Apify vs Firecrawl in 2026: Three Scraping Jobs Priced From Published Rates

Apify vs Firecrawl comes down to shape: Firecrawl is one API that turns a URL into markdown or JSON for a flat credit per page, while Apify is a platform and marketplace where you run pre-built or custom scrapers and pay per result or per unit of compute. Pick Firecrawl when an LLM or agent needs clean page content now; pick Apify for site-specific data, big recurring jobs or your own crawler code.

This comparison is based on the vendors' documentation and pricing pages as of October 2026. We did not run these jobs on either product, so there are no success rates or speed figures here, and every cost is arithmetic from published rates. Sources: Firecrawl's pricing page, billing, scrape and open source vs cloud docs; Apify's pricing page, usage, Store pricing and billing docs, and the Store pages for Website Content Crawler, E-commerce Scraping Tool, RAG Web Browser and Google Maps Scraper.

This page prices the same three jobs on each from the public price lists, then covers what the docs say about limits. For the wider picture, from selectors to LLM extraction, start with our web scraping automation hub.

The verdict: Apify vs Firecrawl in one screen

Nothing stops you using both: Firecrawl inside the app for on-demand pages, Apify for the scheduled bulk jobs.

Apify vs Firecrawl: the head-to-head table

Prices and limits below were checked in October 2026. Firecrawl's price list is dated September 4, 2026.

The two entry plans cost the same $19 a month and buy different things. Firecrawl sells 5,000 credits. Apify sells $19 of usage that you spend on whichever Actors you run, at prices each Actor sets.

Three jobs priced from published rates

Three common shapes of scraping job. The volumes are illustrative inputs, and "pro rata" means the share of the monthly plan fee the job uses up; you still pay for the whole plan.

Job 1: a JavaScript-heavy product page

Firecrawl has two ways to return product fields. The json format runs an LLM over the page and adds 4 credits, so 5 a page. The product format reads structured data already on the page (JSON-LD, microdata, embedded app state) without an LLM, and the billing page lists no surcharge for it. It fails closed: a page with no usable product data returns a warning instead of a guess.

Apify's E-commerce Scraping Tool charges per event: a product detail, plus a browser-rendering fee when the site needs one, plus a residential-proxy fee when it needs that too. On Starter that is $2.07 to $3.07 per 1,000 products. The same events on the free plan cost $6.60 per 1,000, so the $5 free allowance covers about 750 products.

Job 2: a documentation crawl

Firecrawl's crawl endpoint bills 1 credit per page, with a default limit of 10,000 pages, so set limit yourself. Apify's Website Content Crawler is pay-per-usage: the Actor is free and you pay for compute. Its README estimates about $0.20 per 1,000 pages with the raw HTTP crawler and $0.50 to $5 with a headless browser, at a baseline of $0.25 per compute unit. The pricing page now lists $0.20 a unit on Starter, so the compute part should come in under that estimate.

Both are a few lines of code. These samples follow each vendor's docs:

import { Firecrawl } from 'firecrawl';

const firecrawl = new Firecrawl({ apiKey: "fc-YOUR-API-KEY" });

const docs = await firecrawl.crawl('https://docs.firecrawl.dev', { limit: 10 });
console.log(docs);

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'MY-APIFY-TOKEN' });

// Start an Actor and wait for it to finish
const run = await client.actor('apify/website-content-crawler').call({
    startUrls: [{ url: 'https://docs.apify.com/' }],
    maxCrawlPages: 10,
});

// Get results from the Actor's dataset
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

Once the pages are in markdown, where you store them matters as much as how you fetched them; our agent memory comparison covers when a vector store is worth adding.

Job 3: a bulk listing scrape

At 10,000 listings the plan size starts to matter more than the unit price. Firecrawl Hobby holds 5,000 credits, and pay-as-you-go on Hobby adds 1,000 credits per $5, so this job belongs on Standard, where it uses a tenth of the month. With LLM JSON it uses half.

