Compare/vs Apify

Crawl4AI vs Apify

Both get data from the web for code and AI. On Apify each tool in its store has its own price and its own rule for failures. Crawl4AI has one price list for every page, never charges a failed call, and comes from the team that wrote the open-source crawler.

Facts last checked 12 Nov 2026

Crawl4AI Cloudcrawl4ai.com

1k plain pages$0.10 · $0.08 on Builder

1k Google pages + ads$1.00, ads and AI overview inside

Unused creditExtra credits never expire

Data regionEU, Singapore or US

AApifyapify.com

1k plain pages$1.50 Starter · $1.00 Business

1k Google pages + ads$9.50 on Starter

Unused creditExpires every billing cycle

Data regionOne US region (us-east-1)

Talk to us about your team See the side by side ↓

Crawl4AI vs Apify: the short answer

Crawl4AI charges by the work each page needs ($0.10 per 1,000 plain pages, $0.50 with a real browser) and nothing for a failed or blocked call; Apify's costs $1.00 to $1.50 per 1,000 for any page, and each other tool sets its own price and failure rule. Google results with ads and AI overview cost $1.00 per 1,000 on Crawl4AI against $9.50 on Apify's Starter plan, and a LinkedIn profile costs 1 credit on a Crawl4AI recipe against $4.00 to $10.00 per 1,000 on third-party Apify tools. Crawl4AI's extra credits never expire and a first payment is refundable within 14 days; Apify's prepaid usage and its fees are . Crawl4AI runs in the EU, Singapore and the US with teams and an audit log from the $99 Builder plan; Apify runs in . Agents set Crawl4AI up from one message, and 17 MCP tools let them price a call first and manage their own budget.

Which one fits

Different tools fit different jobs. Here is when each one is the better choice.

AChoose Apify if

You want to host your own scraper code: , with storage, schedules and webhooks.
You build no-code flows in Zapier, Make or n8n and want ready connectors for them.
You write your own browser scripts in Playwright, Puppeteer or Selenium and want a place to run them.
Almost every page you fetch is a hard site, where their Web Fetch at costs less than a hard page on Crawl4AI.

Choose Crawl4AI if

You build with AI agents: one message sets Crawl4AI up in Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, Gemini CLI or OpenCode, and 17 MCP tools let the agent run recipes, price a call first and manage its budget.
You want one price list for every page, and nothing to pay for a failed or blocked call.
You need Google results as data: 1 credit a page with ads and AI overview inside. Apify charges for ads .
You need named sites as rows from one vendor: 93 recipes, a LinkedIn profile for 1 credit. On Apify, .
You want money that stays yours: 14-day refunds and extra credits that never expire.
You need data in the EU, Singapore or the US, and a team with an audit log from Builder.
You want to run it inside your network on the same engine, Apache 2.0.

For enterprise teams

The controls your security team asks for

Crawl4AI's Enterprise plan next to Apify's. Apify's side restates its own pages; click a line to see the quote.

Control	Crawl4AI Enterprise	AApify Enterprise
SSO (SAML, OIDC)	✓ Yes
SCIM user sync	✓ Yes	Not published
Teams, roles and audit log	✓ From Builder ($99), no seat limit
Zero data retention	✓ Yes	Not published
IP allowlist and key limits	✓ Yes
Static exit IPs	✓ Yes	Not published for the account
Where data is processed	EU, Singapore or US, your choice
Deployment	Cloud, dedicated fleet, inside your network, managed pipeline; one engine	Apify cloud; self-hosted platform not published
DPA and invoice billing	✓ Every Enterprise plan
Refunds	14 days, if no credits were used
Status page	Hourly uptime per service, public
Uptime and response SLA	Typical: 99.9% a month; service down: first answer within 1 hour, 24/7; part broken: 4 business hours; a question: 1 business day; 5% of the month's fee back if missed, 10% under 99%
Support	A named engineer
Security assurance	Controls monitored every day in Drata, with the evidence kept; dependencies watched for known vulnerabilities; SOC 2 audit by Sensiba under way, report target January 2027. Security pack on request: policies, audit status, DPA, questionnaire answers.

Bring your current invoice

Send us your last scraping bill, from Apify or anyone else. We price the same workload on Crawl4AI and walk you through it on a 30-minute call.

Book the invoice call Enterprise plan

Same job, two calls

6 jobs an agent does every day. The call on each side, and the price of 1,000 of them at list. The label marks the side that costs less for that job.

01 · One page to Markdowna plain page

Crawl4AI costs less$0.10/ 1,000

curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com","format":"md"}'

0.1 credit. $0.08 per 1,000 on Builder.

Apify $1.00–$1.50/ 1,000

curl "https://web-fetch.apify.actor/?url=https://example.com&formats=markdown,links&token=$TOKEN"

Web Fetch: one price for any page, .

