Diffbot pricing vs Apify: what 100,000 pages cost
Diffbot sells credits. Free is $0 for 10,000 credits a month, Startup is $299 for 250,000 credits, Plus is $899 for 1,000,000, and Enterprise is quoted. One Extract call on one page costs one credit. Apify sells platform usage instead, starting at $19/month subject to change · verified 2026-09-09 with $19 of usage included. Both figures read live from the vendors' own pricing pages on 2026-09-09.
The $299-versus-$19 gap is the headline, and it is also the most misleading number on this page. Diffbot's marginal rate is $1.00 per 1,000 pages once you are past the plan allotment. Apify's is $0.20 per 1,000 pages on a raw HTTP crawl and $0.50 to $5.00 with a headless browser. So Diffbot's per-page rate lands inside Apify's range, not above it. What differs is the floor: Diffbot's cheapest paid plan is $299/month whether you use it or not.
What does Diffbot cost?
Read live from diffbot.com/pricing on 2026-09-09.
| Plan | Price | Included credits | Overage | Rate limit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/mo | 10,000/mo | none (quota enforced) | 5 requests/min |
| Startup | $299/mo | 250,000/mo | $0.001/credit | 5 requests/sec |
| Plus | $899/mo | 1,000,000/mo | $0.0009/credit | 25 requests/sec |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom | 25+ requests/sec |
Diffbot states that "Signing up for the Free plan doesn't require a credit card; you only add payment details when you upgrade." Crawl access (25 active crawls) starts on Plus, not Startup. Diffbot's pricing page does not say whether unused credits roll over, so assume they do not until you have that in writing.
What does one Diffbot credit actually buy?
This is where budgets get wrong, because the credit is not a flat unit.
| Operation | Credits | Effective cost per unit on Startup |
|---|---|---|
| Extract one page | 1 | $0.0012 |
| Extract one page through Diffbot's proxy | 2 | $0.0024 |
| Natural Language API, one document | 1 | $0.0012 |
| Web Search, run one search | 1 | $0.0012 |
| Export one Knowledge Graph facet query record | 100 | $0.120 |
| Enhance one Knowledge Graph entity record | 25 | $0.030 |
| Export one Knowledge Graph entity record | 25 | $0.030 |
The 25-credit export is the line to plan around. Startup's 250,000 credits buy 250,000 page extractions or 10,000 entity records, and Diffbot's own docs note that Extract costs "two credits when using a proxy service" (diffbot.com/docs/extract, read 2026-09-09). Diffbot publishes no per-query price for the Knowledge Graph itself. DQL queries are billed per record returned, not per query, and DQL run over your own crawl collections consumes no credits at all (diffbot.com/docs/crawl/search, read 2026-09-09). A blocked-site workload therefore burns credits twice as fast as the pricing page's headline number implies.
How does Apify price the same work?
Apify charges for platform usage (compute, storage, proxy) measured in compute units, with a monthly plan fee that comes with an equal amount of included usage. Read live from apify.com/pricing on 2026-09-09.
| Plan | Price | Annual | Included usage | CU rate | Max platform limit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/mo | — | $5/mo | $0.20/CU | $5 (cannot be raised) |
| Starter | $19/mo | $17/mo | $19/mo | $0.20/CU | $100 |
| Scale | $199/mo | $179/mo | $199/mo | $0.16/CU | $1,000 |
| Business | $999/mo | $899/mo | $999/mo | $0.13/CU | $5,000 |
Platform-limit ceilings come from help.apify.com, which states "Starter Plan ($19): Maximum platform limit is $100." That ceiling matters more than the plan fee, and the cost table below shows why. For the mechanics of CU billing, see Apify compute units.
What do 100,000 pages a month cost on each?
Assumptions, stated so you can re-run the arithmetic: 100,000 URLs, one extraction per URL, September 2026 list prices, no proxy add-on, no Knowledge Graph exports.
Diffbot's side is one number. 100,000 Extract calls is 100,000 credits, which sits inside Startup's 250,000, so the bill is $299 and does not move.
