No-Code Web Scraping: Apify vs Octoparse
You can pull structured data off a website without writing a line of code. Two routes exist. Either you find a ready-made Actor in the Apify Store, fill its input form, click Start, and download CSV or JSON. Or you load the page in Octoparse's desktop app and click the fields you want. Apify bills per result. Octoparse bills per seat.
Both routes are genuinely free to start, and they are free in incompatible ways. That difference is what should decide your choice, so the sections below put numbers on it. Every price here was read from Apify's API and Octoparse's own pricing page on 2026-09-09.
What does no-code scraping actually cost?
Apify's Free plan is $0 with $5/month subject to change · verified 2026-09-09 of platform credit. Starter is $19/month subject to change · verified 2026-09-09 ($17/month billed annually) and includes $19 of usage. All three Actors below charge per event, so the credit converts straight into rows.
| Target | Actor | Free plan, $5 credit | Starter, $19 credit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Maps places | compass/crawler-google-places | $0.004/place → ~1,250 places | $0.003/place → ~6,300 places |
| Instagram posts and profiles | apify/instagram-scraper | $0.0027/result → ~1,850 results | $0.0023/result → ~8,200 results |
| Amazon products | junglee/Amazon-crawler | $0.005/result → ~1,000 results | $0.004/result → ~4,750 results |
Per-event prices read from api.apify.com/v2/acts/<user>~<name> on 2026-09-09; plan prices from apify.com/pricing the same day. Treat the row counts as ceilings, not budgets. They assume you spend the whole credit on one Actor and touch no add-ons.
Neither free tier risks a surprise bill. Apify's Free plan takes no card, and once the $5 credit is spent it blocks new runs until your next monthly cycle instead of charging you (apify.com/pricing FAQ, checked 2026-09-10). Octoparse's Free plan is also card-free.
The add-on trap on the Free plan
Pay-per-event Actors price optional enrichments separately, and the Free-tier surcharge on those is much steeper than the surcharge on the base result. On compass/crawler-google-places, a scraped place costs $0.004 on Free against $0.003 on Starter, a 33% gap. Business-leads enrichment costs $0.10 on Free against $0.005 on Starter. That is 20×. Email verification is 25× (api.apify.com, checked 2026-09-09).
Leave the enrichment toggles off while you are on the Free plan. Two hundred business-leads enrichments cost $20 on Free and $1 on Starter. The $19 plan pays for itself on that one input.
Where Octoparse's free tier beats Apify's
Octoparse's free plan is the more generous one by raw row count, and it is not close. It allows 10 scraping tasks, 1 device, and up to 50,000 rows of export per month to Excel, CSV, JSON, HTML, or XML (octoparse.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-09). That is roughly 40× the Google Maps rows Apify's $5 credit buys.
The catch sits in the same feature list. Free extraction is local only. The scrape runs inside the desktop app on your own machine, so it holds a laptop hostage for the duration and stops when you close the lid. Cloud extraction and task scheduling begin at the Standard plan, listed at $69/month billed annually, which Octoparse describes as 16% below its monthly rate.
So the rule is about when the data has to arrive, not how much of it there is:
- A one-time pull of tens of thousands of rows, and you can leave a machine running. Octoparse Free is cheaper than anything Apify sells. Use it.
- A recurring pull that has to land at 6am whether or not your laptop is awake. You need a cloud runner: Apify's Free tier, or Octoparse Standard.
Which tool fits which job?
| Apify | Octoparse | |
|---|---|---|
| How you build | Fill an Actor's input form | Click fields in a visual editor |
| Where it runs | Cloud only | Local on Free; cloud from $69/month, billed annually |
| Site coverage | 70,000+ published Actors | Any site you can load, if you map it yourself |
| Billing | Per result or per event, against a monthly credit | Per seat, per month |
| Free tier ceiling | $5 of usage (~1,250 Maps places) | 50,000 rows/month, local only |
| Scheduling on free | Yes | No |
| Breaks when | The Actor's author stops maintaining it | The target site changes its layout |
| Best for | Targets someone else already solved | Targets nobody has solved |
The Apify Store states "70,000+ ready-to-run tools called Actors" (checked 2026-09-09). Store size moves fast enough that it is worth checking at the source rather than trusting a guide, this one included.
Running both is normal. Apify for the well-supported, high-volume targets; Octoparse for the one obscure directory nobody has built an Actor for.
How do you run your first no-code scrape?
- Pick by target, not by preference. Search the Store for your site. A maintained Actor beats a scraper you have to map by hand, every time. The Apify no-code hub has form-by-form walkthroughs, and Best Apify Actors ranks them by category.
- Cap the first run at 50 results. Fill the input form, set
maxItemsto 50, and run it once. Open the output and check the columns are the ones you need. This costs pennies and catches the wrong-Actor mistake before it costs real credit. - Name the dataset, or export it now. See the retention warning below. This step is not optional.
- Save it as a Task and attach a Schedule. Apify Tasks and Schedules stores the input so you re-run it with one click, hourly, daily, or weekly.
- Route the output somewhere useful. Google Sheets is a native integration. For a CRM or anything else, Apify to Make covers the pipeline, and the Make lead-generation walkthrough shows an end-to-end build.
Site-specific starting points: Google Maps for local business leads, Amazon for prices and reviews, Instagram for profiles and posts. On the Octoparse side, start with the beginner tutorial and the Octoparse review.
What goes wrong, and what it costs you
Your dataset disappears
This is the one that loses real work. Name the dataset, or export it before you close the tab.
