Apify vs Diffbot
Apify is a Scraping API, while Diffbot is an AI extraction API. 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. Diffbot fits best for: Teams that need rule-free, consistent structured data across many sites, or entity data from a Knowledge Graph.
| Apify | Diffbot | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Scraping API | AI extraction API |
| Starting price | $19/mo | $299/mo |
| Free tier | $5 of platform usage per month, no credit card, 5 concurrent runs | 10,000 credits/month, all APIs, 5 requests/min, no credit card |
| Pricing model | usage (compute units) plus per-Actor pay-per-event/pay-per-result pricing | 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. | Teams that need rule-free, consistent structured data across many sites, or entity data from a Knowledge Graph. |
| Visit Apify | Visit Diffbot |
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 Diffbot
- Automatic Extract APIs (article, product, discussion etc.) with no rules
- Crawlbot for whole-site crawling
- Knowledge Graph of organizations, people and articles
- Natural-language processing API
Watch out for
- High jump from free to $299/mo
- Fixed page-type schemas; less flexible than prompt-based extraction
- Knowledge Graph credits are expensive per record
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