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Quick answer: these two are not the same kind of product, and the honest comparison is not "which is cheaper" but "which unit are you buying". Apify sells you compute, metered in compute units, on top of a store of tens of thousands of ready-made scrapers. Bright Data sells you delivered records, at $1.50 per 1,000 on pay as you go, across the sites it builds and maintains itself. If your target site is one Bright Data already maintains and you need hundreds of thousands of rows a month, Bright Data is cheaper per record and it is not close. For everything else, meaning odd sources, one-off jobs, small volumes and anything you want scheduled and glued to a workflow, Apify wins.
Every price below was read off each vendor's own pricing pages on 9 and 10 September 2026, not lifted from a roundup, and the catalogue figures were re-read on 11 September 2026. That matters more than usual here, because both platforms changed pricing this quarter and almost every published comparison of the two is quoting numbers that are already wrong. It matters in a second way too: on re-reading, we deleted this page's coverage ratio rather than refresh it, and the section below shows why.
The real difference: attempts versus results
This is the sentence the comparisons skip. Apify charges you for the attempt. Bright Data charges you for the result.
On Apify, a compute unit is 1 GB of RAM for one hour, and you pay for it whether the run returned 10,000 rows or zero. Add storage operations, data transfer and residential proxy traffic on top. If a target site starts blocking you at 2am, the meter keeps running.
Bright Data's Web Scraper API pricing page states the opposite policy in its own words: you only pay for what is successfully delivered, with no charges for failed deliveries. On a hostile target that is a real financial difference, not a marketing line.
Neither model is better in the abstract. Pay per attempt is cheaper when jobs succeed and you control the code. Pay per result is cheaper when the target fights back and you would rather buy an outcome than run infrastructure.
Apify pricing in 2026, read off its own page
- Free: $0, with $5 of platform usage a month, $0.20 per compute unit, 16 GB Actor RAM, 5 concurrent runs.
- Starter: $19 a month plus pay as you go, $19 of prepaid usage, $0.20 per compute unit, 64 GB RAM, 32 concurrent runs, Bronze store discount.
- Scale: $199 a month, $0.16 per compute unit, 256 GB RAM, 128 concurrent runs, Silver store discount.
- Business: $999 a month, $0.13 per compute unit, 512 GB RAM, 256 concurrent runs, account manager, Gold store discount.
- Enterprise: custom, and the only tier with single sign-on.
Annual billing takes 10 percent off. Residential proxy is $8 per GB on Free and Starter, $7.50 on Scale, $7 on Business. Add-ons are priced separately: $5 per extra concurrent run, $1 per GB of extra Actor RAM, $150 an hour for personal training.
The trap is in Apify's own FAQ, stated twice: unused prepaid usage does not roll over from one month to the next and expires at the end of the billing cycle. Buy the $199 Scale plan, use $90 of it, and the other $109 is gone. On the free plan you are blocked until the next cycle when the $5 runs out; on paid plans you keep running and the overage lands on the next invoice.
There is one number people quote that does not exist: Apify has no price per record. Each store Actor sets its own price, under one of two models the platform defines, pay per event or pay per usage. In practice lead-generation Actors we run for clients sit in the region of $3 to $10 per 1,000 results depending on the source. That is a range, not a rate card, and it is the single biggest reason a like-for-like cost comparison with Bright Data is harder than it looks.
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Bright Data pricing in 2026, read off its own page
Bright Data's Web Scraper API has four published tiers:
- Free: 5,000 records a month, no credit card.
- Pay as you go: $1.50 per 1,000 records, no monthly fee, unlimited concurrency, settable spend limits.
- Scale: $499 a month including 384,000 records, then $1.30 per 1,000 extra.
- Enterprise: custom, with volume discounts, an account manager, premium SLA and SSO.