Apify's own documentation describes unnamed-storage retention two different ways, and they do not agree. docs.apify.com/platform/storage/dataset says "Unnamed datasets expire after 7 days unless otherwise specified." docs.apify.com/platform/storage/usage says "Unnamed storages and runs beyond the 10 most recent are deleted automatically" and, for the Free plan, "Your 10 most recent runs are retained for 4 months." Both checked 2026-09-09.
Assume 7 days. Both pages agree on the part that matters: named storages are "always exempt from deletion regardless of retention periods." Naming a dataset takes one click and removes the question.
You plan a schedule around the wrong concurrency limit
Two Apify pages disagree here too. apify.com/pricing lists 5 concurrent Actor runs on the Free plan; docs.apify.com/platform/limits lists 25 in its "Maximum number of concurrent Actor runs per user" table. Both checked 2026-09-09. The two pages agree on Starter at 32.
Plan for 5 and treat anything above it as a bonus. If you have staggered five scheduled tasks and a sixth silently queues, this is why. Confirm the real ceiling on your account's Limits page before you rely on it.
The Actor stops being maintained
A Store Actor is someone's product, and products get deprecated or change hands. Neither breaks the URL, so a link check will not warn you. A deprecated Actor's page still returns 200: flamboyant_leaf/incremental-link-crawler reports isDeprecated: true on api.apify.com while its Store page loads normally. And when an Actor moves accounts, the old slug 308-redirects to the new owner's: apify.com/drobnikj/crawler-google-places now resolves to compass/crawler-google-places. Only a genuinely deleted slug 404s. (All three checked on api.apify.com and apify.com, 2026-09-09.) Open the Actor's page and check for a deprecation notice and its last-modified date before you build a schedule on it.
Your Octoparse task breaks on a redesign
Visual scrapers bind to the page's structure. A target site's layout change breaks the field mapping, and nothing warns you: the task runs and returns empty columns. Re-running Auto Detect usually rebuilds the selectors. See handling dynamic sites and AJAX SPAs for the harder cases, and blocking cookie modals for the consent overlay that sits between the visual editor and the data.
When is no-code the wrong answer?
Say plainly when it is. No-code tooling stops paying for itself in three situations:
- The extraction logic is conditional. "Follow this link only if the price dropped, then join it against yesterday's run" is a program, not a form field. Neither tool expresses it.
- You need the data inside another system in real time. Both platforms are batch tools. Scheduled runs plus a webhook is the ceiling.
- The volume makes per-result billing absurd. Run the arithmetic from the first table at your real volume before you commit. A million Google Maps places at the Starter rate of $0.003 is $3,000 a month, which buys a lot of developer time to write and host a scraper instead. The web scraping budget calculator does that comparison properly.
If any of those describe your job, the web scraping learning path is the honest next step. For the other paths in this academy, see the learning paths index.
Yes, on two routes. The Apify Store publishes over 70,000 ready-to-run Actors that you operate by filling an input form and clicking Start (apify.com/store, checked 2026-09-09). Octoparse loads any page in a desktop editor and lets you click the fields you want. Neither requires programming. Both handle pagination, scheduling, and export to CSV or JSON.
Nothing, on either tool, but the free tiers are shaped differently. Apify's Free plan gives $5/month of platform credit, which buys roughly 1,250 Google Maps places at $0.004 each, and it runs in the cloud on a schedule. Octoparse's free plan gives 50,000 rows of export per month across 10 tasks, but extraction is local only, so your own machine has to stay awake for the whole run. Prices checked 2026-09-09.
Search the Apify Store for your target site first. If a maintained Actor already covers it, Apify is faster and needs no selector work at all. If nothing covers it, Octoparse's visual builder is the better tool, because mapping fields by clicking beats waiting for someone else to publish an Actor. The decision follows the target, not the tool.
Yes. Apify's Free plan is $0 with $5/month of platform usage and no credit card (apify.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-09). It includes scheduling and CSV/JSON export. Concurrency is the one number to be careful with: apify.com/pricing lists 5 concurrent Actor runs on Free while docs.apify.com/platform/limits lists 25, both checked 2026-09-09. Plan for 5.
The dataset was unnamed. docs.apify.com/platform/storage/dataset states that unnamed datasets expire after 7 days, and docs.apify.com/platform/storage/usage states that unnamed storages beyond the 10 most recent runs are deleted automatically (both checked 2026-09-09). Named storages are exempt from deletion on every plan. Name the dataset, or download the CSV in the same session.
Yes. Apify has native integrations for Google Sheets, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Airtable, plus webhooks that fire when a run finishes. Anything without a native connector goes through Make, which reaches thousands of apps without code. Octoparse exports to file formats and an API, so it usually needs a middle layer to reach a CRM.
Common mistakes and fixes
My exported dataset vanished a week after the run.
Unnamed Apify storages are temporary. Open the run, click Save to name the dataset, or export to CSV in the same session. Named datasets are retained indefinitely on every plan (docs.apify.com/platform/storage/dataset, checked 2026-09-09).
My Octoparse task stops returning rows after the site changes.
Re-run Auto Detect to rebuild the field selectors. Visual scrapers bind to page structure, so any layout change on the target breaks them until you re-map.
The Actor finished but returned far fewer rows than I asked for.
Check the run log first. The usual causes are a maxItems cap you left at its default, a target that paginates behind a login, or blocked requests. Enable Apify Proxy in the Actor's input before assuming the site is unscrapeable.
My bill grew much faster than the row count.
Pay-per-event Actors charge add-ons separately from results. On compass/crawler-google-places, email verification and lead enrichment cost $0.10 per record on the Free plan against $0.004 and $0.005 on Starter (api.apify.com, checked 2026-09-09). Turn add-ons off until you are on a paid tier.