Our first test page held ten quotes. The cheap crawler type behind Apify’s budget scrapers found none of them.
Nothing had broken. The quotes load with JavaScript, and that crawler never runs any. Firecrawl renders JavaScript on every page, which is a big reason the two bill so differently.
If you’re weighing Firecrawl vs Apify for web scraping, that empty result tells you more than any feature list.
Apify wins elsewhere, though, and by a wide margin.
What’s the real difference between Firecrawl and Apify?
Firecrawl is a scraping API: send a URL, get clean Markdown or JSON back. Apify is a cloud platform where scrapers run, yours or someone else’s.
So the real split isn’t speed or features. It’s what you get back, and who runs the scraper.
Firecrawl hides the machinery. You never pick a browser, a proxy or a parser, and every page costs a credit.
Apify hands you the machinery. You pick an Actor (Apify’s word for a scraper), tune it, schedule it and pay for what it uses.
Both models hide a trap. Apify’s sits in how browser crawls get billed, and Firecrawl’s shows up on pages you have to click.
We’ll get to both.
How we compared them (and what we didn’t do)
Short version: two hands-on runs, two live rate cards, and zero paid Apify jobs.
We used Firecrawl’s hosted MCP server on three live pricing pages, Apify’s included. We also ran two web searches through it.
Its keyless API refused us “your IP address looks suspicious.” A free key avoids that, so sign up before you test.
Apify, on our machine. We didn’t run paid jobs on Apify’s cloud. We ran Crawlee instead, the open-source library Apify’s Website Content Crawler is built on.
Our test bed was toscrape.com, a sandbox built for scraping practice. Its pages load quotes through JavaScript, after a delay, or as you scroll.
Prices. Every number comes from Firecrawl’s and Apify’s pricing pages plus Apify’s public API. For plan-by-plan detail, see our Firecrawl pricing and Apify pricing breakdowns.
What is each one actually built for?
Firecrawl is built to feed web pages to AI apps. Apify is built to run scrapers that pull structured data from specific sites, often on a schedule.
Firecrawl: one API call per page
Send a URL to Firecrawl’s scrape endpoint and you get Markdown, HTML, a screenshot or JSON back. JavaScript rendering and proxy retries happen on its side.
Need more than one page?
Crawl follows a site’s links, map lists its URLs for 1 credit a call, and search finds pages to scrape.
Newer endpoints cover the rest. Monitor re-checks pages on a schedule, and interact drives a live browser for pages that need clicks.
SDKs cover nine languages, from Python and Node to Go and Rust. There’s an MCP server for Claude, Cursor and ChatGPT too.
The open-source repo has over 190,000 GitHub stars, and Firecrawl raised a $75M Series B in September 2026.
Best for: AI apps, RAG pipelines and agents that need readable text from any site.
Not ideal for: big platforms like Google Maps or Instagram, where you want ready-made fields, not a page of text.
Apify: a store of scrapers and a cloud to run them
Apify has run scrapers in the cloud since 2015, and its Store now lists more than 85,000 Actors. You’ll find ready-made scrapers for Google Maps, Amazon, TikTok and thousands of smaller sites.
Each run saves its results to a dataset you can export as JSON, CSV or Excel. Or you push them into Make, n8n, LangChain or a vector database.
Schedules, webhooks and proxies are built in. And Apify sells a Firecrawl-style job too: Website Content Crawler turns a whole site into Markdown for AI.
Best for: structured data from big platforms, recurring jobs, and teams that want to own their scraper code.
Not ideal for: a quick “give me this page as text” call, where an Actor’s setup is overkill.
So the two overlap in one place: turning websites into clean text. That’s where the bills split, and it starts with JavaScript.
What happens when a page needs JavaScript?
Firecrawl renders JavaScript on every scrape for the same 1 credit. On Apify, the crawler you pick decides whether JavaScript content shows up at all.
That’s what happened on our first test page. Many modern sites send an empty page first, then fill it in with JavaScript.
We pointed Crawlee’s two crawler types at the same toscrape.com pages. Here’s what came back.
| Test page | HTTP crawler (Cheerio) | Browser crawler (Playwright) |
|---|---|---|
| Quotes loaded by JavaScript | 0 of 10 | 10 of 10 |
| Quotes shown after a delay | 0 of 10 | 10 of 10, after a wait (13.1 s) |
| Infinite-scroll page | 0 quotes | 100 quotes, after scrolling (6.7 s) |
| 25-page book crawl | 3.9 s (156 ms a page) | 29.7 s (1,189 ms a page) |
The browser saw everything. It also took about 7.6 times longer per page on the same crawl.
