Both are serious infrastructure and both will get you the data. They come at it from opposite ends: Apify grew from developer tooling and a marketplace of runnable scrapers, Bright Data grew from one of the largest proxy networks in the industry and layered scraper APIs and prebuilt datasets on top. So the real question is whether your hard problem is building the scraper or not getting blocked. Answer that and the choice mostly makes itself.
| Apify | Bright Data | |
|---|---|---|
| Core product | A compute platform plus a marketplace of ready-to-run 'actors' you can also fork and modify | A proxy network, with Scraper APIs and prebuilt datasets built on top of it |
| What it's built for | Developers who want to build, host, schedule and scale their own scrapers | Data and engineering teams running large, ongoing collection where reliability and compliance paperwork matter |
| Google Maps | Store actors, several of them good, quality varying by author | A first-party Google Maps scraper API and dataset product, maintained in-house |
| Proxies & blocking | Proxies are a purchasable add-on to the platform | The core competency — residential, datacenter, ISP and mobile networks at very large scale |
| Pricing model | Monthly platform plan bundling usage, plus metered compute units, plus actor fees (shifting to pay-per-result / pay-per-event as flat rentals retire) | Per-record for Scraper APIs and datasets, per-GB or per-IP for proxies, with higher tiers on monthly commitments; enterprise plans are quoted |
| Getting started | Self-serve with a small free platform credit; you can run something in minutes | Self-serve entry exists, but the account, KYC and product sprawl mean larger deployments usually involve sales |
| Custom scrapers | Yes — write your own in JavaScript or Python on the open-source Crawlee SDK | Less the point; you consume APIs and datasets rather than write collectors, though its browser and unblocking products support your own code |
| Compliance & contracts | Standard SaaS terms, self-serve | A major selling point — SLAs, compliance review, DPAs, enterprise procurement |
| Scale ceiling | Very high; you tune concurrency and memory, and the ceiling is mostly your budget and your code | Effectively industry-maximum — this is the tier that supplies other scraping companies |
| Support | Docs, community and platform support scaled by plan | Account management and dedicated support at higher tiers |
Disclosure: we sell Hubertino, a Google Maps lead-list tool, so we're hardly neutral. Both of these are aimed at technical teams building pipelines, and if that's you, neither our product nor this paragraph is relevant — pick between them on the blocking-versus-building question above. Hubertino is only worth a look if the end goal is a finished spreadsheet of local businesses and nobody on your side wants to own infrastructure at all.
At low volume Apify, because you can start on a small plan and pay for the compute you use. At sustained high volume Bright Data's per-record rates get more competitive, and the calculation changes again if you'd otherwise be buying proxies separately to make an Apify actor work reliably. Price the whole stack — compute plus proxies plus actor fees on one side, records plus any commitment on the other — because comparing headline numbers across these two models produces the wrong answer almost every time.
Often, for anything at scale on a site that defends itself. Apify sells proxies as part of the platform and they're fine for a lot of work, but if blocking is your bottleneck you'll end up buying proxy quality from somewhere — and that's precisely the thing Bright Data is best in the world at. If you're not getting blocked, this whole consideration is moot and you shouldn't pay for it.
Honestly, neither. Both assume a technical buyer: Apify expects you to eventually write or modify actors, Bright Data expects you to consume APIs and handle delivery. If nobody on your team codes, running a prebuilt Apify Store actor from its web UI is the more approachable of the two, but you'd be paying platform prices for a fraction of the platform.
Yes, and plenty of teams do — write and host the scraper on Apify, route its traffic through Bright Data proxies. That's a common and sensible architecture, and it's a good sign that these products are complements more often than they're substitutes.
Start free with 100 credits — enough for a real lead list. No card required.
Start free with 100 credits