By use case · Apify vs Firecrawl

Apify vs Firecrawl: pricing, credits and LLM-ready output compared

The short answer

Apify and Firecrawl solve different halves of the same problem. Apify is an automation platform with a marketplace of prebuilt scrapers, billed as a dollar allowance you burn at $0.13 to $0.20 per compute unit, from $29 a month. Firecrawl is a crawling API that returns clean markdown, billed in credits at 1 per page, from $16 a month for 5,000 credits. Choose Apify when your bottleneck is access, meaning the site is defended or you want a scraper someone already wrote for that exact platform. Choose Firecrawl when your bottleneck is cleanup, meaning you have the pages and need model-ready text out of them. Both prices verified from each vendor in August 2026.

Clean markdown & JSON · JavaScript rendered · robots.txt respected

Last updated August 2026

Live Extraction

Endpoint · POST /v1/extract

POST

try:

Hit Extract to turn this page into clean, LLM-ready data.

robots.txt respected · public data only

Markdown · JSON · structured fields, from one API call. Crawling, rendering and extracting ...

The reason these two get compared so often is that they answer the same question, "how do I get data off this website", from opposite ends. Apify started as a scraping and automation cloud and grew a marketplace on top, so its answer is usually "someone already built an Actor for that site, run it". Firecrawl started from the LLM side, so its answer is "give me a URL and I will hand back markdown a model can read".

That difference shows up in the bill more than in the feature list. Firecrawl prices in credits and a normal page is one credit, so you can estimate a crawl on the back of an envelope. Apify prices in compute units, where one unit is a gigabyte of RAM running for an hour, and the Actor's author decides how heavy that Actor is. Two people running the same monthly volume on Apify can pay very different amounts, which is exactly why the pricing question keeps coming up.

The honest headline: if you are feeding a RAG pipeline or an agent from ordinary public pages, Firecrawl is the closer fit and the cheaper starting point. If you need LinkedIn profiles, Amazon listings or Google Maps records, Apify's marketplace has solved rate limits and pagination for those targets and Firecrawl has not, because it is a general crawler rather than a per-site scraper.

We build a crawling API too, so read our recommendation with the skepticism that deserves. We have put ClawEngine third in the table below and stated where it loses. It has no free plan and does not defeat anti-bot systems, so for defended targets Apify is the correct purchase and we are not.

CRAWL RENDER JS EXTRACT MARKDOWN JSON

Any URL in LLM-ready data out

robots.txt respected public data only

Why it works

Three things that decide this comparison

Access versus cleanup

Decide which problem you actually have. If sites block you, Apify's per-target Actors and proxy layer are the product. If you already reach the pages and drown in messy HTML, Firecrawl's markdown output is the product. Buying the wrong one means paying for a capability you never use.

Predictable versus variable bills

Firecrawl at 1 credit a page is easy to forecast. Apify's compute-unit model depends on how heavy the Actor is and how long it runs, so two teams at the same volume can pay very differently. Run a real sample before you commit to an annual plan.

The parser you still have to write

Compare what lands in your pipeline, not just the invoice. Generic JSON from an Actor still needs mapping into your schema, and that engineering time is a real cost that never appears on either pricing page.

What it handles

Any URL in, clean structured data out

Point ClawEngine at a public page and it crawls, renders the JavaScript and extracts clean markdown or typed JSON in one call. Define a schema for structured fields, and respect robots.txt and Terms of Service by default.

Compares August 2026 pricing verified from each vendor
Explains compute units against per-page credits
Shows what a blocked page costs on each platform
Covers output format and the downstream parsing cost
Names the jobs where each tool is the wrong buy
States plainly where ClawEngine does not compete

POST /v1/extract extraction result

200 · JSON

{
  "url": "https://example.com/products/atlas",
  "title": "Atlas Field Notebook",
  "markdown": "# Atlas Field Notebook\n\nDurable...",
  "data": {
    "name": "Atlas Field Notebook",
    "price": 24.00,
    "currency": "USD",
    "rating": 4.7
  },
  "links": [ "/products", "/cart" ],
  "metadata": { "rendered": true }
}

JS rendered · boilerplate stripped ✓ robots.txt respected

Head to head

Apify vs Firecrawl, side by side

Pricing and billing details taken from each vendor's own pricing page and documentation in August 2026, not from a review aggregator. We include ourselves in the third column and we are not the cheapest.