That gap is the Apify trap we promised. On Apify’s pay-per-usage crawlers, you pay in compute units. One unit is 1 GB of memory running for an hour.
A browser crawl burns far more of them. And the cheap HTTP crawler goes blind on exactly the pages that need a browser.
By Apify’s own estimate for Website Content Crawler, a browser crawl costs up to 25 times more per page. We’ll do the dollar math in a moment.
Firecrawl hides that choice. Every page costs 1 credit whether it needs a browser or not, which is a gift on JavaScript-heavy sites.
On plain HTML, though, that flat credit costs more than Apify’s cheap crawler.
Is that a problem for you?
Only if your pages are static and your volume is big.
Still with me? Good. The next part is where the money goes.
What do 1,000 pages really cost on each?
On the two $19 entry plans, 1,000 plain pages cost $3.80 on Firecrawl Hobby. On Apify Starter, they use about $0.20 of compute, by Apify’s own estimate.
Plain pages are only one job, though. Here’s the same math for five common ones.
| Job (1,000 of each) | Firecrawl | Apify |
|---|---|---|
| Plain HTML pages | $3.80 on Hobby $0.99 on Standard | About $0.20 (HTTP crawler, Apify’s estimate) |
| JavaScript-heavy pages | $3.80 on Hobby $0.99 on Standard | $0.50 to $5 (browser crawler, Apify’s estimate) |
| Pages as JSON fields | $19.00 on Hobby $4.95 on Standard | Depends on the Actor or your code |
| Google searches (10 results each) | $7.60 on Hobby $1.98 on Standard | $2.50 on Starter $1.95 on Scale |
| Google Maps places | No dedicated tool | $3.00 on Starter $2.00 on Scale |
Why Apify’s bill moves and Firecrawl’s doesn’t
Firecrawl sells credits. A page is 1 credit and JSON extraction adds 4. The price per credit only drops when you move up a plan.
Apify sells usage. Its own crawlers bill compute time. Many Store Actors charge per result instead, like $3 per 1,000 Google Maps places on Starter.
Proxies add their own line. Residential traffic costs $8 per GB on Apify’s Free and Starter plans.
Our take: Firecrawl’s bill is easier to predict. Apify’s is easier to shrink, if you’re willing to tune it.
When does each one get cheaper?
Firecrawl’s price per page falls with each plan: $3.80 per 1,000 on Hobby, $0.99 on Standard and $0.75 on Scale.
Watch the top-ups. On Hobby, $5 buys only 1,000 extra credits, so overflow pages cost more than your plan’s own.
Apify’s compute gets cheaper as you climb too: $0.20 per unit on Starter, $0.16 on Scale and $0.13 on Business.
So which wins at 100,000 pages a month?
For static pages, Apify, at roughly $20 of compute against Firecrawl’s $99 Standard plan.
For JavaScript-heavy pages, Firecrawl’s $0.99 per 1,000 beats most of Apify’s $0.50 to $5 range. And it’s far easier to budget.
Can either one get past sites that block bots?
Both handle everyday blocking, in different ways. Firecrawl retries blocked pages through stronger proxies on its own. Apify hands you the proxies and the controls.
Firecrawl’s default auto mode tries a basic proxy first. After a 401, 403 or 429 error, it retries once through enhanced proxies, still at 1 credit.
Apify includes datacenter IPs on every plan: 5 on Free and 30 on Starter. Residential traffic is extra, and Crawlee rotates sessions and browser fingerprints for you.
More control means more ways to get it wrong. If proxy types are new to you, our guide to residential vs datacenter proxies covers the choice.
One more difference: Firecrawl respects robots.txt by default, and only Enterprise plans can switch that off. On Apify, it depends on the Actor you run.
Want the bigger picture? Here’s how proxies fit into web scraping.
Blocks are the loud failures. The quiet ones don’t throw an error at all.
Where does each one break?
Firecrawl struggles with content hidden behind clicks and with keeping results. Apify struggles when an Actor falls behind its target site, or when a browser crawl runs long.