Everything is included in those rates: JavaScript rendering, residential proxies, CAPTCHA solving, geotargeting, data validation, JSON or CSV parsing, and webhook or API delivery. A 25 percent introductory discount code, APIS25, is shown on the pricing page; confirm the term with Bright Data before you budget around it.
One honest flag. Bright Data's own navigation menu advertises Scraper APIs "from $1 per 1,000 records" struck through to $0.75. Neither figure appears on any published plan. The cheapest rate you can actually buy off the page is $1.30 per 1,000, and only after committing $499 a month. Treat the headline number as a teaser for volumes that are quoted, not listed.
The wider catalogue, for context: pre-collected datasets from $250 per 100,000 records, residential proxies from $2.50 per GB at the current 50 percent discount, datacenter from $0.90 per IP, SERP and Unlocker APIs from $1 per 1,000 requests.
The number Bright Data does not put on the page
Bright Data sells a $499 Scale plan next to a pay as you go plan with no monthly fee. It never tells you where one beats the other, so here is the arithmetic on its own published rates.
Pay as you go costs $1.50 per 1,000 records with no floor. Scale costs a flat $499 for anything up to 384,000 records. Those two lines cross at 332,667 records a month. Below that, the $499 subscription is more expensive than simply paying per record, and the gap is widest exactly where a small team would be tempted to "upgrade for the better rate".
Put plainly: if you pull 100,000 records a month, pay as you go costs $150 and Scale costs $499. You would be paying $349 a month for a discount you never reach. Scale only starts earning its fee past roughly a third of a million records, and its effective rate on the full included volume is $1.2995 per 1,000, which rounds to the $1.30 overage rate anyway.
Coverage: we deleted the 97-to-1 ratio, and here is why
This section used to report that Apify's store held 58,346 Actors against about 600 websites maintained by Bright Data, and it derived a 97-to-1 coverage gap from those two numbers. We have deleted the ratio rather than refresh it, because on re-reading both vendors' own pages on 11 September 2026 we could not get it to mean anything.
Neither vendor publishes one number. On 11 September, Apify's own homepage printed 67,643 in its headline and 67,646 in its body copy, in a single page load. Twenty minutes earlier the same two elements read 67,369 and 67,372. So the figure moved 274 in twenty minutes, and the gap between the two elements on one page was three both times. Apify's public store API does not settle it either: it returned 55,128, 56,949, 66,115 and 67,569 within a few minutes on the same day, depending only on which sort we asked for, because its total is the size of a query result set rather than a count of the store.
On Bright Data's side the figure we had was attached to the wrong unit, and that was our error rather than the vendor's. Bright Data does publish "600+ domains", but in its llms.txt and as the domain count for its pre-collected datasets, not for its Scraper APIs. The only figure it currently gives for Scraper API coverage is "800+ websites", and that sits in the global navigation rather than on any product or pricing page. We cannot establish what that navigation said on 10 August, so we are not claiming the number changed. What we can say is that no Bright Data page today supports 600 as a count of Scraper API websites.
The ratio was never one number. Divide Apify's homepage figure by Bright Data's navigation figure and you get about 85 to 1. Divide Apify's own API total by the scraper count in Bright Data's llms.txt and you get about 37 to 1. Every input there is live on a vendor's own site today, and every Bright Data figure is a "+" floor, so each of those ratios is a ceiling rather than a value. A comparison that swings from 37 to 85 depending on which of the vendor's own pages you happen to open is not a measurement, and it has no business being in a buying guide.
The two counts were never the same unit either. Bright Data's library lists one row per input method rather than one per site: Amazon products occupies several separate rows, by best seller category URL, by category URL, by keyword and by UPC, and those sibling rows report identical usage statistics, which is what tells you they are facets of one maintained scraper. Apify's store is duplicative in the other direction, because anyone can publish: search it for one target and you get several independent Actors for the same site from different developers, for instance three separate Facebook Ad Library scrapers, apify/facebook-ads-scraper, curious_coder/facebook-ads-library-scraper and memo23/facebook-ads-library-scraper-ppe. The old ratio divided one inflated catalogue count by another and called the result coverage.