Apify's side depends on whether the target sites need a browser. Apify publishes its own estimate on the Website Content Crawler Actor page: "$0.2 per 1,000 web pages with raw HTTP crawler" and "$0.5 - $5 per 1,000 web pages with a headless browser."
| Setup | Usage generated | Monthly total | Fits the plan? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Diffbot Startup | 100,000 of 250,000 credits | $299 | Yes |
| Apify Starter, raw HTTP crawler | ~$20 | ~$20 | Yes |
| Apify Starter, headless browser, low end | ~$50 | ~$50 | Yes |
| Apify Starter, headless browser, high end | ~$500 | ~$500 | No — over Starter's $100 platform limit |
Three things fall out of that table, and only one of them favours Apify.
Apify is roughly 15x cheaper when the sites are static. A raw HTTP crawl of 100,000 pages costs about $20 all-in. Diffbot has no equivalent cheap path, because Extract renders every page.
Diffbot is cheaper at the top of Apify's browser range. If your targets are JavaScript-heavy enough to land near $5 per 1,000 pages, Diffbot's flat $299 beats Apify's ~$500, and it does so without you tuning anything. That is a real result and it argues against the platform this site is an affiliate for.
The $100 Starter ceiling bites before the price does. A $500 crawl cannot run on Starter at all. You move to Scale at $199/month, where the CU rate drops from $0.20 to $0.16, about 20% less for the same crawl. The honest Apify figure in that scenario is roughly $400 on a $199 plan, not $500 on a $19 one. Budget the plan you will actually need, not the one on the pricing page.
Where Diffbot is worth $299 a month
This is Diffbot's home turf, and it is not price.
Extract takes a URL and returns structured JSON with no configuration. Diffbot's docs state it "uses computer vision and natural language processing to read a web page the way a person would, then return its contents as clean, structured JSON — no rules or per-site configuration required," with an Analyze endpoint that classifies the page and routes it to the right page-type extractor. Article, Product, Discussion, Image, Video, Event, List and Job each have their own extractor. If you are pointing at 500 domains you have never seen, that is worth paying for. Apify's answer to the same problem is a crawler that gives you clean text, not typed entities; you still write the schema.
The Knowledge Graph is the harder gap. Diffbot publishes "over 10 billion entities (news organizations, people, and more)" and "trillions of facts" (diffbot.com/products/knowledge-graph, read 2026-09-09), queryable with its DQL query language or matched against your own rows with Enhance. Apify has no equivalent. You can crawl the sources yourself, but you would be building the graph, not querying one that already exists. If enrichment against a pre-indexed entity graph is the job, Diffbot is the tool and the comparison ends there.
Where Apify is worth $19 a month
Apify's leverage is the library. The Apify Store publishes "70,000+ ready-to-run tools called Actors" (read 2026-09-09), including maintained scrapers for Amazon, Google Maps, LinkedIn, TikTok and Instagram. When you already know which sites you are scraping, a ready-made Actor beats a generic AI extractor. It returns the fields that site actually has: review counts, seller ratings, variant SKUs, rather than a generic product object.
The platform is the other half. Scheduling, datasets, key-value stores, webhooks and integrations with Make, n8n and Zapier are included in the plan fee. With Diffbot you supply all of that yourself: it is an API call, and where the results land is your problem. For LLM work specifically, see data for AI and RAG and the best AI data Actors.
What the price tables leave out: throughput
Neither vendor's pricing page makes throughput obvious, and it is the constraint that usually bites first.
Diffbot caps requests: 5 per minute on Free, 5 per second on Startup, 25 per second on Plus. At 5 requests a minute the Free plan's 10,000 credits take a minimum of 33 hours to spend, which is fine for evaluation and useless for a deadline.
Apify caps concurrent runs, and here two Apify pages disagree. apify.com/pricing lists 5 maximum concurrent runs on the Free plan; docs.apify.com/platform/limits lists 25 for the same plan. Both read live on 2026-09-09. The two pages agree on every paid tier (32 on Starter, 128 on Scale, 256 on Business), so the conflict is confined to Free. Plan for 5 until Apify reconciles them, and treat anything you have read elsewhere quoting 25 as unconfirmed.