On Apify the same job is about $15 to $21 on Starter. If the listings live on a site with its own Actor, the price is per record: Google Maps Scraper charges $0.003 a place on Starter, so 10,000 places is $30 before add-ons. Firecrawl's docs describe a general API, not a marketplace of site-specific extractors; you would describe the fields and let its JSON format do the work.

Firecrawl: pricing, strengths and limits

Firecrawl's pricing (checked October 2026) runs from a free 1,000 credits a month through Hobby ($19, 5,000 credits), Standard ($99, 100,000), Growth ($399, 500,000) and Scale ($749, 1,000,000), with about 17 to 20 percent off for annual billing.

• Strength: one price that includes the hard parts. Rendering and proxies are inside the credit, and the enhanced proxy adds nothing. A scrape that returns no document is not charged.
• Strength: output built for models. Markdown, links, screenshots, JSON, the product format, plus search at 2 credits per 10 results.
• Limit: LLM formats multiply the bill. JSON, question and highlight formats each add 4 credits a page.
• Limit: the small plans are small. Free allows 10 scrape requests and 2 crawl requests a minute; Hobby runs 5 browsers at once.
• Limit: blocked pages can still cost. A page that comes back with a 403 or 404 is returned as a document and bills 1 credit, so check the status code before retrying.
• Limit: results are short-lived. Crawl results are available through the API for 24 hours after the job completes.

Apify: pricing, strengths and limits

Apify's pricing (checked October 2026) is a plan fee that doubles as prepaid usage: Free ($5 of usage), Starter ($19), Scale ($199) and Business ($999), with 10 percent off annually. Compute units cost $0.20 on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale and $0.13 on Business, and paid plans get Bronze, Silver or Gold discounts on participating Store Actors.

• Strength: someone has usually built your scraper. Store Actors are priced per event, and you can set a maximum charge per run that the Actor will not exceed.
• Strength: it is a platform, not just an endpoint. Scheduling, datasets, proxies and up to 64 GB of Actor memory on Starter, with Crawlee underneath if you write your own.
• Limit: the bill has more parts. Pay-per-usage Actors bill compute, proxy traffic, storage operations and data transfer. Apify's own docs call it "quite difficult" to estimate beforehand and suggest a small trial run.
• Limit: published estimates do not all match. The crawler README above uses $0.25 per compute unit as its baseline, while the pricing page lists $0.13 to $0.20.
• Limit: free-plan prices are not paid-plan prices. A product detail costs $0.006 on the free tier and $0.0015 on Starter.
• Changed in 2026: Apify's docs give October 1, 2026 as the date rental pricing for Actors is fully retired, with remaining rental Actors moved to pay-per-usage.

Firecrawl vs Apify by job shape

Two questions sort most projects: is the output generic page content or fields specific to one site, and is it one page on demand or thousands on a schedule?

For agents, both ship an MCP server, so the choice can be made per task instead of per project. Our list of MCP servers worth installing has the setup string and known limits for each. Remember the model is a second meter: extraction you do with your own LLM is billed by tokens, which our LLM API pricing comparison covers.

Looking for the Apify vs Firecrawl Reddit benchmark?

This page does not have one, on purpose. Success rates depend on the sites you target and change when those sites change their defences, so a number from someone else's URL list tells you little about yours. Both free tiers are large enough to find out for yourself in an afternoon.

Alternatives if neither fits

• Crawlee, self-run. Apify's open-source crawling library (Apache-2.0) runs on your own servers. You pay for hosting and proxies instead of compute units.
• Firecrawl, self-hosted. The AGPL-3.0 core covers scrape, crawl, map and search. Firecrawl's docs are clear that you then own upgrades, security and storage, and that Agent, Browser, Interact and enhanced proxy paths stay in the Cloud product.
• A workflow tool in front. If the job is "fetch these pages nightly and push rows somewhere", either API slots into an automation; our n8n webhook guide covers receiving the results.

If the scraper feeds a product you plan to sell, our AI SaaS Builder program covers the build around it, including a research-agent module that uses Firecrawl through MCP.

Apify vs Firecrawl: FAQ