Apify vs Bright Data

• Huge store of ready-made Actors covers many common scraping jobs.
• Free plan with no credit card makes testing easy.
• Includes proxies, anti-blocking tools and scheduling on the platform.
• MCP server and API let AI agents run Actors directly.
• Open-source Crawlee library reduces lock-in for custom scrapers.

• Costs vary by Actor and pricing model, so budgeting needs test runs.
• Unused prepaid usage expires at the end of each billing cycle.
• Free plan is blocked once monthly usage runs out.
• Store Actor quality depends on the individual developer.

• One platform covers proxies, unblocking, SERP, crawling, browsers, scraper APIs and ready-made datasets.
• Large proxy footprint: 400M+ residential IPs in 195 countries, plus ISP and datacenter options.
• Pay-per-use entry pricing, from $1 per 1,000 requests on Unlocker, SERP and Crawl APIs.
• Free tiers on several products and a free MCP server make agent prototyping cheap.
• Managed data acquisition and datasets let teams skip building pipelines entirely.

• Pricing differs for every product (per request, per GB, per IP, per record), so total cost is hard to forecast.
• Broader and heavier than developer-first scrapers like Firecrawl, with a steeper learning curve.
• Enterprise orientation: managed services start at $1,500 to $2,000 per month.
• Performance and customer-outcome claims on the site are vendor-published, not independently tested.