What changed, and when
The figures this comparison rests on, read from the vendors' own pages on 2026-09-09:
| Figure | Live value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Apify Starter price | $19/month, $17 billed annually | apify.com/pricing |
| Apify Store size | "70,000+ ready-to-run" Actors | apify.com/store |
| Diffbot Knowledge Graph | "over 10 billion entities"; Diffbot no longer publishes a per-type split | diffbot.com |
| Diffbot tiers | Four published tiers, unchanged at that date | diffbot.com |
The cost section below works through per-1,000-page rates and a 100,000-page example on those numbers.
So which one?
| Your situation | Pick |
|---|---|
| You know exactly which sites you are scraping | Apify — a site-specific Actor returns richer fields |
| You are pointing at hundreds of domains you have never seen | Diffbot — no per-site parser to write |
| You need to enrich rows against an existing entity graph | Diffbot — Apify has nothing comparable |
| Static or lightly-scripted pages, high volume | Apify — ~$0.20 per 1,000 pages |
| Heavy JavaScript, ~100,000 pages/month | Close. Price both; Diffbot's $299 is flat |
| You need scheduling, storage and exports included | Apify |
| Monthly spend must start under $50 | Apify — Diffbot's paid floor is $299 |
| You want to evaluate before paying anything | Both — Diffbot 10,000 credits, Apify $5/month |
If you are still deciding, run 1,000 of your real URLs through both free tiers before you commit. Diffbot's free plan takes no card, and Apify's $5 monthly credit covers roughly 25,000 pages on a raw HTTP crawl. A two-hour test on your own targets settles this better than any table here.
Start on Apify's free plan — $5/month in credit, no card to sign up. Evaluate Diffbot's free tier — 10,000 credits/month, no card.
The obvious objection: picking Apify means writing or choosing an Actor per site, and that is real work Diffbot does not ask of you. If your team has no engineering time at all, the $299 buys back more than $280 of it. If you have a developer and fewer than about 20 target sites, it does not.
Diffbot publishes four tiers, read live on 2026-09-09: Free at $0 for 10,000 credits a month, Startup at $299/month for 250,000 credits, Plus at $899/month for 1,000,000 credits, and custom Enterprise pricing. Overage is $0.001 per credit on Startup and $0.0009 on Plus.
One credit covers one Extract page, one Natural Language document of up to 10,000 characters, or one Web Search query. Extracting a page through Diffbot's datacenter proxy costs two credits. Knowledge Graph work is billed per record rather than per query: exporting or enhancing one entity record costs 25 credits and a facet query record costs 100, so Startup's 250,000 credits buy 250,000 page extractions or 10,000 entity records. Read from diffbot.com/pricing on 2026-09-09.
There is a free tier: $0 per month, 10,000 credits, capped at 5 requests per minute. Diffbot states that signing up for it does not require a credit card. It is enough to evaluate extraction quality on your own URLs; the rate limit makes it impractical for production.
At the entry point, yes: $19/month against $299/month. Per page it depends on the target. Apify's Website Content Crawler is listed at $0.2 per 1,000 pages on a raw HTTP crawl and $0.5-$5 with a headless browser; Diffbot's marginal rate is $1.00 per 1,000 pages. On JavaScript-heavy sites at volume, Diffbot can be cheaper.
No. Apify gives you crawlers and storage, not a pre-indexed entity graph. Diffbot publishes over 10 billion entities you can query with DQL or match your own records against. If knowledge-graph enrichment is the requirement, Apify is not a substitute.
Yes, and it is a reasonable pattern: an Apify Actor handles crawling, scheduling and storage, and calls Diffbot's Extract API for pages where writing a parser is not worth it. You pay both bills, so it earns its place only when the site mix is genuinely split between known and unknown targets.
Next steps
- Check Apify pricing for plan tiers, overage mechanics and discounts.
- Compare Apify vs. Firecrawl if you are evaluating other per-credit extraction APIs.
- Browse Apify alternatives for the wider field of scraping platforms.
- Read Apify vs. Crawl4AI if an open-source AI crawler is on your shortlist.
Software Developer & Automation Specialist