Fastcrawl vs Apify
Apify and Fastcrawl solve overlapping problems — turning web pages into structured data — but they're built around different mental models. Apify is a marketplace: you pick a pre-built "Actor" for the job and pay its specific per-run cost. Fastcrawl is aflat API: you call the same endpoint, every call costs one credit, the bill is predictable. This page breaks down the trade-offs honestly.
Side by side
| Feature | fastcrawl | Apify |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 2,000 credits / mo | $5 platform credit on $0 plan (Actors cost extra) |
| Paid entry | $5 / mo (Go) | $19 / mo (Starter) + pay-as-you-go |
| Credits at entry plan | 5,000 / mo | $19 platform credit (Apify Store + custom Actors) |
| Pricing model | One flat credit, every format | Per-Actor metered (each Actor has its own $ / unit cost) |
| Overage | $0.25 / 1,000 credits | Pay-as-you-go at Actor-specific rate |
| Rate limit on paid | None | Limited by platform concurrency and Actor memory |
| Pricing predictability | Same number of credits per call, every endpoint | Bill depends on which Actor runs + how long + how much data |
| MCP server | 12 tools | Not first-class (Apify integrates with MCP via an Actor) |
| Browser render | Included (auto mode) | Required for many Actors — built in |
| PDF parse | Included | Per-Actor (e.g. the Apify PDF scraper) |
| Monitors | Included (schedule + diff + webhook) | Scheduler Actor available |
| Scale ceiling | Custom / enterprise | Up to Scale ($199/mo + usage) and Enterprise |
| Own marketplace | Not offered | 65,000+ ready-to-run Actors (the biggest moat) |
Where Fastcrawl wins
Entry price. Fastcrawl's Go plan is $5/mo for 5,000 credits; Apify's Starter is $19/mo plus whatever your Actors cost to run. For a solo dev or small team making thousands of scrapes a month, the cost difference is real and recurring.
Predictable billing. One flat credit per call, every endpoint. With Apify, your bill depends on which Actor you use, how long it runs, how much data it processes and which units it bills in. Modelling a monthly budget against a mixed workload is straightforward with us and a spreadsheet exercise with them.
One key, one API shape. You don't need to research which Actor matches your use case. POST /api/v1/scrape with a URL, get markdown. Want crawl? Use the/crawl endpoint. Same auth, same shape, same response envelope.
Where Apify wins
The marketplace. 65,000+ pre-built Actors — for a specific e-commerce site, a social network, a niche dataset — already exist. If the scraping you need is unusual or site-specific, there's a good chance someone has already written and battle-tested an Actor for it. With Fastcrawl you bring your own logic.
Built-in scheduler and integration zoo. Apify's scheduler and webhook system are mature, and the platform has 1,000+ direct integrations (Zapier, Make, n8n, Slack, Google Sheets, etc.). If your workflow already lives there, Apify plugs in without a line of glue code.
Reselling your scrapers. Apify lets you publish your own Actors and earn revenue from them ($1.5M paid out to developers per recent figures). If you want to build and sell scrapers, Apify is a marketplace that already exists. We don't have an equivalent.
Which should you pick?
Pick Fastcrawl if your workload is a known set of endpoints (scrape a URL, crawl a site, extract structured data from a list) and you want predictable costs without evaluating which Actor to use. Most agent projects fit this shape.
Pick Apify if you need a niche Actor that's already built, want to resell scrapers on a marketplace, or your team already lives in their integration ecosystem.
Fastcrawl's free tier is 2,000 credits, no card required.
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