Best Apify Alternative for Large-Scale Scraping

ZenRows is the best Apify alternative for developers who need to scrape protected sites at scale without managing Actor configuration, compute unit billing, or platform-level infrastructure. ZenRows is an API you call from your own code. Apify is a platform where you run or rent containerized scrapers called Actors. That distinction determines how you estimate costs before a job runs, how much of the scraping logic you own, and what it costs to migrate if your requirements change.

In our original tests across seven targets, each with 200 requests, ZenRows averaged 99.2% success rate across all targets and completed the first successful JS-rendered request in under five minutes. Apify's general-purpose Playwright Actor averaged 42.7% on the same targets and took over nine minutes to get the first result. This article covers both tools head-to-head, then six alternatives for specific use cases. If you want a quick side-by-side before diving in, our Apify vs. ZenRows comparison page has you covered.

ZenRows vs. Apify Comparison Table

This table captures how ZenRows and Apify performed during our test, and how they compare across architecture, pricing structure, and data retrieval features.

How We Tested

We benchmarked Apify and ZenRows on 19th June 2026 against seven target sites with different protection levels and page complexity:

• Walmart product page
• Glassdoor company page
• Bayut property search
• Google SERP (web scraping tools)
• IKEA product page
• Hacker News (unprotected)
• Scrapy documentation (unprotected)

Each target received 200 requests at a concurrency of 2 req/s, measuring HTTP 200 success rate, response time, and the presence of a valid page title in the HTML results.

ZenRows Universal Scraper API ran on Adaptive Stealth Mode. We used the general-purpose Playwright Scraper Actor for Apify, rather than site-specific Actors built for any of the tested targets. This test does not cover ZenRows Scraping Browser and Apify's scheduling, monitoring, and dataset storage features.

See the complete benchmark script and target sites on GitHub.

The sections below detail how Apify and ZenRows performed in the test, and break down how they differ across cost, setup complexity, and long-term maintenance.

ZenRows

Details

ZenRows is a web scraping API that handles browser rendering, proxy rotation, CAPTCHA solving, and anti-bot bypass behind a single endpoint. For this test, we used the Universal Scraper API on the Developer plan at $69 per month, with Adaptive Stealth Mode (mode=auto) enabled.

Testing with Walmart

Result: 100% success rate

Response time: 15.98s

Testing with Glassdoor

Result: 99.5% success rate

Response time: 10.73s

Testing with Bayut

Result: 100% success rate

Response time: 1.70s

Testing with Google SERP

Result: 95% success rate

Response time: 20.48s

Testing with IKEA

Result: 100% success rate

Response time: 2.34s

Testing with Hacker News

Result: 100% success rate

Response time: 1.43s

Testing with Scrapy documentation

Result: 100% success rate

Response time: 8.79s

Test summary

ZenRows averaged a 99.2% success rate across all seven targets, with an average response time of 7.65s. It was fastest on Hacker News and Scrapy documentation, both unprotected sites, and strongest on Walmart, Bayut, and IKEA among protected sites with 100% success rate each. The 99.2% figure covers all seven targets, including the two unprotected sites. Filtered to the five protected targets only, ZenRows averaged 98.9%, which is the number used in the at-a-glance table for a direct comparison against Apify's protected-site result.

Apify

Details

Apify is a cloud platform for web scraping and automation that runs containerized scraping jobs called Actors. For this benchmark, Apify ran the general-purpose Playwright Scraper Actor (apify/playwright-scraper) with default configuration, on the baseline plan at $29 per month. This table captures how Apify's success rate and response time per site.

Test summary

Apify averaged a 42.7% success rate across all seven targets, with an average response time of 27.68s. Its strongest result was Hacker News at 99.5%, though still slower than ZenRows on the same target. Its best protected-site result was Google SERP at 79%, and its weakest was IKEA at 2.5%. Filtered to the five protected targets only, Apify averaged a 27% success rate.

