 on Capterra. The praise is consistent. Reviewers describe finding a working Actor and piping clean data into an AI pipeline in twenty minutes, instead of coding a scraper over weeks. But the criticism repeats too: pricing that resists forecasting, a learning curve on custom Actors, and community-built Actors that break when a target site changes.
Firecrawl sentiment comes from elsewhere, since 2026 reviews still found it absent from G2 and Capterra. Developers rate it on Product Hunt, GitHub, and forums instead. They like the clean markdown, the JavaScript handling, and the near-zero setup. Still, complaints cluster around billing: monthly credit expiry, no pay-as-you-go option, and per-scrape costs that surprise people.
Which should you pick
Go with Apify if you scrape several site types, need social or marketplace data, or want scheduling, storage, and custom code under one roof. The same applies if procurement asks for compliance paperwork. Budget an afternoon to learn the cost model, and test-run every Actor before scaling it.
Firecrawl is the better fit for a RAG pipeline or an AI agent on ordinary content sites, where a predictable per-page bill matters most. It suits small teams shipping fast, rather than a data team running fifty scheduled jobs.
Plenty of teams run both, using Firecrawl for quick AI extraction and Apify for awkward targets. On the wider Exa vs Apify vs Firecrawl web data extraction question, Exa sits in a different lane. It is a neural search index built for discovery, so it finds relevant pages rather than extracting whole sites. In short, use Exa when you start with a question, and the other two when you start with a URL.
How the Apify cashback works
Rewardio carries Apify, and the rate is 15% recurring. Firecrawl is not a Rewardio merchant, so there is no cashback either way on that side of this comparison.
The mechanism is simple. Start from the Apify cashback page on Rewardio, click through and subscribe as normal. Apify then pays us a commission for the referral, and we pass a share of it back to you as real money. No code needed, so you get an effective 15% off. The recurring part matters most, because the 15% repeats every month your subscription stays active. On a bill that moves around, that is one line item working in your favour.
Cashback tracks in your account within about 24 hours. It clears for withdrawal once Apify confirms the payment and the standard hold passes, usually 30 to 60 days.
FAQ
Is Apify or Firecrawl cheaper?
It depends on your pages. On JavaScript-heavy sites under 100,000 pages a month, Firecrawl’s all-in credit price usually beats Apify once you add proxy costs. Static pages flip that, though, since Cheerio Actors cost Apify users a fraction of Firecrawl’s rate. So run a sample on both first, because Firecrawl vs Apify cost swings hard on page complexity.
Can I use Apify and Firecrawl together?
Yes, and many teams do exactly that. Firecrawl handles fast markdown extraction from ordinary sites, while Apify covers protected targets, social platforms and anything needing custom code. The two bills stay separate, so watch both.
Does Firecrawl have anything like Apify Actors?
No. Firecrawl is API-first with no marketplace, so site-specific logic is yours to write. Its FIRE-1 agent covers some of that ground by navigating pages itself, though you only see the cost of an agent run afterwards.
How does Exa compare with Apify and Firecrawl?
Exa is a semantic search API rather than a scraping platform. It finds pages by meaning and returns snippets, so most teams pair it with an extraction tool. In an exa vs Apify vs Firecrawl web data extraction shortlist, then, Exa is the discovery layer and the other two are the ingestion layer.
Is there an Apify discount code?
There is no standing public Apify code. Apify does run occasional limited offers plus real programmes for students, startups and nonprofits, while annual billing saves around 10%. Still, the reliable saving is cashback at 15% through Rewardio, recurring for as long as you stay subscribed.
Verdict
Apify vs Firecrawl comes down to what you are building. Range, coverage, and control go to Apify, so it is the safer bet for a team scraping many sites over years. Firecrawl wins on simplicity and predictable cost, and for a single AI pipeline it is the cleaner choice. Neither is a bad product, though both sides oversell the gap in their marketing.
Our full scored breakdown, with sub-scores for ease of use, features, value and support, sits on the merchant page. Read the complete Apify review and activate your 15% recurring cashback there.
Rewardio earns a commission when you sign up to a merchant we carry through our links, and we pass a share of that back to you as cashback. That is how the site stays free to use. Either way, this comparison is called as we see it. The pick reflects which tool actually fits the job, not which one pays us. We would rather earn your trust than a single click, so where a rival is the better choice, we say so.
