Free Apify alternatives, and what they cost in 2026
Two Apify alternatives are free with no expiry and no card: Crawl4AI (Apache-2.0, 82.0k GitHub stars) and Crawlee (Apache-2.0, 25.7k stars). Both are libraries you run yourself. Everything else sold as free is a tier or a trial: Firecrawl gives 1,000 credits a month, Octoparse 10 tasks and 50,000 exported rows a month, ScraperAPI 5,000 credits once. Apify's own free plan gives $5 of platform credit a month. If your budget is genuinely zero, the answer is a library on hardware you already own. You swap the invoice for your own hours.
Every figure below was read off the vendor's own pricing or repository page on 2026-09-09. Where a headline price is a promotion rather than list, both numbers are named.
Apify itself is a hosted platform: over 70,000 prebuilt scrapers called Actors, plus scheduling, storage and proxy hooks on a single bill (apify.com/store, checked 2026-09-09). What Apify is not: a proxy seller, a Markdown-for-RAG API, or a desktop point-and-click tool. Each of those is someone else's core product, and each of those vendors beats Apify on price when that one layer is the only layer you need. This page is published by an Apify affiliate, so the useful part of it is the section that names where Apify loses.
Which Apify alternatives are actually free?
Only the open-source libraries are free without an asterisk. The hosted tools all cap something — credits, tasks, rows, or days. The column that matters is the last one.
| Tool | Free tier (checked 2026-09-09) | Recurring? | What it costs next | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Crawl4AI | Full library, Apache-2.0 | Permanent | $0 forever | You supply the server, the proxies, and the maintenance |
| Crawlee | Full library, Apache-2.0 | Permanent | $0 forever | Same, plus you build the scheduler and storage |
| Firecrawl | 1,000 credits/month, no card, 2 concurrent requests | Monthly reset | Hobby $16/mo billed annually, 5,000 credits | ~1,000 pages or 500 searches a month, then it stops |
| Octoparse | 10 tasks, 1 device, 50,000 rows exported/month | Free forever, no card | Standard from $69/mo monthly, ~$58/mo annual | Local extraction only; cloud runs are paid |
| Apify Free | $5 platform credit/month | Monthly reset | Starter $19/mo ($17 annual), $19 credit | Per-result Actor charges come out of the same $5 |
| ScraperAPI | 5,000 API credits at signup | One-off trial | Not retrieved live on 2026-09-09 | Trial, not a standing free tier |
| IPRoyal | No published free data allowance | — | Residential from $7.35/GB pay-as-you-go | You are buying IPs, not a scraper |
| Bright Data | Free trial, plus a first-deposit match to $500 | — | Residential $4.00/GB pay-as-you-go | That $4.00 is a 50%-off promo on an $8/GB list price |
Sources, in order: github.com/unclecode/crawl4ai, github.com/apify/crawlee, firecrawl.dev/pricing, octoparse.com/pricing, apify.com/pricing, docs.scraperapi.com, iproyal.com/residential-proxies, brightdata.com/pricing/proxy-network. All fetched 2026-09-09.
I could not load ScraperAPI's plan table on 2026-09-09 — the page renders its pricing client-side. The 5,000-credit trial figure comes from ScraperAPI's own documentation. Treat any monthly price you read elsewhere as unchecked until you see it on their pricing page yourself.
What does a free scraper actually cost to run?
The library is the cheap part. Three line items survive the move to self-hosting, and one of them is never zero.
- The code: $0. Crawl4AI and Crawlee are both Apache-2.0. No seat fee, no per-run fee, no vendor.
- Somewhere to run it. A crawler that only runs when your laptop is open is not a pipeline. Budget a small always-on box.
- Proxies: the line item that does not go away. Residential traffic starts at $7.35/GB subject to change · verified 2026-09-09 pay-as-you-go on IPRoyal, dropping to $5.25/GB on a 10 GB subscription and $1.75/GB at 10 TB. Bright Data's advertised $4.00/GB subject to change · verified 2026-09-09 is a 50%-off coupon against an $8/GB list; the $2.50/GB tier requires a $1,999/month commitment.
