Apify vs Bright Data

Detailed side-by-side comparison to help you choose the right tool

Apify

🔴Developer

web data

web scraping, browser automation, and data extraction platform with ready-made Actors for collecting web data for AI workflows.

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Starting Price

Free

🔴Developer

Web Data

Bright Data is a web-data platform spanning proxy infrastructure, scraping APIs, browser automation, pre-collected datasets, and managed acquisition.

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Starting Price

From $1/1,000 requests

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Feature	Apify	Bright Data
Category	web data	Web Data
Pricing Plans	4 listed plans	5 listed plans
Starting Price	Free	From $1/1,000 requests
Key Features	• Web scraping with 1,500+ pre-built Actors • Managed proxy rotation (datacenter and residential) • JavaScript rendering and dynamic content handling	• Scraping APIs: Provides unlocking, crawling, SERP, and site-specific extraction APIs. • Proxy networks: Offers residential, ISP, and datacenter routes with different billing units. • Browser API: Runs browser-based collection for JavaScript-heavy or interactive targets.

✓Huge Actor marketplace shortens build time compared with writing every scraper from scratch
✓Good fit for AI pipelines because results land in structured datasets instead of screenshots or brittle copy-paste flows
✓Scheduling, proxies, storage, and APIs are bundled, which reduces glue code for production scraping
✓MCP support makes Apify more agent-friendly than many traditional scraping tools

✗Costs can rise fast when Actors use heavy browser sessions, proxies, or high-volume datasets
✗Marketplace Actor quality varies, so production teams still need monitoring and fallback plans
✗Legal and compliance review is still your job; Apify does not make every target site safe to scrape

✓Unusually broad path from raw proxies to managed, finished datasets.
✓Published starting rates let builders estimate a small pilot before contacting sales.
✓MCP support is convenient for agents needing current public-web information.
✓More than 900 dataset domains can avoid building and maintaining custom collectors.

✗Many billing units make apples-to-apples cost comparison difficult.
✗Starting prices can understate real cost when retries, bandwidth, premium targets, and geography are included.
✗Web collection creates legal, privacy, and target-policy obligations that tooling does not remove.
✗The platform's breadth adds configuration and operational complexity for simple crawling jobs.

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