What to do instead, which is the part that actually decides your bill. The question a catalogue count cannot answer is whether your target site is covered, and both vendors let you check that for free before you pay anything: search the Apify store for your site, and browse Bright Data's library for it. Then ask the maintenance question, which is the only one on this page that survives every number above: who fixes your scraper when the target site changes its markup? On Bright Data that is the vendor, which builds and maintains its own scrapers and sells an SLA. On Apify that is whoever wrote the Actor, and it varies enormously between them. The store page shows each Actor's user count, total runs and last update date, so check that signal before you commit: the Google Maps Actor we use most carries hundreds of thousands of users and millions of runs and is updated regularly, which is exactly the profile you want, while plenty of long-tail Actors have not been touched in a year.
One disclosure, because this edit has a direction. We earn a commission from both vendors on this page. Deleting the 97-to-1 gap removes a talking point that flattered Apify, the vendor we still rank first here, and the maintenance test in the paragraph above is one Apify fails harder than Bright Data does, because its catalogue is community-built. Bright Data also carries the higher per-customer commission ceiling of the two in our portfolio. We made the change anyway, because the number could not be defended, and every reading above can be re-run on the vendors' own pages in about ten minutes.
Where Apify is genuinely the more expensive option
We earn a commission if you sign up to either vendor through this page, so the useful thing we can do is tell you where each of them loses.
Residential proxy. Apify charges $8 per GB on Free and Starter. Bright Data starts at $2.50 per GB at its current promotional rate and $5 at list. That is 3.2 times the cost at the promo rate and 1.6 times at list, on the single line item that dominates any serious scraping bill. Bright Data owns the network; Apify resells access to one.
High volume on a covered site. Take 384,000 records a month from a source both platforms handle. Bright Data Scale is $499. On Apify, a store Actor at $4 per 1,000 results puts the same job around $1,536, roughly three times the price, and at $3 per 1,000 it is still about 2.3 times. If your volume is high and your sources are mainstream, Bright Data wins the money argument outright.
Forecasting. Bright Data's free tier is 5,000 records. Apify's is $5 of usage, which at $0.20 buys 25 compute units. You cannot know in advance how many rows 25 compute units returns, because it depends entirely on the Actor. One free tier is an outcome, the other is a budget, and only one of them lets you plan.
Almost every comparison of these two is out of date
While researching this we read the current crop of Apify versus Bright Data articles. They variously cite the Apify store as 30,000, 39,000 and "1,500 production-vetted" Actors, and Bright Data as having "roughly 120 official scrapers". Not one of those is what either vendor publishes today.
That is not nitpicking, but the fix is not a fresher number either. Both vendors moved pricing this quarter, and as the coverage section above shows, each of them publishes several different catalogue figures across its own properties on the same day, with Apify's spread running to nearly a fifth of the total. The machine-readable web makes this worse rather than better: both vendors now ship files written for AI assistants rather than people, Apify an llms.txt plus a store.md it regenerates daily, Bright Data an llms.txt self-dated September 2026, and those files give a different figure again from the marketing pages, or decline to give one at all. If you have ever wondered why an AI assistant quotes a scraper count that matches nothing on the vendor's own site, that is the mechanism, and it is the same one we deal with in AI search optimization.
So here is the rule we now hold ourselves to. If a comparison does not say when it checked, its numbers are decoration. And if a number moves by a fifth depending on which of the vendor's own pages you open, it should not be load-bearing in a recommendation, however good it looks in a heading.
Which one to pick, by job
- Lead lists from Google Maps, LinkedIn or a niche directory: Apify. The Actor almost certainly already exists, and at lead-gen volumes the per-record premium is worth far less than the weeks you do not spend building.
- Hundreds of thousands of records a month from mainstream sites: Bright Data. The per-record maths stops being close.