- Your maintenance hours. Not a price, but the item that decides this. A DOM change on a target site is your problem now, on your weekend.
Here is the arithmetic against Apify's free plan, using a real Actor. The Google Maps Scraper (compass/crawler-google-places, 596,325 users, priced per event since 2025-03-31, latest rate revision 2026-06-30, verified via api.apify.com on 2026-09-09) advertises from $1.50 per 1,000 scraped places — but that headline is the Gold-tier rate, and Gold only comes with the $999/month Business plan. Apify Store discounts are keyed to your plan (api.apify.com and apify.com/pricing, both checked 2026-09-09):
| Plan (discount tier) | Rate per place | Monthly credit included | Places covered by that credit | Can it reach 100,000 places/month? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free (no discount) | $0.004 | $5 | ~1,250 | No. The Free plan blocks at its $5 credit with no overage, so it stops at ~1,250 |
| Starter (Bronze) | $0.003 | $19 | ~6,300 | No. $19 credit plus a $100 maximum platform limit caps total spend at $119, or ~39,700 places |
| Scale (Silver) | $0.002 | $199 | ~99,500 | Yes, about $200 all-in. The cheapest self-serve landing spot at this volume |
| Business (Gold) | $0.0015 | $999 | ~666,000 | Yes. 100,000 places is $150 of usage, well inside the plan fee |
That fourth column is the one people get wrong, including an earlier version of this page. Multiplying 100,000 by the per-place rate gives $400 on Free and $300 on Starter, and neither is a bill you can actually run up: Apify caps overage per plan, so those runs stop rather than spend. The maximum platform limit is $100 on Starter and $1,000 on Scale, and the Free plan cannot raise its limit at all (help.apify.com, checked 2026-09-10). At 100,000 places a month the real choice is Scale or nothing.
So Apify's $5 of monthly free credit covers roughly 1,250 places a month at zero cost, and fewer once you switch on reviews or images.
To beat that with a free library you would have to write a Maps parser, keep it alive, and buy IPs. One gigabyte of residential traffic already costs $7.35 at IPRoyal's pay-as-you-go rate. Below a few thousand results a month, "free" is more expensive than free.
The crossover moves the other way at volume. The 100,000-place row above is an estimate made on 2026-09-09, not a measurement. Scale is the cheapest self-serve landing spot on Apify at that volume, roughly $200/month all-in. A self-hosted Crawlee job on your own hardware, consuming an assumed 20 GB of residential traffic at IPRoyal's $5.25/GB subscription rate, is about $105 of proxy spend. Cheaper on paper, before a single hour of engineering. The break-even sits in the tens of thousands of results per month, and it resets every time a target site changes its markup.
Crawl4AI or Crawlee: which free library should you self-host?
Both are Apache-2.0 and both are genuinely free. They are built for different outputs.
| Crawl4AI | Crawlee | |
|---|---|---|
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| GitHub stars (2026-09-09) | 82.0k | 25.7k |
| Primary language | Python | Node.js / TypeScript, plus a Python port |
| Native output | LLM-friendly Markdown | Whatever you parse into typed records |
| Built by | unclecode / community | Apify |
| Latest release note | v0.9.3, a security release closing five coordinated-disclosure vulnerabilities in PDF processing and the Docker Playground, plus 33 bug fixes | Ongoing |
Crawl4AI's most recent release is a security release. That is not a mark against the project — coordinated disclosure handled openly is a good sign — but if you run it, pin and patch it rather than treating it as install-once infrastructure.
Crawlee's README states it "is open-source and runs anywhere". It is written by Apify, which is the practical argument for it over Crawl4AI when you are not certain you will stay self-hosted: an Actor is a Crawlee crawler with a manifest, so moving up to managed runs later is a packaging job rather than a rewrite.
