Apify vs Firecrawl (2026): Which Web Scraping Tool Wins?

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Short answer: Apify and Firecrawl solve different jobs. Firecrawl repriced on 4 September 2026 and Apify moves its closest equivalent Actor to per-page pricing on 2 October, and from that date the cheaper one depends on your volume. For turning URLs into LLM-ready Markdown, Firecrawl is cheaper per page at scale: its Standard plan works out to $0.83 to $0.99 per 1,000 pages if you use all its credits, against at least $1.33 to $1.90 per 1,000 on Apify's paid plans. Below roughly 40,000 to 52,000 pages a month, depending on billing and start fees, the order flips, because $19 on Apify Starter covers up to about 10,000 pages where $19 on Firecrawl Hobby covers 5,000. For structured records from specific sites and lead generation, Apify is the stronger platform, with more than 74,000 Actors in its store. You can also use both.

We re-read both vendors' pricing pages, billing docs and Actor pricing records on 26 September 2026 for this update. Six things in our June version were wrong, out of date or could not be re-verified, and five of the six had flattered Apify, so they are listed at the end. Our links to Apify are partner links that can pay us a referral fee; Firecrawl pays us nothing. For the wider picture, see our full Apify review and the best web scraping tools.

Apify vs Firecrawl at a glance

What each tool actually does

Apify is a full scraping and automation platform. You run programs called Actors, prebuilt ones from Apify Store or your own code, and they return structured JSON shaped to the site you target, with proxies, storage, cron schedules, webhooks, an API and an MCP server around them. If your goal is "get every product, profile, or listing from this specific site, at volume," Apify is built for that.

Firecrawl is a web data API. You hand it a URL and it converts the page into clean Markdown, HTML or structured data, rendering pages in browsers and crawling whole sites as well as single pages. Its core output is content rather than a site-specific record, though for four extra credits a page its JSON format uses an LLM to extract structured fields. That difference, structured records versus model-ready text, drives almost every decision below.

Pricing: compute units vs credits per page

The two use different meters, which is the biggest source of confusion. Every figure below was read on the vendor's own pages on 26 September 2026.

Apify plans include platform usage equal to their monthly price, then bill usage beyond it. Free is $0 with $5 of usage a month and no card, and access is blocked until the next cycle once it is used; Starter is $19 a month ($17 billed annually), Scale $199 ($179) and Business $999 ($899). Compute costs $0.20 per compute unit (1 GB of RAM for one hour) on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale and $0.13 on Business. An Actor is either pay per usage, where you pay the compute, storage, data transfer and proxies it consumes, or pay per event, a fixed price for events the developer defines, such as a result or an Actor start, which, Apify says, usually includes platform usage but for some Actors does not. Unused prepaid usage expires at the end of each cycle.

Firecrawl sells monthly credits, and on its rates effective 4 September 2026 a basic scrape or crawled page costs one credit. Free gives 1,000 credits a month with no card. Hobby is $19 a month or $16 billed annually for 5,000 credits, Standard $99 or $83 for 100,000, Growth $399 or $333 for 500,000, and Scale $749 or $599 for one million. When a paid plan runs out, Firecrawl tops it up in $5 increments; the free plan simply stops with an HTTP 402 error.

What 1,000 pages cost on each, from 2 October 2026

The fairest like-for-like test is a single URL turned into Markdown, which is Firecrawl's core scrape. Apify's own documentation points single-URL Markdown jobs to its RAG Web Browser Actor rather than its crawler, and that Actor moves from pay per usage to a fixed price per fetched page on 2 October 2026 (its README still describes today's pay-per-usage pricing): from $2.28 per 1,000 pages on Free, $1.90 on Starter, $1.62 on Scale and $1.33 on Business, plus a $0.000225 start fee per run. Here is the cheapest bill on each at common volumes, by our arithmetic on those published prices, monthly billing first and annual in brackets.