02 · A whole site1,000 plain pages

Crawl4AI costs less$0.10/ 1,000

curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/site \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"url":"https://docs.example.com"}'

/site: 0.5 credit for the call, then each page at its /scrape price. Up to 500 pages a call; /scan lists up to 50,000 URLs.

Apify ≈ $0.10–$0.16/ 1,000

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/apify~website-content-crawler/runs?token=$TOKEN" \
  -d '{…}'

Website Content Crawler is priced by compute: , so $0.10 to $0.16 at plan rates, before proxy and storage. With a browser: $0.5 to $5.

03 · A site that blocks botsproxies and a real browser

Crawl4AI $2.00/ 1,000

curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"url":"https://hard-site.example",
       "proxy":"extra"}'

2 credits for a hard page. A page we cannot get costs nothing.

Apify costs less$1.00–$1.50/ 1,000

curl "https://web-fetch.apify.actor/?url=https://hard-site.example&wait=2000&token=$TOKEN"

Same Web Fetch price with a real browser, and .

04 · Google results with adsone results page, ads and AI overview

Crawl4AI costs less$1.00/ 1,000

curl "https://api.crawl4ai.com/serp?q=best+crm+software" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY"

1 credit a page from /serp: organic, ads, maps and AI overview in one answer. A failed answer costs nothing.

Apify $6.30–$9.50/ 1,000

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/apify~google-search-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$TOKEN" \
  -d '{"queries":"best crm software",
       "maxPagesPerQuery":1}'

Google Search Results Scraper: $2.50 a page, AI overview +$2.00, ads +$5.00 per 1,000 on Starter, .

05 · A LinkedIn profile as rowsname, title, company, history

Crawl4AI costs less$1.00/ 1,000

curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/recipes/linkedin-profile \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"profile":"satyanadella"}'

A recipe: 2 units × 0.5 credit. The same named columns every time; one of 93.

Apify $3.20–$10/ 1,000

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/harvestapi~linkedin-profile-scraper/runs?token=$TOKEN" \
  -d '{…}'

No Apify-built LinkedIn tool; the top results are third-party, such as , and up to $10 per 1,000 on others.

06 · Structured JSON from a pageyour schema, filled by a model

Crawl4AI costs less$1.87/ 1,000

curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/extract \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"url":"https://news.ycombinator.com",
       "instruction":"the top stories",
       "schema":{…}}'

Median of real calls this week: 0.5 credit for the page plus the model's tokens.

Apify $20–$25/ 1,000

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/apify~ai-web-scraper/runs?token=$TOKEN" \
  -d '{…}'

AI Web Scraper: .

Crawl4AI vs Apify, side by side

Each Apify cell restates Apify's own pages, read on 12 Nov 2026. Click it to see the quote and the page. "Not published" means those pages say nothing about it, not that it is missing.

	Crawl4AI Cloud	AApify
Pricing
How you pay	Credits in every plan: Free, Starter $10, Builder $99, Scale $499
1,000 plain / browser / hard pages	$0.10 / $0.50 / $2.00
Failed calls	Free, blocked pages included
A page already cached	Half price	Not published
Unused credit	Extra credits never expire
Refunds	14 days, if no credits were used
What you get back
Formats	Markdown, HTML, links, media, metadata, tables; engine and cache on every answer
Whole site	/site deep crawl (500 pages a call); /scan up to 50,000 URLs
Google results as data	/serp 1 credit; ads, maps and AI overview inside
Named sites	93 recipes from one team; a LinkedIn profile 1 credit
Extraction	/extract by schema or plain words; median 1.87 credits
Documents	PDF, Word and Excel; a PDF costs one page
Change monitoring	Watch (beta)	Not published as an Apify tool
Hard sites
Proxies	standard and extra levels; country choice; included in the page price
Bot checks	Gets past bot checks and CAPTCHA pages on hard sites; a page we cannot get costs nothing
Agents
MCP	Hosted, no install; key or OAuth; 17 tools
Setup	One message sets it up in 7 coding agents
Agent budget	Estimate, balance, spend cap and top-up as tools; cost on every answer
Results	In the answer
Open source
License	Apache 2.0, 87,236 GitHub stars
Self-host	The same engine as the Cloud	Libraries only; platform self-host not published

Crawl4AI's prices come from its live price list, GET /v1/prices. Prices change; check each product's own pricing page before you decide.

The trade-off

What each one does better

AWhere Apify does best

Your own code in the cloud. Write a scraper in JavaScript or Python and run it there, with storage, schedules and webhooks.
No-code connectors. Ready links to Zapier, Make, n8n and similar tools.
Browser scripts you write. Templates for Playwright, Puppeteer and Selenium for click-and-fill jobs.
One flat fetch price. Web Fetch charges the same for a hard page as for a plain one.