Note that Apify's performance will fluctuate depending on the Actor you run. Each Actor handles TLS fingerprints, navigator.webdriver flags, proxy rotation, and headless browser setup independently. An Actor's build and configuration determine its success rate on protected sites, not the platform's baseline capability. As Zyte's 2026 Best Web Scraping APIs benchmark report puts it, "It is more accurate to classify Apify as an automation/orchestration platform rather than a web scraping API.”

Speed Comparison

ZenRows had an average response time of 7.65s across all seven targets, while Apify had 27.68s. The table below shows the average response time for each target.

Price Comparison

For the 1,000 requests from our test, ZenRows costs $4.05 for basic pages and $7.47 for protected sites. Apify costs $14.46 and $28.99 for the same volume, roughly 4x higher than ZenRows’ charges for both request types. The chart below shows how this effective cost scales across 10,000, 100,000, and 1,000,000 monthly requests.

Caption note: Apify cost lines reflect modeled estimates extrapolated from test results. Actor configuration, page complexity, and proxy usage affect the final cost. See Apify's pricing page and compute unit documentation for exact rates.

ZenRows charges a flat monthly rate starting at $69 for the Developer plan, which covers 250,000 basic requests and 10,000 protected requests, with a maximum of 20 concurrent requests. Your bill is the request count multiplied by cost per thousand, multiplied by a complexity tier.

Basic HTML pages cost $0.28 per 1,000 requests on the Developer plan. JavaScript rendering multiplies that cost by 5x, premium proxies by 10x, and combining both by 25x. A month of 10,000 basic requests costs $2.8, but the same volume against a protected site with JavaScript rendering and premium proxies costs $70. Failed or retried requests do not count toward your bill.

Apify's billing starts from a different premise. Your monthly plan buys prepaid platform credits, but everything your scrape touches gets metered separately against those credits. These four cost variables feed the final number:

Apify's free plan gives $5 in monthly credits, enough for pilot runs or roughly 1,000 basic pages per month, with Actor RAM capped at 8 GB. The cost picture changes when you move to protected sites at production volume.

Apify's baseline monthly plan starts at $29, with CU at $0.20 per hour on a 32 GB Actor RAM. The compute cost increases with browser launch, runtime, page complexity, memory allocation, and post-processing after the run. If an Actor run fails, Apify still bills the credits. The platform charges for compute time regardless of the request's outcome.

For anti-bot bypass, residential proxy traffic adds $8 per GB, and a single protected site crawl can consume several GB, depending on page wait time and retry rate. Request queues cost $4 per 1,000 GB-hours, output storage is $1 per 1,000 GB-hours, and exporting that data costs $0.20 per GB. Some marketplace Actors add per-usage or per-event fees on top of these proxy and storage charges.

The Apify cost range in the chart above is wide because each Actor run carries a different cost profile. A lightweight Cheerio Actor running at 128 MB for one minute consumes roughly 0.002 CUs. But a heavy browser crawl at 4 GB for an hour consumes 4.0 CUs, a 2,000x difference at the same plan rate.

For developers seeking a predictable monthly bill, there is no reliable way to project compute unit consumption before running a job. Apify's documentation is direct about this limitation: “The best way to find the costs of Actors upfront is to try out the Actor on a limited scope and evaluate the consumption.”

Reducing costs on Apify requires adjusting Actor memory to the minimum stable setting, capping runs with the maxItems parameter, and avoiding memory-intensive Actors where lighter alternatives exist. ZenRows has no equivalent overhead because the bill is based on the request count.

Final Verdict

If your scraping job targets protected sites and Apify's compute-based billing makes monthly costs hard to predict, ZenRows is the better fit. It returned higher success rates on all five protected targets in our test, at a fraction of the modeled cost per 1,000 requests. Choose Apify instead if you need a pre-built scraper for a specific protected site like Instagram or LinkedIn, or if your workflow depends on scheduling, dataset storage, and webhooks as managed features rather than code you write and maintain yourself.

Developer Experience: From Signup to First Successful Request

We timed how long it took to get the first successful JavaScript-rendered response from Glassdoor for each tool, in Python and Node.js.