If your output is Markdown for a model, take Crawl4AI. If you are producing typed rows and might one day want someone else to run the schedule, take Crawlee. Details in Apify vs Crawl4AI and the self-hosting guide.
When is Firecrawl the better choice than Apify?
Firecrawl turns URLs and crawls into clean Markdown for AI pipelines. Its free tier is 1,000 credits a month with no card, which is about 1,000 pages or 500 searches at 2 concurrent requests. Hobby is $16/month billed annually for 5,000 credits, Standard $83/month for 100,000 (firecrawl.dev/pricing, 2026-09-09).
Firecrawl wins when the deliverable is tokens for a model and the source set is arbitrary documentation, marketing or knowledge-base pages. For that job it needs no configuration at all, and its free tier alone will carry a small RAG project indefinitely.
Apify wins when you need typed, schema-stable columns from a known domain, because a maintained Actor already handles that site's layout changes. See Apify vs Firecrawl.
When is Bright Data the better choice than Apify?
Bright Data sells IPs and unblocking, not finished scrapers. Residential is $4.00/GB pay-as-you-go under a standing 50%-off promotion (list $8/GB), $3.50/GB at a $499/month commitment, and $2.50/GB at $1,999/month. Datacenter IPs run $1.80 each at 10 IPs down to $1.30 at 1,000; ISP IPs $1.40 down to $0.90 (brightdata.com/pricing/proxy-network, 2026-09-09).
Bright Data wins when IP quality or compliance paperwork is the actual bottleneck and your extraction code already exists. If your only requirement is buying high-grade proxy access for a scraper you maintain, Bright Data is the market leader and Apify is the wrong purchase.
Apify wins when you want the scraper, the schedule and the dataset on one invoice. See Apify vs Bright Data.
Note the promotional structure before you budget. The $4.00/GB figure carries a coupon code on the live page; the durable planning number is the $8/GB list.
When is Octoparse the better choice than Apify?
Octoparse is point-and-click desktop and cloud scraping for people who will not write code. The free plan is free forever with no card: 10 tasks, 1 device, 1 user, 2 concurrent local runs, and 50,000 rows of export a month with up to 10,000 rows per export. Standard starts at $69/month monthly, about $58/month billed annually; Professional is $249/month annually (octoparse.com/pricing, 2026-09-09).
Octoparse wins when a non-developer needs data from a long-tail site that has no maintained Actor, and the layout is stable enough to click-map. Its free tier is the most generous permanent free tier of any hosted tool on this page.
Apify wins when a Store Actor already tracks that site's DOM for you, because then you are paying someone else to absorb the breakage. See Apify vs Octoparse.
When are ScraperAPI or IPRoyal enough on their own?
Both sell the network layer only. ScraperAPI fronts your HTTP requests with rotated IPs and optional headless rendering, and gives 5,000 API credits at signup (docs.scraperapi.com, 2026-09-09). IPRoyal sells raw residential and datacenter proxies from $7.35/GB pay-as-you-go, $5.25/GB on a 10 GB subscription.
They win when you already have working parsers and only need reliable egress. Choose ScraperAPI for the fastest integration, since it is a query-parameter change to an existing client. Choose IPRoyal when you want to own the HTTP stack and only rent the IPs.
Neither replaces a platform. There is no Actor store, no scheduler, no dataset storage. See Apify vs ScraperAPI.
Which other tools appear on Apify alternative lists?
These come up constantly on competing round-ups. Prices are not quoted here because I did not verify them live on 2026-09-09, and an unchecked price is worse than none.