So at these floor prices, on monthly billing Apify costs the same or less up to about 52,000 pages a month, and above that Firecrawl is cheaper at almost every volume, by at least $581, about 44 percent, at a million pages. Annual billing moves the line to about 44,500 pages, so Firecrawl already wins the 50,000 row there ($82.50 against $93), and it gives Firecrawl Hobby's $15.83 a small edge over Apify Starter's $17 between roughly 2,200 and 5,000 pages. One narrow exception runs the other way: on monthly billing between about 170,000 and 246,000 pages (about 166,000 to 217,500 on annual), Apify Scale at the floor price can undercut Firecrawl, because above Standard's 100,000 credits Firecrawl's top-ups cost $2.50 per 1,000 pages against Apify Scale's $1.62.

Three limits on that table. First, the Apify figures are floors: Apify says most pay-per-event Actors include platform usage in the price but some charge it separately, and this Actor's record does not say which. The start fee adds about $0.23 per 1,000 pages if you start one run per URL, which pulls the first crossover down to about 47,000 pages on monthly billing and 40,000 on annual and removes the exception above. (The record also lists two higher discount tiers, $1.05 and $0.76, that we could not map to a plan.) Second, the table assumes usage beyond your Apify plan is billed at the same per-page price; Apify's pricing page says excess usage goes on your next invoice, and we found no separate rate. Third, it covers single pages. For whole-site crawls, Apify's Website Content Crawler is on pay per usage, and Apify's own estimate is about $0.20 per 1,000 pages with the raw HTTP crawler and $0.50 to $5 with a headless browser, measured at a $0.25 compute unit price. If that estimate is all compute, the $0.20 Free and Starter rate makes it about $0.16 and $0.40 to $4, and Scale and Business lower still. Firecrawl charges one credit per crawled page, $0.60 to $3.80 per 1,000 in plan, so for sites that need a browser Apify's range runs from below Firecrawl's price to above it. The raw HTTP figure is the lowest in this comparison, but only for sites that need no browser; for a site that blocks, Apify advises the browser crawler plus residential proxies at $8 per GB.

The costs neither headline price shows

• Firecrawl top-ups cost more than plan credits. $5 buys 1,000 credits on Hobby, 2,000 on Standard, 2,500 on Growth and 5,000 on Scale, so a top-up page costs 1.3 to 3 times an in-plan page ($2.50 per 1,000 on Standard against $0.83 to $0.99). Bought credits stay until used but are lost if you cancel.
• Apify's per-event extras. From 2 October the RAG Web Browser also bills the $0.000225 start fee per run and a separate search-result event, from $0.00348 each on Free to $0.00203 on Business, and its pricing record does not say whether platform usage is billed on top.
• Structured JSON is five pages' worth. Firecrawl's LLM-powered JSON format adds four credits a page, about $4.13 to $4.95 per 1,000 pages on Standard. Some Apify Store Actors price per result instead, for the one site they target: the Google Maps Scraper Actor charges from $4 per 1,000 places on Free, $3 on Starter, $2 on Scale and $1.50 on Business, plus a small start fee. A place is not a page, so this shows the pricing model, not a like-for-like price.
• Blocked pages. Firecrawl charges one credit whenever it returns a document, a 403 or 404 page included, and nothing when it returns none; on a 401, 403 or 429 it first retries once through enhanced proxies at no extra charge. A pay-per-usage Apify run costs more with every retry, and anti-blocking is billed separately: residential proxy at $8 per GB and the Unblocker at $1.50 per 1,000 requests on Free and Starter. The RAG Web Browser record does not say whether a failed fetch is billed.
• Unused allowance. Apify's prepaid usage expires each cycle. Firecrawl's plan credits reset monthly on Hobby, Standard and Growth; its pricing page says Scale carries them one month, and its billing docs say annual Scale.
• Uncapped jobs. A Firecrawl crawl sent without a page limit can run to its default of 10,000 pages, and on a paid Apify plan usage past your allowance keeps being invoiced until the usage limit you set in billing, so cap both before you point them at a large site.

Where Firecrawl genuinely wins

• Feeding an LLM or RAG pipeline. When you want the readable text of a page as clean Markdown with no parsing, Firecrawl is hard to beat. This is its home turf.
• Volume. Above the crossover in the table, Firecrawl costs less at almost every volume; at a million pages the gap is at least $580 a month.
• Predictable budgeting and a fast start. One credit per basic page, with the proxy retry included, is easy to forecast, and one API call returns usable content.

