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Short answer: Apify is cheaper until roughly 15,000 rows a month, and Octoparse is cheaper above it. That is the opposite of what the sticker prices suggest, because Apify starts at $29 a month and Octoparse starts at $69.
The list price tells you very little here, because the two platforms bill on different axes. Apify sells a prepaid credit balance you spend per result. Octoparse sells a capability licence with mostly flat usage on top. We priced the same job on both on August 28, 2026, using each vendor's own published rates, and we are publishing the crossover point instead of a winner. Every figure below is checkable on a vendor page.
What each one actually charges in 2026
Apify runs four public plans, each of which is a prepaid usage balance rather than an allowance of rows:
- Free: $0, includes $5 of prepaid usage, $0.20 per compute unit, no Apify Store discount.
- Starter: $29 a month, $29 of prepaid usage, $0.20 per compute unit, Bronze Store discount.
- Scale: $199 a month, $199 prepaid, $0.16 per compute unit, Silver discount.
- Business: $999 a month, $999 prepaid, $0.13 per compute unit, Gold discount.
Annual billing takes 10 percent off. One line from Apify's own FAQ matters more than any of the above: unused prepaid usage expires at the end of the billing cycle and does not roll over. A quiet month is money you do not get back.
Octoparse runs a free forever plan, Standard, Professional and a custom Enterprise tier. Free gives you 10 tasks, one device, local extraction only and 50,000 rows of export a month. Standard adds 100 tasks, three concurrent cloud processes, IP rotation, residential proxies, automatic CAPTCHA solving, unlimited export, scheduling and the Data Export API. Professional adds 250 tasks, 20 concurrent cloud processes, cloud monitoring and a pay per result template discount.
Here is the detail almost every review gets wrong, including an earlier version of ours. Octoparse's headline $69 and $249 are the annually billed prices. Its own FAQ says both are "billed annually with 16% savings versus monthly billing." Pay month to month and you pay more, and the page only reveals that figure once you flip the billing toggle. The $69 is real, but only if you commit to a year.
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The same job, priced on both platforms
Take the single most common job either tool is bought for: pulling business listings from Google Maps.
On Apify the reference tool is Google Maps Scraper from the compass account, rated 4.69 from 1,788 reviews, with 579,624 users and last updated August 27, 2026. It bills per event, per place scraped:
- $4.00 per 1,000 on the Free plan
- $3.00 per 1,000 on Bronze, which is the $29 Starter plan
- $2.00 per 1,000 on Silver, the $199 Scale plan
- $1.50 per 1,000 on Gold, the $999 Business plan
- $1.26 and $0.76 per 1,000 on Platinum and Diamond, two tiers that are not named on the pricing page at all
Adding contact details costs another $2.00 per 1,000 on Free and Bronze.
On Octoparse, the Maps templates are priced per 1,000 lines on the vendor's own template page:
- Google Maps Scraper (the advanced one that splits the map to get past Google's 120 result cap): $2.00 per 1,000
- Google Maps Email Finder: $0.50 per 1,000
- Google Maps Leads Scraper by keywords: $0.40 per 1,000
- Google Maps Leads Scraper by URLs: $0.20 per 1,000
- Google Maps Listings Scraper, by keyword or by URL: no extra cost at all
Octoparse's flagship Maps template is a flat $2.00 per 1,000. Apify's is $4.00 on the free plan and $3.00 on the $29 plan. You have to reach Silver, meaning $199 a month, before Apify matches a rate Octoparse charges everybody, and two of Octoparse's Maps templates cost nothing beyond the subscription.
Where the cheaper tool flips
Rates only become an answer once you attach a volume. Take Google Maps places with contact details, which is what a lead list actually needs.
At 10,000 places a month. Apify Starter charges $0.003 per place plus $0.002 for contacts, so $50 of usage. The $29 plan fee covers the first $29 and the remaining $21 lands on the next invoice, for $50 all in. Octoparse Standard is $69 plus $5 of Email Finder credits, so $74. Apify wins by $24.
