ScrapeField vs Apify

Apify is a platform with more than 80,000 scrapers. We are 45 endpoints over five surfaces, each with a documented schema and a price you can multiply. Here is the honest comparison, including where they win.

ScrapeField compared with Apify
	ScrapeField	Apify
Billed in	Credits, published per endpoint	Compute units — 1 CU = 1 GB of RAM for 1 hour
Can you forecast a bill?	Yes. Multiply the table by your volume	On a pay-per-event actor yes; on a pay-per-usage one it depends on memory and runtime you do not control
One price for a given job	One. Published per endpoint	Dozens of LinkedIn profile actors, from $2.80 to $20.00 per 1,000 — the price is whichever listing you clicked
Entry price	2,000 credits free, then $39 once — no plan	$0 free ($5 usage), then $19/mo
Unused credits	Never expire — there is no cycle	Expire at the end of the cycle
Schema	One per platform, documented field by field, named the way the platform names it	Each actor’s author decides. Two Maps actors, two shapes
Who answers when it breaks	Us. It is our name on the status page	A third-party author. An abandoned actor is your outage
Failed calls	Refunded automatically, into your ledger	You pay for the compute either way
Cache hits	Charged, like any call	Charged
Published success rate per endpoint	Yes	No
Sites covered	5	More than 80,000 actors
Time to first result	One GET, no account needed to try	Configure a run, poll it, read the dataset

Checked 3 October 2026 against each vendor’s own pricing page. Rechecked quarterly — tell us if something here is out of date and we will fix it.

Migrating a Google Maps search

// Apify: the Google Maps Scraper actor (compass/crawler-google-places)
const run = await client.actor("compass/crawler-google-places").call({
  searchStringsArray: ["coffee shops"],
  locationQuery: "Brooklyn, NY",
  maxCrawledPlacesPerSearch: 20,
  language: "en",
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();

items[0].title
items[0].totalScore
items[0].reviewsCount
items[0].address
items[0].placeId

// ScrapeField
const q = new URLSearchParams({ query: "coffee shops in Brooklyn, NY", limit: "20", language: "en" });
const res = await fetch(`https://api.scrapefield.com/v1/google-maps/places?${q}`, {
  headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${key}` },
});
const { data, meta } = await res.json();

data[0].name
data[0].rating
data[0].user_ratings_total
data[0].formatted_address
data[0].place_id

Four differences worth knowing before you start:

One call answers, with no run to start and no dataset to read afterwards. A page holds up to 20 places; pass meta.next_cursor back as cursor for the next one.
The fields are named after Google’s own Places API: title is name, totalScore is rating, reviewsCount is user_ratings_total, address is formatted_address, placeId is place_id, categoryName is category and phone is formatted_phone_number. website and url keep their names. Every field is in the reference.
place_id is Google’s own id, the same one the actor gives as placeId. Ids you have stored carry over, and one place and its reviews take it as it is.
The price is per call, known before you make it: 3 credits for a page of up to 20 places, so 1,000 places in 50 full pages cost between $0.07 and $0.12, by pack. The actor’s listing says “from $1.50 / 1,000 scraped places”.

Apify against the others

Choosing between Apify and another service? Each pair has its own page, with ScrapeField beside them.

Questions

What is a compute unit, really?

One CU is one gigabyte of RAM running for one hour, charged at $0.20 falling to $0.13 on the largest plan. It is a fair way to bill a platform and a hard way to budget, because the memory footprint and the runtime belong to whoever wrote the actor.

The practical test: try to answer “what will 100,000 Google Maps places cost me?” before you run it. On our side that is 100,000 × 3 credits, which is $234 on the smallest pack and $132 on the largest.

Is Apify more expensive?

Sometimes cheaper, sometimes much more, and you find out afterwards. That is the actual complaint — not the level of the price but that it is not knowable in advance. If your volume is small and steady, their $19 plan may well cost you less than buying credits from us.

Should I move everything?

No. Move the five surfaces if their schemas are costing you code, and keep Apify for the long tail. Plenty of teams should run both, and we would rather tell you that than lose your trust in month three.

Try it before you decide

Every endpoint has a playground that runs against the live API with no key and no account — real routing, real validation, real errors. If the response shape does not fit your code, you will know in about a minute.

Open the docs See the credit table