| Tool | What it actually is | When it beats Apify |
|---|---|---|
| Diffbot | AI extraction APIs plus a knowledge graph of organizations, articles and products | You want pre-built entity data without writing parsers; vs Diffbot |
| Zyte | Scrapy hosting and APIs | Your team already has a deep Scrapy investment; vs Zyte |
| Oxylabs | Enterprise residential and datacenter proxies plus scraper APIs | You need a second large proxy mesh and run your own parsers |
| ScrapingBee | Rendering API | Same niche as ScraperAPI when you only need rendered HTML |
| ParseHub | Visual cloud scraper | Tiny one-off jobs that fit its free tier; vs ParseHub |
| PhantomBuster | Social and LinkedIn sequence automation | You want outreach sequencing, not data collection; vs PhantomBuster |
| Gumloop | Agent and workflow builder advertising 300+ connectors (gumloop.com, 2026-09-09) | You are orchestrating AI steps across apps; it is not a data-collection layer and still needs one |
| Clay | GTM enrichment over rows you already have | You have a list to enrich, not a site to scrape; vs Clay |
| RapidAPI | API marketplace | Someone already publishes the data as an API; vs RapidAPI |
Gumloop's connector count was 100+ when this page last stated it. Their homepage says 300+ as of 2026-09-09.
Where does Apify genuinely lose?
Four cases, plainly.
You only need IPs. Buy them from Bright Data or IPRoyal and keep your own code. Paying platform fees for a runtime you do not use is waste.
You only need Markdown for a model, at small volume. Firecrawl's 1,000 free credits a month will outlast most prototypes, and it needs no configuration.
Nobody on the team writes code and the target is obscure. Octoparse's permanent free tier — 10 tasks, no card — is a better first move than any paid platform.
Your budget is genuinely zero and stays zero. Crawl4AI or Crawlee on hardware you own. The cost is your hours, and that is a real cost, but it is not an invoice.
One more thing worth knowing before you plan around Apify's free tier: its own two official sources disagree on concurrency. apify.com/pricing lists 5 concurrent runs on the Free plan; docs.apify.com/platform/limits lists 25 (both checked 2026-09-09). Neither is a typo I can resolve from outside. Schedule against 5, and confirm the real ceiling on your account's Limits page before you depend on it.
How to choose, in four questions
- Do you already have working parsers? Yes → buy proxies only (Bright Data, IPRoyal, ScraperAPI). No → keep reading.
- Is the output Markdown for a language model, or typed columns? Markdown → Firecrawl, or Crawl4AI if you want it free. Typed columns → keep reading.
- Will anyone on the team write code? No → Octoparse's free tier, then its Standard plan. Yes → keep reading.
- Does a maintained Actor already exist for your target site? Yes → Apify, and the free $5 credit will tell you within an hour whether the output fits. No → Crawlee if you will own it, Apify if you want someone else to own the runtime.
The reason Apify is the default answer to question 4 is bundling: scraper, proxy hooks, storage, scheduler and integrations arrive as one thing. The alternatives win whenever one of those layers is the whole product you need and the rest is already solved in-house.
What changed recently
- Apify Starter is $19/month, $17 billed annually, with $19 of included usage (apify.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-09).
- The Store lists over 70,000 Actors (apify.com/store, checked 2026-09-09).
- Google Maps scraping on Apify is priced per event (since 2025-03-31; latest rate revision 2026-06-30). Cost models built on compute units for that job no longer apply. The advertised $1.50 per 1,000 places is the Gold-tier rate on the $999/month Business plan; Free-plan users pay $4.00 per 1,000 and Starter users $3.00 per 1,000 (api.apify.com, checked 2026-09-09).
- Gumloop now advertises 300+ connectors, up from the 100+ this page previously cited.
- Bright Data's $4.00/GB residential rate is promotional, sitting behind a 50%-off coupon on an $8/GB list price.
The fastest way to settle this is to run the Actor for your target site on the Apify free plan and look at the output columns. If the schema fits, you are done in an hour. If it does not, you have learned that before writing a parser — and the free alternatives above are still there.
Not convinced Apify belongs in the shortlist at all? Read the full comparison hub, or the broader web scraping tools comparison that covers vendors outside this page's scope.
Yes, two: Crawl4AI and Crawlee, both Apache-2.0 libraries with no license fee and no expiry. You supply the server, the proxies and the maintenance. Among hosted tools, Octoparse's free plan (10 tasks, 50,000 exported rows a month, no card) is the most generous permanent free tier, and Firecrawl gives 1,000 credits a month. All checked 2026-09-09.