At 50,000 places a month. Apify Starter would be $250, so you move to Scale, where the rate drops to $0.0035 per place and 50,000 places cost $175, comfortably inside the $199 prepaid. Your bill is the plan fee: $199. Octoparse Standard is $69 plus $25, so $94. Octoparse wins by $105.
The crossover sits at about 15,300 places a month. Solve $0.005 per place against $69 plus $0.0005 per row and both platforms bill $76.67. Below that line Apify is cheaper. Above it Octoparse is, and the gap widens quickly: at 100,000 places a month the best available Apify configuration is $350 and Octoparse Standard is $119, a difference of roughly three times.
One caveat before acting on that. Octoparse Standard gives three concurrent cloud processes; Apify Starter allows 32 concurrent runs at $29. At high volume that becomes a scheduling problem, not a billing one. Apify sells parallelism, Octoparse sells volume. If 100,000 rows must land in one night, the cheaper bill is not the cheaper answer.
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The proxy line nobody compares
Every head to head compares subscriptions. Almost none compare residential proxies, the input that decides whether a scrape of a well defended site finishes at all.
- Apify residential proxies: $8 per GB on Free and Starter, $7.50 on Scale, $7 on Business.
- Octoparse residential proxies: $3 per GB, flat, on every plan.
Apify is 2.7 times more expensive per GB at the entry tier, and still 2.3 times more expensive on the $999 a month plan. The platform with the cheaper subscription is the more expensive one on the input that most often decides success. Neither vendor puts this in a comparison table, because each publishes it on its own page and nobody reads two pricing pages side by side.
The other unblocking costs are closer. Octoparse charges $1 to $1.50 per 1,000 CAPTCHA solves; Apify's Unblocker is $1.50 per 1,000 requests, falling to $1 on Business. If your targets are soft this line barely matters. If they are hard, it can be most of your bill.
The 25x cliff hiding in Apify's free plan
Moving from Apify's free plan to the $29 Starter plan cuts the base cost per Maps place from $0.004 to $0.003, a 1.33x step. The enrichment add-ons on the same Actor do not move by 1.33x:
- Business leads enrichment: $0.10 on Free, $0.005 on Bronze. Twenty times.
- Email verification: $0.10 on Free, $0.004 on Bronze. Twenty five times.
- Social profile enrichment: $0.10 on Free, $0.008 on Bronze. Twelve and a half times.
The free plan carries $5 of prepaid usage, and it expires monthly. At $0.10 per verification, $5 buys 50 verified emails. You cannot verify one thousand emails on Apify's free plan. That is arithmetically impossible, not merely expensive.
Apify publishes every one of those numbers openly, which is more than most vendors manage. But the free tier is priced so raw scraping feels cheap and enrichment feels out of reach, which means if you evaluate on the free plan you are not testing the economics you will live with. Run the trial, then reprice the same job at Bronze before deciding.
Nor is Apify one price. The compass Maps Scraper charges $0.005 per business lead at Bronze; lukaskrivka's Google Maps Email Extractor charges $0.0075 for the same add-on, 50 percent more, for the same job on the same platform. Developers set their own ladders.
Read Octoparse's refund policy, not its refund promise
Octoparse's pricing page promises a "5 day money back guarantee on all Octoparse plans." The binding document in its help center, last updated September 5, 2025, is narrower on three counts.
- It says refund requests "are evaluated on a case by case basis" and that "refunds are not guaranteed and are subject to review and approval by our support team."
- It says payments made after a 14 day trial are not eligible under the new subscription criteria. Octoparse advertises exactly that 14 day trial on its own template pages, so taking the trial it offers can disqualify you from the guarantee it advertises.
- Payment processor fees of roughly 4 percent are non refundable and come off the total, so a "full refund" is not full.
Two details in that policy have also fallen out of step: its worked example refunds a "$299 Professional plan" when Professional is listed today at $249, and it names a "Basic" plan the pricing page no longer shows. Treat it as a stale document rather than a live price list, but read it before relying on the guarantee.
