This is the clearest fork in the whole scraping market: you point and click, or you write code. Octoparse lets you build a scraper by selecting elements on a page in a visual designer. Apify hands you a runtime, a marketplace and an SDK. Both will scrape the same sites; the difference is who can build the scraper and who has to fix it when the site changes — and that second half is the part buyers underestimate.
| Octoparse | Apify | |
|---|---|---|
| How you build a scraper | Visually — load the page in a designer, click the elements you want, define pagination, save it as a task; plus a large library of prebuilt templates | Run an existing Store actor as-is, or write one in JavaScript or Python on the open-source Crawlee SDK |
| Technical skill required | Low — genuinely usable by someone who has never programmed, which is the entire product thesis | Low to run someone else's actor; real developer skills to get the platform's value |
| Google Maps | Prebuilt templates plus a task you can build yourself | Store actors, quality varying by author |
| Emails from business websites | Possible, but it means building a second task that visits each site and hunting the address yourself | Depends on the actor; several Maps actors do a website crawl for contacts |
| Pricing model | Subscription tiers sized by saved tasks and concurrent cloud runs — you buy capacity, not output | Monthly platform plan bundling usage, plus metered compute units, plus per-actor fees |
| Where jobs run | Locally on your machine, or in their cloud on paid tiers | Always on the platform, with concurrency and memory you configure |
| Scale ceiling | Moderate — bounded by your plan's concurrent cloud runs, and awkward past that | Very high — horizontal scale is the point of the platform |
| When the target site changes | Your visual task breaks and you re-select the elements; no code to debug, but nobody else will fix it for you | A maintained Store actor is the author's problem; a custom actor is yours, but you have logs, versioning and code to work with |
| Scheduling & recurring runs | Yes, on cloud plans | Yes — scheduling, webhooks and API triggers are first-class |
| Export & API | CSV / XLSX / JSON and database export; API access on paid tiers | REST API, dataset exports in several formats, webhooks and integrations |
Disclosure: this page is published by Hubertino, which sells Google Maps lead lists, so weigh it accordingly. Both tools here are general-purpose, and if you scrape several different sites you want a general-purpose tool — we'd be a bad fit and we'd rather say so. The only case where we'd put ourselves forward is when Google Maps is the whole list of sites you care about and building or maintaining a scraper for it is work you'd rather not own.
Yes, unambiguously, for building your first scraper without code. The honest caveat is that visual builders stay easy right up until the site does something awkward — infinite scroll, a login, a lazy-loaded field, an anti-bot check — and past that point the visual abstraction becomes harder to reason about than code would have been. If your targets are simple, Octoparse's advantage is real and lasting. If they're not, the difficulty arrives later rather than never.
They meter different things, so it depends on your shape of usage. Octoparse sells capacity — how many tasks you can save and how many cloud runs go at once — so it's cheap if you run a lot through a few scrapers, and wasteful if you have one task you run occasionally. Apify charges for what you actually consume, which suits bursty work and gets efficient at volume, but is harder to predict in advance.
For a one-off list, an Octoparse template is the fastest path from zero to a spreadsheet with no code. For anything recurring, at volume, or feeding a system, a maintained Apify actor is more robust — largely because someone else keeps it working when Google's page changes, which it does. That maintenance question, not the scrape itself, is usually what decides it.
Not from one search. Google's own results feed tops out around 100-120 businesses per query, so every tool hits the same wall — no scraper can extract results the source never serves. The way past it is splitting the geography: run the same category across many smaller areas such as zip codes or map tiles. Both tools can do that, but on either one you're setting up and stitching together those runs yourself.
Start free with 100 credits — enough for a real lead list. No card required.
Start free with 100 credits