These two get compared constantly, but they aren't really the same kind of product. Outscraper is a catalog of finished data services you call and pay for by the record. Apify is a compute platform where scrapers — 'actors' — run, and you pay for the platform plus whatever the actor charges. The practical question is almost never which is better; it's whether you want a data service or a runtime. If you never intend to open a code editor, that answer decides it.
| Outscraper | Apify | |
|---|---|---|
| What it's built for | A catalog of ready data services (Maps, reviews, emails, phone validation, marketplaces) you call and get results back from | A general web-scraping and automation platform: run, schedule, host and build scrapers for effectively any site |
| Google Maps specifically | A first-class, maintained service with its own endpoint and documented fields | Available through Store actors — several exist, quality and field coverage vary by author |
| Emails & contact enrichment | Available, but as separate billable services layered on top of the base scrape | Depends entirely on the actor you pick; some include website email extraction, some don't |
| Pricing model | Pay-as-you-go per record, no mandatory subscription; prepaid credit packs lower the effective rate, and each enrichment service meters separately | Monthly platform plan that bundles usage, plus metered compute units, plus per-actor fees (increasingly pay-per-result / pay-per-event as Apify sunsets flat actor rentals through 2026) |
| Technical skill required | Low for the web UI; an API key and basic HTTP for the API | Low to use a Store actor, high to get the platform's real value — building or modifying actors means JavaScript or Python |
| Cost predictability | Easier — you can usually estimate a job from record count before running it | Harder — compute units depend on runtime, retries, memory and proxy usage, so the same job can cost different amounts twice |
| Scale ceiling | High for its supported sources; large jobs run on their infrastructure asynchronously | Very high and horizontally scalable — concurrency and memory are things you buy and tune |
| Sources beyond Google Maps | A fixed catalog: other maps and directories, marketplaces, reviews, company and contact data | Essentially unbounded — thousands of Store actors, and anything you write yourself |
| Export & API | REST API, XLSX / CSV / JSON, async jobs with results fetched when ready | REST API, dataset exports in several formats, webhooks, scheduling and integrations |
| Who maintains the scraper | Outscraper — one vendor is accountable when a source changes | The actor's author, who may be Apify or a third-party developer; check the actor's activity and reviews |
Disclosure: we build Hubertino, a Google Maps lead-list tool, so we have a stake here. Our honest read is that neither product is aimed at someone who just wants a spreadsheet of local businesses with emails — Outscraper is broader than that job and Apify is lower-level than it. But if you need many sources, custom scrapers, or anything outside Google Maps, we're the wrong tool and one of these two is genuinely the right answer.
It depends on the shape of the work, not the sticker price. Outscraper's per-record billing is easy to forecast: you can multiply records by a rate and be roughly right, though enrichments like emails and phone validation are separate services that stack. Apify's cost depends on how long an actor runs, how much memory it uses, proxy traffic, and any per-result fee the actor charges on top — cheaper at scale if you tune it, and easy to overspend if you don't. Rough rule: for occasional, well-defined pulls Outscraper is more predictable; for continuous high-volume scraping you control, Apify usually wins on unit cost.
Outscraper, clearly. Both have a web interface, but Apify's design assumes you'll eventually write or modify code — the concepts you have to learn (actors, compute units, datasets, memory allocation) exist because it's a developer platform. Outscraper's services are closer to 'fill in a form, get a file'. If nobody on your team writes code, Apify's ceiling is whatever a Store actor happens to expose.
No — you can run a Store actor entirely from the web UI. But you should be honest about what you're buying: without code, you're using a general platform to run someone else's prebuilt scraper, and paying platform pricing for it. The reason to choose Apify is the ability to change what the scraper does.
Outscraper treats Google Maps as a maintained product with a documented field set, so it's the safer default. On Apify, quality depends on which actor you run — the good Maps actors are very good, but you're picking from a marketplace, so check the actor's recent runs, last update and reviews before you commit a workflow to it.
Start free with 100 credits — enough for a real lead list. No card required.
Start free with 100 credits