Apify makes no money back promise at all. What it does publish plainly is that unused prepaid usage vanishes at the end of each cycle. Between a guarantee that narrows when you open the policy and no guarantee at all, we would rather have the honest absence, but go in knowing both.
Who should pick which
Pick Apify if you are under roughly 15,000 rows a month, you need breadth (its store lists more than 64,000 ready made tools, so an obscure site is usually already covered), you need parallelism, or you are wiring scrapers into AI agents, where its MCP server and x402 agentic payments are genuinely ahead.
Pick Octoparse if you run steady high volume against a handful of well covered sites, you are not technical and want a point and click desktop app, you need residential proxies at $3 a GB, or you want a predictable flat bill instead of a usage bill that can surprise you.
Our bias, stated plainly. We use Apify in client pipelines and earn a commission if you start a paid plan through our link. That is exactly why we published the crossover number rather than a verdict, and why it hands the win to Octoparse above 15,300 rows a month. A comparison that never costs the writer anything is not a comparison.
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The mistake we watch agencies make
The mistake is treating the scrape as the deliverable. A Google Maps export is a spreadsheet of places, not a pipeline. What decides whether the project pays for itself is almost never $50 against $74 a month. It is what happens to those 10,000 rows next: deduplication, email verification, enrichment against a real ideal customer profile, and a sending setup that does not burn the domain you take meetings on. We have watched teams argue for a week about a $24 monthly difference, then send the whole list from their primary domain.
Pick either tool. Then spend your attention on the lead generation pipeline that turns rows into replies and the cold email infrastructure that keeps them landing in inboxes.
For a fuller look at the platform, read our Apify review for 2026 or our best Google Maps scrapers roundup.
Frequently Asked Questions
It depends entirely on volume, and the crossover is around 15,300 rows a month. Below that, Apify's $29 Starter plan is cheaper: 10,000 Google Maps places with contact details costs about $50 on Apify against $74 on Octoparse Standard. Above it, Octoparse's flat subscription wins: 50,000 places costs $199 on Apify's Scale plan against $94 on Octoparse, and 100,000 places costs about $350 against $119. Prices verified against both vendors' own pages on August 28, 2026.
Octoparse's published prices of $69 for Standard and $249 for Professional are the annually billed rates. Its own pricing FAQ states both are billed annually with a 16 percent saving versus monthly billing, so paying month to month costs more, and that figure only appears once you flip the billing toggle on the pricing page. There is also a genuine free forever plan with 10 tasks, local extraction only and 50,000 rows of export a month.
You can scrape, but you cannot realistically enrich. Apify's free plan includes $5 of prepaid usage that expires monthly, and the Google Maps Scraper charges $0.004 per place on that tier, so roughly 1,250 plain places. Enrichment is the problem: email verification and business lead enrichment both cost $0.10 per record on the free plan against $0.004 and $0.005 on the $29 Starter plan, which means $5 buys about 50 verified emails. Test the workflow on free, then reprice it at Starter rates before deciding.
Octoparse, in most cases. It is a visual point and click desktop app for Windows and Mac with hundreds of prebuilt templates, so you never touch an API. Apify is also usable without code if a ready made Actor already covers your target site, and with more than 64,000 in its store one usually does, but you will still be reading a usage dashboard and reasoning about per event pricing. Octoparse hides more of that.
Its pricing page says so, but the binding refund policy in its help center is narrower. That document says refunds are evaluated case by case and are not guaranteed, that payments made after a 14 day trial are not eligible under the new subscription criteria, and that payment processing fees of roughly 4 percent are deducted from any refund. Since Octoparse advertises that same 14 day trial on its template pages, taking the trial can disqualify you from the guarantee. Read the help center policy before you rely on it.
Both ship an MCP server, so an AI agent can call their scrapers directly. Apify is further ahead here: alongside MCP it supports x402 agentic payments, which lets an agent trigger and pay for a run without a human subscription sitting behind it, and its store of more than 64,000 Actors gives an agent far more tools to reach for. If agent access is the reason you are choosing, that is the clearest gap between the two.