- A source nobody has built for: Apify. Crawlee plus a custom Actor on managed infrastructure beats waiting for a vendor to add your site.
- Compliance-led buying, SLAs, procurement: Bright Data. ISO 27001 and SOC, an account manager and a contractual delivery guarantee.
- Scheduling, webhooks, storage and glue: Apify. It is a platform, not just an endpoint, which is why it slots into an automation stack so easily.
- Tiny or occasional jobs: Bright Data pay as you go, which has no monthly fee at all, or Apify's free plan if you also want scheduling.
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How we actually use both
We do not treat this as a either or. For client work we default to Apify for orchestration, because scheduling, storage, webhooks and a very large Actor library mean a new data source is usually a day of work rather than a sprint. When a target gets hostile or a volume gets big, we point the Actor at a stronger proxy pool rather than fight it, which is the hybrid most experienced teams end up running.
The scraping bill is rarely the expensive part anyway. Turning raw rows into a clean, deduplicated, deliverable list that a sequencer will accept is where the work is, and it is where most scraping projects quietly die. That is the piece we build for clients as lead generation and wire into cold email campaigns, usually as one automated pipeline rather than a person exporting CSVs.
If you want the wider field rather than a head to head, our best web scraping tools guide covers eight platforms with the same pricing treatment. For a single platform deep dive there is our Apify review, and for source-specific picks see LinkedIn scrapers and Google Maps scrapers, which also covers the legal side properly.
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Frequently Asked Questions
It depends entirely on volume and source. Below a few hundred thousand records a month, or on any site Bright Data does not already cover, Apify is normally cheaper because you only pay a small plan fee plus usage. Above that, on mainstream sources, Bright Data is clearly cheaper: its Scale plan is $499 a month for 384,000 records, roughly $1.30 per 1,000, while an equivalent Apify store Actor at $4 per 1,000 would cost about $1,536 for the same volume. Bright Data is also much cheaper on residential proxy, from $2.50 per GB against Apify's $8.
Apify is a platform that runs scrapers, called Actors, on managed infrastructure and bills you for compute, storage and proxy usage. Bright Data is a web data provider that bills you per successfully delivered record across the websites it supports, plus a large proxy network and pre-collected datasets. In short, Apify charges for the attempt and Bright Data charges for the result.
Neither vendor publishes a single number, which is why we deleted the coverage ratio this page used to carry. On 11 September 2026 Apify's own homepage printed 67,643 in its headline and 67,646 in its body copy in one page load, and its public store API returned anywhere from 55,128 to 67,569 within minutes depending only on the sort order. Bright Data gives "800+ websites" for its Scraper APIs, in its navigation rather than on a product page, and a separate "600+ domains" for its pre-collected datasets. The two counts are not the same unit anyway: Bright Data lists one row per input method, and Apify carries several competing Actors for the same site. Check whether your own target site is covered instead, which both vendors let you do for free.
Only past about 332,667 records a month. Bright Data's pay as you go rate is $1.50 per 1,000 records with no monthly fee, so the $499 subscription does not break even until your volume crosses that point. At 100,000 records a month pay as you go costs $150 and Scale costs $499, meaning the subscription would cost you $349 a month for a discount you never actually reach.
No. Apify states in its own pricing FAQ that unused prepaid platform usage does not roll over from one month to the next and expires at the end of the billing cycle. If you subscribe to the $199 Scale plan and use $90 of usage, the remaining $109 is lost. Excess usage beyond your prepaid amount is billed as overage on the next invoice on paid plans, while free plan accounts are blocked until the next cycle.
Yes, and many teams do. A common setup is to run Apify Actors for orchestration, scheduling, storage and webhooks, while pointing them at Bright Data's residential proxy network for targets that block aggressively. You get Apify's workflow and Actor library with a stronger IP pool, which is usually cheaper than moving the whole pipeline to either vendor alone.