Firecrawl: what loads first is what you get
Here’s the Firecrawl trap we promised. On Firecrawl’s own pricing page, its plan cards came back with yearly prices only: $16, $83, $333 and $599.
The monthly prices for Standard, Growth and Scale sat behind a toggle, so they never appeared. To reach them, you’d script the click with interact.
That costs 2 to 7 credits per browser minute, on top of the scrape.
Main-content mode isn’t spotless either. A promo banner survived at the top of both pricing pages we scraped.
Speed has a ceiling too. Hobby runs 5 browsers at once and Standard runs 25, so big crawls on small plans take a while.
And results don’t stick around. Crawl results stay available for 24 hours, so you’ll want your own storage.
Apify: a scraper is only as good as its maintainer
Store Actors come from Apify and from independent developers, and quality varies. The public run stats tell you a lot.
Website Content Crawler finished 96.4% of its 2.9 million runs in the last 30 days. The most popular Amazon scraper managed 91.8%, with 46,805 failed runs.
Browser crawls burn compute fast. Since compute is memory multiplied by time, a run that dies at minute 40 still used 40 minutes.
Then there are the bill’s layers: plan fee, compute units, proxy traffic and per-event Actor fees. Each one is fair. Together, they take a spreadsheet to predict.
Warning: before you schedule 50,000 pages on Apify, run 50. Open the run, read its cost, then multiply. Five minutes turns a guess into a quote.
The catch: who fixes your scraper when the site changes?
With Firecrawl’s Markdown output, there’s usually nothing to fix, because it reads the whole page instead of hunting for elements. With Apify, an Actor’s developer or you must update the code.
This is the cost nobody prints on a pricing page. Sites redesign, rename a CSS class, or move a price into a new box.
Firecrawl’s Markdown output has no selectors to break. Its JSON mode asks an AI model to find your fields by meaning, not by position on the page.
Wait, can’t the AI get it wrong?
It can. A model can misread a field, so spot-check a sample before you trust 10,000 rows.
Most Apify Store scrapers are coded against each site’s structure. When the site changes enough, the Actor breaks until its developer ships a fix.
Write your own Crawlee scraper, and that developer is you. Even Crawlee’s homepage admits it “won’t fix broken selectors for you (yet).”
Before you rely on an Actor, check its page for three things:
- The 30-day run success rate
- When it was last updated
- How fast its developer answers issues
Our take: if your target sites change often and nobody wants to babysit selectors, pick Firecrawl. If your target is one big platform, a well-maintained Apify Actor is the better bet.
It beats writing your own scraper, and it beats asking an AI to guess the fields.
Firecrawl vs Apify: which scraper should you pick?
Pick Firecrawl for clean text from any website at a flat price. Pick Apify for structured data from specific platforms, recurring crawls, or static pages at volume.
- Pick Firecrawl for an AI app, RAG pipeline or agent, because one call turns almost any page into readable Markdown.
- Pick Firecrawl if your URLs are unpredictable, because you never choose a crawler type or fix a selector.
- Pick Apify for Google Maps, Amazon or TikTok data, because ready-made Actors return clean fields for $3 to $4 per 1,000.
- Pick Apify for big static crawls every week, because its HTTP crawler is cheap and schedules are built in.
- Use both if your project has both jobs: Firecrawl for pages, Apify for platforms.
| Feature | ||
|---|---|---|
| What you get | Markdown, HTML or JSON | Datasets: JSON, CSV, Excel |
| Free tier | 1,000 credits a month | $5 of usage a month |
| Entry plan | $19 for 5,000 credits | $19 of usage |
| 1k static pages | $3.80 on Hobby | About $0.20 of compute(winner for this row) |
| 1k Google searches | $7.60 on Hobby | $2.50 on Starter(winner for this row) |
| JavaScript pages | Included, 1 credit | Browser crawler, more compute |
| Store scrapers | None | 85,000+ Actors |
| Scheduling | Monitor endpoint | Built-in schedules |
| Keeps results | Crawls for 24 hours | Named datasets indefinitely |
| Open source | Yes (AGPL-3.0) | Crawlee (Apache-2.0) |
| MCP server | Yes | Yes |
- What you get
- Markdown, HTML or JSON
- Free tier
- 1,000 credits a month
- Entry plan
- $19 for 5,000 credits
- 1k static pages
- $3.80 on Hobby
- 1k Google searches
- $7.60 on Hobby
- JavaScript pages
- Included, 1 credit
- Store scrapers
- None
- Scheduling
- Monitor endpoint
- Keeps results
- Crawls for 24 hours
- Open source
- Yes (AGPL-3.0)
- MCP server
- Yes
- What you get
- Datasets: JSON, CSV, Excel
- Free tier
- $5 of usage a month
- Entry plan
- $19 of usage
- 1k static pages
- About $0.20 of compute
- 1k Google searches
- $2.50 on Starter
- JavaScript pages
- Browser crawler, more compute
- Store scrapers
- 85,000+ Actors
- Scheduling
- Built-in schedules
- Keeps results
- Named datasets indefinitely
- Open source
- Crawlee (Apache-2.0)
- MCP server
- Yes
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What if neither one fits?
