Apify vs Firecrawl
Apify is a Scraping API, while Firecrawl 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. Firecrawl fits best for: Developers building LLM/RAG apps or agents who want clean markdown or JSON from any URL with minimal setup.
| Apify | Firecrawl | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Scraping API | AI extraction API |
| Starting price | $19/mo | $19/mo |
| Free tier | $5 of platform usage per month, no credit card, 5 concurrent runs | 1,000 credits/month, 2 concurrent requests, 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. | Developers building LLM/RAG apps or agents who want clean markdown or JSON from any URL with minimal setup. |
| Visit Apify | Visit Firecrawl |
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 Firecrawl
- Scrape, crawl, map and search endpoints
- Clean markdown output for LLMs
- LLM-based JSON extraction with a schema or prompt
- Agent endpoint (preview) and browser interact sessions
Watch out for
- JSON extraction costs 5x a plain scrape (1 + 4 credits)
- No pay-as-you-go on the free plan
- Self-hosted version lacks some cloud-only features
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