---
title: "Apify vs Bright Data (2026): Pricing & Features Compared · Best AI Scraper"
description: "Apify vs Bright Data: compare pricing ($19/mo vs Pay as you go), free tiers, AI extraction, JS rendering and which one fits your project."
canonical_url: "https://bestaiscraper.com/compare/apify-vs-bright-data"
meta:
  "og:description": "Apify vs Bright Data: compare pricing ($19/mo vs Pay as you go), free tiers, AI extraction, JS rendering and which one fits your project."
  "og:title": "Apify vs Bright Data (2026): Pricing & Features Compared · Best AI Scraper"
---

> Index of every page on this site: [llms.txt](https://bestaiscraper.com/llms.txt)

# **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](https://bestaiscraper.com/tools/apify) | [Bright Data](https://bestaiscraper.com/tools/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**](https://bestaiscraper.com/go/apify) | [**Visit Bright Data**](https://bestaiscraper.com/go/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**

## **Only need structured JSON from pages?**

BestAIScraper's extraction API takes a URL and a list of fields and returns typed JSON. Pay per use, no subscription.

[**Try it free**](https://bestaiscraper.com/extract)

```json
{"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@id":"https://bestaiscraper.com/#website","@type":"WebSite","description":"Independent comparisons of AI web scraping tools, plus a pay-as-you-go AI extraction API.","name":"Best AI Scraper","url":"https://bestaiscraper.com/","publisher":{"@id":"https://bestaiscraper.com/#identity"}},{"@id":"https://bestaiscraper.com/compare/apify-vs-bright-data#webpage","@type":"WebPage","description":"Apify vs Bright Data: compare pricing ($19/mo vs Pay as you go), free tiers, AI extraction, JS rendering and which one fits your project.","name":"Apify vs Bright Data (2026): Pricing & Features Compared","url":"https://bestaiscraper.com/compare/apify-vs-bright-data","isPartOf":{"@id":"https://bestaiscraper.com/#website"},"potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https://bestaiscraper.com/compare/apify-vs-bright-data"]}]},{"@id":"https://bestaiscraper.com/#identity","@type":"Organization","name":"Best AI Scraper","url":"https://bestaiscraper.com"}]}
```

## Sitemap

See the full [sitemap](https://bestaiscraper.com/sitemap.md) for all pages.