Firecrawl's own pricing page carries a testimonial from a user who moved an internal agent's web scraping from Apify to Firecrawl because it "benchmarked 50x faster with AgentOps." We could not verify that figure and found no independent benchmark of either tool, but it names Apify, so we say so here.

Where Apify genuinely wins

• Structured data from specific sites. Need every listing from a marketplace, every review with its rating and date, or every profile field as clean JSON? A purpose-built Actor returns that schema, where a general tool hands you text to parse or, on Firecrawl, LLM-extracted JSON at five credits a page.
• 74,000+ ready-made Actors. Apify Store lists more than 74,000 web data and automation tools, among them the Google Maps Scraper Actor priced per place, so for many sites someone has already built the scraper.
• Small volumes and plain HTML. Below that crossover, from about 5,000 single pages a month, Apify's per-page Markdown Actor costs less at its floor price, and on Apify's own estimate its raw HTTP crawler is the cheapest option here for sites that need no browser.
• Automation, not just extraction. Cron schedules, webhooks and an API let Apify run a whole pipeline on a timer and push results into your stack.

Our guide to the Apify free plan limits shows what $5 buys on five real Actors before you pay for anything.

For lead generation and outbound, Apify is the pick

Most of our readers scrape to build pipeline, not to train a model, and for lead generation you want structured records with names, roles, companies and contact fields, not a page of Markdown. That is squarely Apify's strength. Site-specific Actors in Apify Store, such as the Google Maps Scraper Actor, return rows ready for outreach, with Apify's proxies, billed by usage, available when a pull needs them, and a cron schedule can refresh a list on a cadence. Pair that with enrichment and verification and you have a repeatable lead engine, which is how we run lead generation and cold email campaigns for clients.

The caveat: Apify gives you the raw data, not deliverability or legal cover. You still have to verify emails, respect privacy rules, and set up and warm your sending infrastructure before you send. If you would rather have the whole system designed and run for you, that is what our AI automation agency does. To build the data layer yourself, start on Apify's free plan and test a lead Actor against your niche.

When the smart move is to use both

One sensible split is Firecrawl for clean content from arbitrary URLs feeding a RAG knowledge base or an agent, and Apify for structured records from the sites you scrape repeatedly and for scheduled lead and monitoring pipelines. If you can only pay for one, let the dominant job and your monthly page count decide.

What we corrected in this update

• We said Firecrawl's Enhanced mode cost five credits a page. Its billing docs now list enhanced proxies at no extra credits, and an escalated retry is not charged separately.
• We said AI extraction needed a separate Firecrawl subscription from about $89 a month. Firecrawl's current pricing and billing docs list LLM-powered JSON extraction at four extra credits a page on its regular plans, so we removed that claim; we did not verify current pricing for its separate extract endpoint.
• We said Firecrawl credits never roll over. Its pricing page says Scale carries unused credits for one month (its billing docs say annual Scale), and credits you buy stay until used unless you cancel.
• We described a testimonial on Firecrawl's pricing page as a customer leaving "another platform". The platform it names is Apify.
• We gave Firecrawl 141K GitHub stars; the repository showed 184.9k when we checked.
• We said Apify had 67,000+ Actors; its store now lists 74,000+.

The verdict: Apify vs Firecrawl in 2026

Neither tool is a knockout winner. Firecrawl is the cleaner choice for turning any URL into LLM-ready text, and above roughly 40,000 to 52,000 single pages a month it is also the cheaper one. Apify is the stronger choice for structured data from specific sites and lead generation, and, at its floor prices, the cheaper way to get single-page Markdown below that line.

For our readers, who mostly scrape to build pipeline, Apify is the more useful platform; if you feed models at volume, Firecrawl is the better fit and usually the cheaper one. The lowest-risk next step is to run one real job for your use case on both free plans: Apify's $5 of monthly usage and Firecrawl's 1,000 monthly credits. If you want the data layer plus the outreach engine built and managed end to end, our automation team can set the whole thing up for you.