Crawl4AI (82.0k stars, Apache-2.0, Python) if your output is Markdown for a language model. Crawlee (25.7k stars, Apache-2.0, Node.js and Python) if you are building typed records, because it is the same library Apify Actors are built on, so a later move to managed runs is a packaging job rather than a rewrite. Star counts checked 2026-09-09.
Yes, and the two are not really rivals. Crawlee is the crawling library; Apify is the runtime, storage, scheduler and proxy layer around it. If you want a managed environment, Apify is Crawlee plus the operations you would otherwise run yourself. Self-host Crawlee only when you already have the infrastructure and the engineering time to keep it healthy.
For most teams below roughly tens of thousands of results a month, yes. A maintained Store Actor absorbs the target site's layout changes, which is the recurring cost custom infrastructure never escapes. Build your own when volume makes per-result pricing dominate, when you need a runtime environment Apify does not offer, or when data residency rules out a third-party platform.
Octoparse. It is point-and-click, its free plan is permanent and needs no card (10 tasks, 1 device, 50,000 rows exported a month, checked 2026-09-09), and it does not assume anyone on the team writes Python. Zyte assumes Scrapy; Apify assumes you can at least read a JSON schema. Octoparse assumes neither.
They sit at different layers. Oxylabs sells proxies and scraper APIs, so it fits when you have your own extraction and orchestration and need enterprise-grade IPs. Apify sells the runtime, storage and prebuilt Actors. For an AI data pipeline you often need both: IPs from a proxy vendor, extraction and scheduling from a platform. I did not verify Oxylabs pricing live on 2026-09-09, so check their page before budgeting.
Firecrawl for hosted Markdown extraction with almost no setup, on a free tier of 1,000 credits a month. Crawl4AI for the same output self-hosted at zero license cost. Diffbot when you want pre-structured entities rather than page text. Apify stays stronger when your pipeline needs schema-stable typed feeds from specific domains rather than prose.
Not directly. Gumloop is an agent and workflow builder advertising 300+ connectors (gumloop.com, checked 2026-09-09). It orchestrates AI steps across applications but does not collect web data itself, so it still needs a source underneath it. Apify Actors fit inside a Gumloop flow rather than being replaced by it.
On Apify, the Google Maps Scraper (compass/crawler-google-places) has been priced per event since 2025-03-31 and advertises from $1.50 per 1,000 scraped places — but that headline is the Gold-tier rate, which only the $999/month Business plan reaches. The Free plan gets no Apify Store discount and pays $0.004 per place, so the $5 monthly free credit covers roughly 1,250 places before you pay anything (api.apify.com and apify.com/pricing, both checked 2026-09-09). Self-hosting is only cheaper once you are past the tens of thousands of results a month, because residential proxy traffic starts at $7.35/GB.
Apify's own sources disagree. apify.com/pricing lists 5 concurrent runs on the Free plan; docs.apify.com/platform/limits lists 25 (both checked 2026-09-09). Plan your schedules against 5, which is the safe assumption, and confirm the real ceiling on your account's Limits page before you rely on it.
Common mistakes and fixes
We moved to a self-hosted crawler and the bill did not go to zero.
The library is free; the IPs are not. Residential traffic starts at $7.35/GB pay-as-you-go on IPRoyal and $4.00/GB on Bright Data's promotional rate (both checked 2026-09-09). Price your expected GB before you migrate.
Firecrawl output does not match our warehouse schema.
Firecrawl returns Markdown aimed at language models. For SKU-level or social fields, use a maintained Apify Actor or write your own Crawlee parser.
We planned for 25 concurrent runs on the Apify free plan and hit a ceiling.
Apify's own sources disagree: apify.com/pricing lists 5 concurrent runs on Free, docs.apify.com/platform/limits lists 25 (both checked 2026-09-09). Schedule against 5 and confirm on your account's Limits page.