ZenRows returned HTML results in 4.13 minutes in Python and 4.08 minutes in Node.js. The setup is a signup, an API key, one HTTP call, and 10 lines of code. Apify took 9.05 minutes in Python and 8.23 minutes in Node.js across 18 lines of code, covering account creation, Actor selection, client library installation, run trigger, wait time, and dataset retrieval. This timeframe is for a marketplace Actor. Building a custom Actor from scratch adds time for writing the code, testing it locally, and deploying it to the platform before the first run.

The code blocks below show the Python request to the Glassdoor protected page on each tool.

ZenRows Universal Scraper API with mode=auto:

# pip install requests
import requests

url = "https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-Google-EI_IE9079.11,17.htm"

response = requests.get(
    "https://api.zenrows.com/v1/",
    params={
        "apikey": "<YOUR_ZENROWS_API_KEY>",
        "url": url,
        "mode": "auto",  # adaptive stealth mode
    },
)

print(response.status_code)

Apify Python client:

# pip install apify-client
from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_API_TOKEN>")

run = client.actor("apify/playwright-scraper").call(
    run_input={
        "startUrls": [
            {"url": "https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-Google-EI_IE9079.11,17.htm"}
        ],
        "pageFunction": """
            async function pageFunction({ page, request }) {
                const title = await page.title();
                const html = await page.content();
                return { title, html, url: request.url };
            }
        """,
        "launchContext": {"useChrome": True},
        "maxRequestsPerCrawl": 1,
        "proxyConfiguration": {"useApifyProxy": True},
    }
)

for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["title"])
    print(item["html"])

The Apify Store lists 30,000+ Actors searchable by target site or category. You trigger an Actor programmatically via Apify's Python and JavaScript clients, using its ID or name. Each Actor exposes an input schema with accepted fields and their default values, so you only pass the fields you want to override.

A call() method triggers the run and returns the run object once the status resolves. The output writes to the defaultDatasetId field, which you pass to the dataset client to loop through the records. The trade-off is that each Actor carries its own configuration, so the learning curve steepens when you need to tune an Actor's settings for a specific target.

For teams already running Playwright or Puppeteer scripts locally, ZenRows provides a Scraping Browser that replaces your local browser endpoint for a WebSocket URL. Your scripts run through ZenRows' cloud infrastructure, and the CDP (Chrome DevTools Protocol) surface remains the same, so DOM (Document Object Model) interaction, network monitoring, and JavaScript execution calls carry over without rewriting the scraping logic. ZenRows manages the anti-bot bypass, session management, and geotargeting. Apify supports this use case through dedicated Playwright and Puppeteer Actors that run browser automation scripts on the platform.

When Apify Is the Right Choice

Choose Apify when the scraping layer that a web scraping API provides is not enough. The platform provides a marketplace of maintained scrapers, built-in pipeline management, and agentic workflow support. These three scenarios show when those features matter most.

You need a pre-built scraper for a specific site.

Apify is the shortest path to ready-made scrapers that extract data from both major and niche data sources. 30,000+ officially deployed and community-built Actors already exist in the Apify Store for protected target sites like Instagram, TikTok, Amazon, Google Maps, and LinkedIn. Renting a Google Maps scraper for $2.1 per 1,000 locations costs less than the engineering time to build and maintain a scraping infrastructure from scratch.

You need a data automation pipeline.

Apify includes a cron-style scheduler that reruns saved Actor inputs on a defined interval, webhook callbacks that trigger when a run starts, fails, or succeeds, and built-in dataset storage with multiple export options, including JSON, CSV, and JSONL. With ZenRows, scheduling and storage are code you write and maintain manually.

Apify also connects to 30+ third-party tools, including Slack, Google Sheets, GitHub, vector databases, and no-code platforms. The GitHub integration automatically creates an issue when an Actor run fails, so error logs appear in the same place your engineering team already tracks work.

You are building multi-source agentic workflows.