Where Crawl4AI is the better choice

Pay for the work, not the attempt. 0.1 credit for a plain page, nothing for a failed or blocked call, half price for a page we already hold.
Made for agents. One message sets it up; 17 MCP tools cover recipes, jobs, cost estimates and the budget.
Ready data from named sites. 93 recipes from one team, LinkedIn included, return fixed columns for about 1 credit.
Built for enterprise. Three regions, teams and an audit log from Builder, SSO and SCIM, and 14-day refunds.

Switch in one prompt

Move your Apify calls in minutes

Paste this into Claude Code, Cursor or Codex in your project. It finds your Apify calls and moves them to Crawl4AI, one endpoint at a time, and keeps both working until you check the results.

Move this project's Apify calls to Crawl4AI Cloud. Read https://crawl4ai.com/llms.txt first. 1. Find every call to the Apify API or SDK. 2. Map each one: apify/web-fetch → POST /scrape · apify/rag-web-browser → GET /search + POST /scrape/batch · apify/website-content-crawler → POST /site · /scan + /scrape/jobs · apify/google-search-scraper → GET /serp · apify/ai-web-scraper → POST /extract · Store tools for LinkedIn, Amazon, Maps → POST /recipes/{name} · Batch run + get-dataset-items → POST /scrape/jobs · maxTotalChargeUsd → /v1/estimate · spend_cap. 3. Read the key from CRAWL4AI_API_KEY (YOUR_CRAWL4AI_API_KEY). 4. Keep the old path behind a flag; compare 20 real URLs on both; show me the diff.

then add your API key. Get a free key

Apify		Crawl4AI
apify/web-fetch	→	POST /scrape
apify/rag-web-browser	→	GET /search + POST /scrape/batch
apify/website-content-crawler	→	POST /site · /scan + /scrape/jobs
apify/google-search-scraper	→	GET /serp
apify/ai-web-scraper	→	POST /extract
Store tools for LinkedIn, Amazon, Maps	→	POST /recipes/{name}
Batch run + get-dataset-items	→	POST /scrape/jobs
maxTotalChargeUsd	→	/v1/estimate · spend_cap

From both products' docs, 12 Nov 2026.

Using both

Not either-or. Both speak MCP, so one agent can hold both. A team could keep its own scraper code and no-code flows on Apify and use Crawl4AI for pages, Google results, recipes and EU data.

Apify
your own code · no-code flows

Crawl4AI
recipes · Google · EU data

Frequently asked questions

How much does Apify cost per 1,000 pages?

It depends on the tool. Apify's Web Fetch costs $1.50 per 1,000 pages on Starter and $1.00 on Business, for any page; Website Content Crawler is priced by compute at "approximately" $0.2 to $5 per 1,000. Crawl4AI costs $0.10 per 1,000 plain pages and $0.50 per 1,000 browser pages.

Do I pay for failed Apify runs?

It depends on the tool. Web Fetch charges "nothing for failed requests", but Apify's guide tells tool developers to "Charge for inputs that seem valid but lead to errors, such as URLs that return a 404". On Crawl4AI a failed call costs nothing, a blocked page included.

Does Apify roll over unused credit or give refunds?

No to both, by its own pages: unused usage credits "expire at the end of the billing cycle" and fees are "non-cancellable, non-refundable". On Crawl4AI extra credits never expire, and a first payment or a credit purchase is refundable within 14 days if no credit was used.

Does Apify have EU data residency?

Apify "operates the platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the us-east-1 region", in one region. Crawl4AI runs in the EU, Singapore and the US, and keeps account and billing data in the EU.

How much does Apify charge for Google search results?

Apify's Google Search Results Scraper charges $2.50 per 1,000 result pages on Starter, plus $2.00 per 1,000 AI overviews and $5.00 per 1,000 pages for ads, charged "regardless of whether ads are found". Crawl4AI /serp is 1 credit ($1.00 per 1,000) with ads, AI overview and maps in the answer.

What is a good Apify alternative for LinkedIn?

Crawl4AI has LinkedIn recipes for profiles, companies, jobs, people search and posts, from the same team; a profile costs 1 credit ($1.00 per 1,000). On Apify the top LinkedIn profile tools are third-party, at $4.00 to $10.00 per 1,000.

Is Crawl4AI a library you run yourself, at $0.50 per 1,000 pages?

No. Apify's alternatives page calls Crawl4AI "a library you run for yourself", and an Apify blog post prices 1,000 plain pages on Crawl4AI Cloud at $0.50; neither is correct. Crawl4AI Cloud is live in three regions with a public price list: a plain page is 0.1 credit, so 1,000 cost $0.10, with proxies and browsers included. The open-source engine is Apache 2.0, not MIT as another Apify post says, with 87,236 GitHub stars (GitHub, 2026-11-12).

Sources and method

We read these pages on 12 Nov 2026. Crawl4AI's facts come from its live price list, docs and terms. Something wrong or out of date? Write to hello@crawl4ai.com and we fix it.

This page for your agent or notes · Markdown ↗ · JSON ↗