Swipe to compare all columns →

What you are comparing	Apify	Firecrawl	ClawEngine
What it is	Scraping and automation platform with a marketplace of prebuilt scrapers called Actors	Crawling and scraping API that returns clean markdown or structured data	Crawl, render and typed schema extraction in a single API call
Entry price	$29/mo Starter	$16/mo Hobby (annual rate)	$39/mo Hobby
Free tier	Yes, $5 of usage	Yes, 1,000 credits	No free plan
Billing unit	A dollar allowance, spent on compute units at $0.20 (Free, Starter), $0.16 (Scale) or $0.13 (Business)	Credits. Scrape, crawl, map and monitor cost 1 credit a page	Pages, with rendering and schema extraction included rather than metered separately
Published tiers	Free $0, Starter $29, Scale $199, Business $999	Free, Hobby $16 (5k credits), Standard $83 (100k), Growth $333 (500k), Scale $599 (1M)	Hobby $39, Startup $99, Scale $399, Enterprise custom
Cost of a protected page	Depends on the Actor, plus residential proxies at $7 to $8 per GB	5 credits on the enhanced proxy mode. The default auto mode retries there when a page is blocked	Not supported. We do not defeat anti-bot systems
Unused allowance	Expires monthly	Expires monthly on self-serve plans, rolls over on Scale and Enterprise	Expires monthly
Output format	JSON, CSV and dataset exports, shaped by the Actor you ran	Markdown first, plus structured extraction	Clean markdown or typed JSON matching a schema you supply
JavaScript rendering	Yes	Yes	Yes, on by default
Prebuilt per-site scrapers	Thousands in the Apify Store, covering major platforms	None. It is a general crawler you point at a URL	None. It is a general crawler you point at a URL
Best for	Hard, well-known targets and scheduled pipelines where someone else already wrote the scraper	Turning arbitrary public pages into model-ready markdown, fast	One compliance-first call that crawls a site and returns typed JSON for RAG and agents
Main gotcha	Costs stack in layers: plan, compute units, proxies and add-ons	The default proxy mode can quietly bill 5x on blocked pages	No free plan, and defended sites are out of scope

Prices are US list prices in USD. Firecrawl publishes its ladder at the annual-billing rate, so monthly billing costs more. Apify plan prices are the dollar value of usage included, not a flat fee for unlimited runs.

Why ClawEngine

One API that crawls, renders and extracts

Not a raw HTML dump, not a headless browser fleet to run, and not a brittle parser to maintain. One call crawls a public page, renders its JavaScript and returns clean markdown or typed JSON, built for RAG pipelines and AI agents.

LLM-ready output

Clean markdown or typed JSON with the boilerplate stripped, so the data drops straight into a vector store, a prompt or an agent without a cleanup step.

JavaScript rendered

Each page loads in a real browser environment before extraction, so single-page apps and client-rendered content come back complete, not as an empty shell.

Compliance-first

ClawEngine works on public, permitted data only. It respects robots.txt and site Terms of Service and honors crawl-delay, so responsible scraping is the default.

Code examples

The version of this job with no credit table to read

If your targets are ordinary public pages and you want typed JSON rather than markdown you still have to parse, the whole request looks like this. Rendering and extraction are part of the call, not metered add-ons.

curl Crawl a site and return typed JSON

curl https://api.clawengine.ai/v1/crawl \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CLAWENGINE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://example.com/docs",
    "path_prefix": "/docs/",
    "max_pages": 200,
    "render": true,
    "schema": {
      "title": "string",
      "summary": "string",
      "code_samples": ["string"]
    }
  }'

# No Actor to pick, no credit multiplier to read, no parser to maintain.
# Rendering is on by default and robots.txt is respected.

Apify vs Firecrawl: the questions buyers ask

What is the difference between Apify and Firecrawl?

Apify is a platform: a marketplace of thousands of prebuilt scrapers, plus scheduling, storage and proxies, billed as a dollar allowance you spend on compute units. Firecrawl is a single API that takes a URL and returns clean markdown or structured data, billed at roughly one credit per page. Apify solves getting into hard sites, Firecrawl solves getting clean text out of ordinary ones.

Is Apify or Firecrawl better?

