Apify vs Crawl4AI
Apify is a Scraping API, while Crawl4AI is an Open source. 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. Crawl4AI fits best for: Python developers who want a free, self-hosted crawler for RAG/agent pipelines and full control over the stack.
| Apify | Crawl4AI | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Scraping API | Open source |
| Starting price | $19/mo | $10/mo |
| Free tier | $5 of platform usage per month, no credit card, 5 concurrent runs | Library and self-hosting free (Apache-2.0); Crawl4AI Cloud includes 1,000 free credits/month (10 req/min) |
| Pricing model | usage (compute units) plus per-Actor pay-per-event/pay-per-result pricing | free/self-hosted; cloud uses credits |
| 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. | Python developers who want a free, self-hosted crawler for RAG/agent pipelines and full control over the stack. |
| Visit Apify | Visit Crawl4AI |
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 Crawl4AI
- LLM extraction via any LiteLLM provider, plus CSS/XPath/regex
- Clean and 'fit' markdown output
- Playwright browser control, stealth, sessions, proxies
- Deep crawling strategies (BFS/DFS/best-first)
Watch out for
- You run and maintain the browsers and proxies yourself
- No built-in residential proxy network or managed unblocking
- LLM extraction costs depend on your own model provider
Our product
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