Browse AI vs Apify Pricing for Data Teams

Browse AI and Apify get compared constantly, and most comparisons stop at features: one is no-code, the other is a developer platform. That is true and it is the first thing to decide. But teams that have already picked a side still end up surprised by the invoice, because the two products meter completely different things. Browse AI meters rows and tasks. Apify meters memory and time. Neither meters pages, which is the unit most buyers actually think in.

This post puts both meters side by side, runs three real jobs through each, and shows where each one gets expensive. Every Browse AI figure was read from the Browse AI pricing page and its help centre article on credit calculation, and every Apify figure from apify.com/pricing, in October 2026.

Browse AI vs Apify pricing plans side by side

The plan ladders look similar at a glance, both starting near $19 a month. What a dollar buys is where they part ways.

Notice what each plan is. A Browse AI plan is an allowance of credits. An Apify plan is a prepaid wallet: the included usage equals the plan price on every tier, and you spend it on compute, proxies and any fees the Actor you rent charges on top. Unused Apify credit expires at the end of the month, so the plan is a floor on your spend, not a budget.

How Browse AI pricing works

On a standard site, 10 rows of extracted data cost 1 credit, and one screenshot costs 1 credit. The rule that decides most bills sits underneath that: the minimum cost of any task is 1 credit. On sites Browse AI classes as premium, because of bot detection, CAPTCHAs or complex page structures, the minimum rises to 2 to 10 credits per task.

So the meter rewards dense list pages and punishes detail pages. A listing with 50 products costs 5 credits for all 50. Opening each of those 50 product pages is 50 separate tasks at 1 credit each, so 50 credits, ten times as much for the same products. On the largest Professional annual tier that is about $1.06 per 1,000 list rows and $10.63 per 1,000 detail pages. On Personal monthly it is $2.40 and $24. We break the full ladder down in our Browse AI pricing teardown.

How Apify pricing works

Apify sells compute units. One compute unit is one gigabyte of RAM running for one hour. An Actor configured with 4 GB that runs for 30 minutes uses 2 compute units, which is $0.40 on Starter whether it returned ten pages or ten thousand. Runtime is the product, so an Actor that waits on slow pages or holds a browser open bills you for the waiting.

That makes cost per page a property of the Actor, not of the plan. A lean HTTP Actor fetching 3,600 simple pages an hour on 1 GB costs about $0.06 per 1,000 pages on Starter. A browser Actor on 4 GB managing 720 pages an hour costs about $1.11 per 1,000. Those are derived figures from the compute-unit definition, and our Apify pricing breakdown shows the arithmetic for five Actor shapes. On top of compute, a rented Store Actor can charge per result, per event or a flat monthly rental, deducted from the same credit.

Browse AI vs Apify cost for the same three jobs

Here are three common jobs priced on both, plus a flat per-page API for reference. The Apify column assumes a reasonably efficient Actor and no rental fee; treat it as a range to test, not a quote.

Three things stand out. Browse AI is the right price for the first job and the wrong price for the second, because the task minimum turns every detail page into a full credit. Apify is the cheapest option on paper in almost every row, but the range in its column is real, and it widens once the target needs a browser or the Actor you rent bills per result. And the per-page column never moves: a page is a page whether it is a listing, a detail page or a monitoring check, and schema-typed JSON costs the same as markdown.

Where each one gets expensive

Browse AI gets expensive on depth. Any job where the fields you want sit one click below the listing, specifications, descriptions, contact details, salary bands, pays the task minimum on every page. Frequent monitoring compounds it, since every check of every page is billed again.

Apify gets expensive on runtime and layers. A browser Actor that waits five or ten seconds per page, a residential proxy at $8 per GB, and a Store Actor that charges per result all draw from the same wallet. None of those shows up on the plan page, and the bill can swing month to month on the same job if the target site slows down.

Both make forecasting hard. Browse AI because you need to know how many tasks a job becomes. Apify because you need to measure the Actor first. The honest fix on Apify is to run your Actor on 500 URLs on the free tier, read the compute units off the run, and divide. On Browse AI it is to count how many of your fields live on detail pages before you pick a plan.

Is Browse AI cheaper than Apify?

For small jobs run by a non-developer, yes in practice, because Browse AI includes the recorder, the scheduler and the change alerts that you would otherwise have to build around an Apify Actor. For anything with real volume, usually no. At 10,000 detail pages a month Browse AI needs a $129 plan where Apify typically fits inside its $19 Starter wallet, and the gap widens from there.

Which should you choose?

Choose by who maintains the scraper, then by meter.

• Browse AI if the person who needs the data does not write code, the targets are a handful of list pages, and built-in alerts matter more than throughput.
• Apify if you have developers, someone has already built an Actor for the exact site you need, or the job needs logins and multi-step browser flows.
• A per-page crawl API such as ClawEngine if you need typed fields from thousands of public detail pages and finance wants a number before the job runs. Hobby is $49 a month for about 50,000 pages, Startup $99 for about 250,000 and Scale $399 for about 1,500,000, which is $0.98, $0.40 and $0.27 per 1,000, with JavaScript rendering included.

Be clear about what that third option does not do. ClawEngine has no recorder and no built-in monitoring alerts, so someone writes the schedule and the diff. It does not defeat bot protection, which is what the Browse AI premium tier charges extra for, and there is no free plan. We lay out the full trade on our Browse AI alternatives comparison, including the places Browse AI is simply the better buy, and the developer side of the same decision on the Apify alternatives page.

One practical note whichever way you go. Browse AI ships ready-made integrations with spreadsheets and automation tools, and Apify pushes datasets out through webhooks and integrations of its own. With a raw API, the extracted rows land in your code, so plan for where they go next: a data integration platform that connects your apps, APIs and databases saves writing a loader for every destination. If the job is watching pages for changes, our website change monitoring API guide shows the schedule-and-diff pattern that replaces the alert UI.

Can I use Browse AI and Apify together?

Yes, and plenty of teams do something similar. Keep Browse AI for the few pages an operations team watches with alerts, and move the deep crawls to whichever developer tool fits the target: Apify where a maintained Actor already exists or the flow needs a browser, a per-page API where the pages are public and the output has to be typed. Splitting by job usually cuts the bill more than switching everything to one vendor.