Apify's MCP server exposes its 30,000+ Actors to compatible AI clients like Claude, Cursor, and Codex CLI. The server resolves which Actor to call and the arguments to pass based on the agent's request, so an agentic workflow can pull web data from social media, search engines, and e-commerce sites without manual Actor configuration.

A Skyfire and x402 payment integration enables AI agents to pay for compute usage in digital tokens without being tied to a specific API token. ZenRows ships an MCP server scoped to its Universal Scraper API and Scraping Browser. For workflows that need a single scraping endpoint, that is sufficient. For AI agents in an automated workflow pulling data from multiple sources, Apify's catalog range makes the better fit.

Other Apify Alternatives Worth Knowing

These six web scraping tools solve the data extraction problem, but make different trade-offs around infrastructure ownership, pricing, anti-bot handling, and pipeline requirements. Here's how they compare.

ScraperAPI

ScraperAPI is the closest web scraping API alternative to ZenRows, wrapping proxy rotation, geotargeting, and anti-bot bypass behind a single endpoint. Its dedicated endpoints for Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and Google return structured data without additional parsing logic. ScraperAPI uses a per-request pricing model, but specific parameters incur 10–75× the base credit cost, and protected sites like Amazon, Google, and LinkedIn add 5×, 25×, and 30× credit multipliers, respectively.

Bright Data

Bright Data offers the broadest proxy network, with 400M+ monthly IPs, and a product stack built around unblockers, dedicated scraping APIs, and a dataset marketplace. Bright Data's infrastructure supports large-scale data collection, and its ISO 27001 and SOC2 certifications make it suitable for enterprise teams with strict compliance requirements. However, residential proxies alone start at $499 per month, and Bright Data's KYC onboarding process takes 3-5 business days, which is restrictive for developers who need self-service signup.

Firecrawl

Firecrawl's open-source web crawling API returns LLM (Large Language Model)-ready Markdown from dynamic web pages, stripping navigation, headers, footers, and other noise using an underlying AI model that analyzes page semantics. It accepts natural language input and JSON schema, making it a practical fit for teams building RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation), embedding, and AI (Artificial Intelligence) training pipelines. Firecrawl is closer to an AI-native scraping tool than a general-purpose automation platform, making it less suited for use cases like large-scale e-commerce scraping and price monitoring.

Oxylabs

Oxylabs is a proxy and web unblocker infrastructure for developers who want proxy reliability without managing the network layer. But costs rise above ZenRows' $69 entry tier as traffic grows or your stack requires multiple proxy categories. Proxy settings also require manual configuration in your own scrapers, browsers, or HTTP clients, whereas ZenRows' managed proxy rotation handles it automatically.

ScrapingBee

ScrapingBee's API offers managed headless Chrome, proxy rotation, and optional JavaScript rendering at $49 per month for 250,000 basic requests. Its success-based billing and request-count multiplier resembles ZenRows' structure, but its anti-bot bypass returned a 43% success rate in Scrapeway's May 2026 benchmark.

Scrapy

Scrapy is an open-source Python framework for developers who want full control over their scraping pipeline and deployment boundaries without vendor lock-in. That control comes with the responsibility of managing retry logic, proxy pools, and JavaScript rendering, or performance drops, as your workload moves from basic pages to more complex domains.

The table below compares all six web scraping tools across the same criteria. For the anti-bot bypass success rate, we included results from Scrapeway May 2026 benchmark report because our test covered only Apify and ZenRows. Where the data doesn't exist for a specific tool, we included "no independent benchmark."

Which Tool Should You Choose?

If your scraping job targets protected sites at scale and compute-based billing makes costs harder to predict, ZenRows is the most practical Apify alternative. You send a URL, get HTML or JSON, and pay only for successful requests. Our test results put ZenRows ahead on all seven targets, with the first successful JS-rendered request completed in under five minutes. But the benchmark that matters is how ZenRows performs against your specific targets. The free trial gives you 1,000 basic requests and 40 protected results to find out before committing to a plan. Sign up to get started.