Apify vs Bright Data
Apify is a Scraping API, while Bright Data is a Proxy & data infrastructure. Apify fits best for: Teams that want a ready-made scraper for a popular site (Google Maps, Amazon, social media) or a platform to host their own. Bright Data fits best for: Companies scraping heavily protected sites at scale that need the strongest proxy and unblocking infrastructure.
| Apify | Bright Data | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Scraping API | Proxy & data infrastructure |
| Starting price | $19/mo | Pay as you go |
| Free tier | $5 of platform usage per month, no credit card, 5 concurrent runs | Web Unlocker / MCP: 5,000 free requests per month (per official MCP docs and pricing page as indexed by search); first deposit matched up to $500 in promo credits (docs) |
| Pricing model | usage (compute units) plus per-Actor pay-per-event/pay-per-result pricing | per GB (proxies) and per 1K successful requests (Unlocker/SERP/Scraper APIs) |
| AI extraction | ||
| Structured JSON | ||
| JS rendering | ||
| Proxies / anti-bot | ||
| API | ||
| No-code UI | ||
| Open source | ||
| MCP server | ||
| Best for | Teams that want a ready-made scraper for a popular site (Google Maps, Amazon, social media) or a platform to host their own. | Companies scraping heavily protected sites at scale that need the strongest proxy and unblocking infrastructure. |
| Visit Apify | Visit Bright Data |
Why choose Apify
- Apify Store with thousands of prebuilt scrapers (Actors)
- Build and deploy your own Actors (Crawlee, JS/Python)
- Built-in proxy, scheduling, storage and webhooks
- Official MCP server exposing Actors to AI agents
Watch out for
- Costs can be hard to predict across compute units and per-Actor fees
- Quality of community Actors varies
- Free plan's proxy usable only inside the platform
Why choose Bright Data
- Residential, ISP, datacenter and mobile proxy networks
- Web Unlocker with automatic CAPTCHA/anti-bot handling
- Browser API (hosted headless browsers)
- SERP API and site-specific Web Scraper APIs
Watch out for
- Pricing is complex and spread across many products
- Overkill and expensive for small projects
- Promotional vs list prices make cost comparison tricky
Our product
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