Apify vs Jina Reader
Apify is a Scraping API, while Jina Reader 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. Jina Reader fits best for: Developers who need the fastest, cheapest way to feed a single web page to an LLM.
| Apify | Jina Reader | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Scraping API | AI extraction API |
| Starting price | $19/mo | Prepaid tokens |
| Free tier | $5 of platform usage per month, no credit card, 5 concurrent runs | Usable without a key at 20 RPM; new API keys include 10M free tokens (500 RPM) |
| Pricing model | usage (compute units) plus per-Actor pay-per-event/pay-per-result pricing | tokens (prepaid top-ups, shared across Jina 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. | Developers who need the fastest, cheapest way to feed a single web page to an LLM. |
| Visit Apify | Visit Jina Reader |
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 Jina Reader
- Zero-setup: r.jina.ai/<url> returns markdown
- s.jina.ai search-and-read endpoint
- Image captioning and PDF reading
- JSON output and CSS-selector targeting via headers
Watch out for
- Not built for multi-page crawling or complex interactions
- Limited anti-bot handling on heavily protected sites
- No schema-based structured extraction comparable to Firecrawl
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.
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