Neither tool covers every scraping job. Here’s where we’d look next, depending on what’s missing.
- No code at all? Thunderbit scrapes a page from a Chrome extension in two clicks.
- Point-and-click robots that watch pages for changes: Browse AI.
- A plain scraping API with proxies built in: ScraperAPI returns raw HTML and handles the blocking.
- Enterprise unblocking and ready-made datasets: Bright Data.
- Free and self-hosted: Crawlee itself, under Apache-2.0, if you’re happy to own the code.
Tracking what ChatGPT and Perplexity say about you is a different job. That’s where Cloro comes in, and our Firecrawl vs Cloro vs Apify comparison covers it.
For a wider shortlist, see our best web scraping tools and best SERP APIs.
Frequently asked questions
Is Firecrawl better than Apify for web scraping?
Firecrawl is better for turning any page into clean text for AI apps, JavaScript included. Apify is better for structured data from big platforms and for scheduled crawls at volume. If you can only test one, start with the job you run most often.
Can Apify scrape JavaScript-heavy websites?
Yes. Use a browser-based option such as Playwright Scraper, or Website Content Crawler in its adaptive or Firefox mode. The cheaper Cheerio-based crawlers only read raw HTML, so content that JavaScript loads later never shows up.
Does Firecrawl charge for failed scrapes?
Not when nothing comes back: a scrape that returns no document costs 0 credits. A page that answers with an error such as a 403 or 404 is still returned and costs 1 credit. Cached results cost 1 credit per page too.
Do unused Firecrawl credits or Apify usage roll over?
Mostly no. Firecrawl credits expire monthly on Hobby, Standard and Growth, and only Scale carries unused credits for one month. Apify’s unused usage credits don’t roll over either, and they expire at the end of each billing cycle.
Can I self-host Firecrawl or Apify?
Yes for Firecrawl: its open-source build is AGPL-3.0, minus Fire-engine (the anti-bot layer), screenshots and browser actions. Apify’s platform isn’t self-hostable. Its Crawlee library is Apache-2.0, though, and runs on any server you own.
Can Firecrawl scrape Google Maps or Amazon data?
Firecrawl has no dedicated Google Maps or Amazon tool. You’d use JSON extraction at 5 credits a page and define the fields yourself. Apify sells ready-made Actors for both, and its most popular Amazon scraper charges $4 per 1,000 products on Starter.
Do I need my own proxies with Firecrawl or Apify?
Not with Firecrawl: proxies are built in, and enhanced proxies cost the same 1 credit as basic ones. Apify Proxy comes with every plan, but on Free it only works inside Apify’s platform. Many Actors also accept your own proxy URLs.
Is it legal to scrape websites with Firecrawl or Apify?
Scraping public pages is legal in many countries, but site terms, copyright and privacy laws like GDPR still apply. Avoid personal data unless you have a lawful reason, and respect robots.txt and rate limits. For commercial projects, check with a lawyer before you scale.
Which one is easier for beginners?
Apify, if you want results without code: pick an Actor, fill in its input form and press Start. Firecrawl suits beginners who can make one API call or connect it through n8n, Zapier or Make. Neither asks you to run your own servers.
The bottom line
Firecrawl vs Apify isn’t a contest over the better web scraper. It’s a choice between clean text from any page and structured data from specific sites.
- Pick Firecrawl for AI apps, agents and unpredictable URLs.
- Pick Apify for platform data, schedules and big static crawls.
- Run both when your project needs pages and platforms.
Your next step: take 20 real URLs from your project. Run them through Firecrawl’s free credits and one Apify Actor, then compare the output and the bill.