Neither wins outright, and the deciding question is what is blocking you. Firecrawl is better for AI and RAG work, where you need model-ready markdown from arbitrary public pages with a bill you can predict. Apify is better for repeatedly extracting structured records from specific well-known platforms, where a maintained Actor already handles pagination, rate limits and layout changes for you.

How much does Apify cost?

Apify publishes a free plan carrying $5 of usage, then Starter at $29 a month, Scale at $199 and Business at $999. Those plan prices are the dollar value of usage included, not a flat fee. Actor compute draws it down at $0.20 per compute unit on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale and $0.13 on Business, with residential proxies billed at $7 to $8 per GB on top. Verified from Apify in August 2026.

How much does Firecrawl cost?

Firecrawl publishes a free tier with 1,000 credits, then Hobby at $16 a month for 5,000 credits, Standard at $83 for 100,000, Growth at $333 for 500,000 and Scale at $599 for 1 million. Those figures are the annual-billing rate, so paying monthly costs more. A normal scrape, crawl or map request is one credit per page. Verified from Firecrawl in August 2026.

Is Firecrawl cheaper than Apify?

For clean text from ordinary public pages, usually yes, and the reason is predictability rather than the headline number. Firecrawl bills a flat credit per page, so 100,000 pages on the $83 Standard plan is about $0.00083 each. On Apify the same volume depends entirely on how much RAM and time the Actor consumes, so the cost per page is only knowable after you run a sample.

What is a compute unit in Apify?

A compute unit is one gigabyte of memory running for one hour. Apify meters Actor runs in those units rather than in pages, so a heavy Actor scraping a slow, JavaScript-rich site burns far more per record than a light one hitting a fast API. This is why Apify bills are hard to forecast from a page count alone, and why running a small sample first is worth the time.

Does Firecrawl have prebuilt scrapers like Apify Actors?

No, and this is the clearest functional gap between them. Firecrawl is a general crawler: you give it a URL and it returns the content. It has no per-site knowledge of LinkedIn's rate limits, Amazon's pagination or a given marketplace's layout. Apify's Store carries thousands of Actors built and maintained for those specific platforms, which is the main reason to pay for the platform.

Which is better for RAG and AI agents?

Firecrawl, in most cases, because markdown output is what a chunker and embedding model actually want and there is no cleanup stage between the API and your vector store. Apify returns whatever JSON its Actor produces, so you write a mapping layer per Actor. If your RAG sources are documentation, blogs and company sites rather than defended marketplaces, the markdown-first path is simpler and cheaper.

Why is my Apify bill higher than the plan price?

Because the plan price is an allowance, not a cap. Once Actor compute exceeds the dollar value included in your tier you pay the overage per compute unit, and residential proxies at $7 to $8 per GB, SERP proxies, extra concurrent runs and additional Actor memory all bill separately. Unused allowance also expires monthly, so a spiky workload wastes what it does not spend.

What is a good alternative to Apify and Firecrawl?

It depends on which half of the job you care about. For defended marketplace targets at scale, an enterprise proxy platform like Bright Data or Oxylabs is the honest recommendation over either of these. For crawling a site and getting typed JSON matching your own schema in one call, on public and permitted pages, ClawEngine fits that shape and starts at $39 a month with no free plan.

Good questions

Questions about Apify vs Firecrawl

Plenty of teams do, and it is a sensible pattern. Apify handles the small set of defended, high-value targets where a prebuilt Actor already solves pagination and rate limits, while a markdown-first API handles the long tail of ordinary public pages feeding your knowledge base. Splitting by target difficulty usually costs less than forcing every page through the more expensive path.

Both leave that decision largely to you rather than enforcing it by default, which matters because compliance is the customer's legal exposure, not the vendor's. If you need robots.txt and crawl-delay honored automatically as a matter of policy, check the setting explicitly on whichever platform you pick, or choose a tool that treats it as the default rather than an option.

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More ways to turn the web into data with ClawEngine

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Stop wrangling raw HTML. Get LLM-ready data.

Point ClawEngine at a public page and one call crawls, renders the JavaScript and extracts clean markdown or typed JSON, ready for your RAG pipeline or AI agent. Public, permitted data only.

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Crawl · render JS · extract markdown & JSON · robots.txt respected, public data only