Apify is a broad actor marketplace. Crawley Cloud is a focused no-code scraping platform: build, schedule and pull data fast, with predictable pricing and a free tier.
Apify is a marketplace and a platform: thousands of community-built 'actors' you can rent, plus infrastructure to run your own. It is broad by design. Crawley Cloud is narrow by design: one way to build a scraper, one way to schedule it, one API to read it, one price.
That difference decides which one you want. If an existing actor already scrapes the exact site you need, Apify gets you data in minutes. If you need a scraper for your sites, kept working over time, with a bill you can predict, that is what Crawley Cloud is built for.
| Crawley Cloud | Apify | |
|---|---|---|
| No-code scraper builder | Yes | Varies by actor |
| REST API + CLI | Yes | Yes |
| Scheduling & alerts | Yes | Yes |
| Predictable, simple pricing | Yes | Usage credits |
| Free tier | Yes, no credit card | Free credits |
The actor store. For very large, well-known targets — social networks, marketplaces, maps — someone has usually published and maintains an actor, and renting it is faster than building anything. Apify also lets developers ship their own actors in Node or Python with full control over the runtime.
Your own targets. For the long tail of sites nobody wrote an actor for, Crawley's visual builder gets a scraper running in minutes with no code, and keeps it running: field triggers and drop alerts tell you when a site changed, cross-run de-duplication maintains a clean canonical dataset, and deliveries push to S3, webhooks, Slack or email.
The other difference is cognitive load. Apify's flexibility comes with compute units, actor rental fees, storage, proxies and residential-proxy tiers to understand. Crawley includes proxies and rendering in the plan, and the plan is the whole bill.
Apify charges platform usage (compute, storage, proxies) against a monthly prepaid amount, and many marketplace actors add their own per-result or monthly rental fee. It is fair, but the number you pay is only known after the run. Check their pricing page for current rates.
Crawley Cloud: Free (no credit card) · Starter $9/mo · Pro $29/mo · Scale $79/mo · Business $199/mo — flat monthly plans sized by concurrency units and retention, every feature in every plan. Nothing is metered behind the plan.
For each actor you run against your own sites, rebuild it as a Crawley scraper with the picker and compare the item schema and counts with your last dataset. Move the schedule, then repoint whatever reads the dataset to the Crawley API or an auto-export. Actors for third-party platforms that you only rent can simply stay on Apify.
It has public recipes — shareable scraper templates others can clone — but not a paid marketplace. The platform is aimed at scraping your own targets.
No. Rotating proxies and JavaScript rendering are included in every plan.
Yes: REST API with an OpenAPI spec, a CLI, and deliveries to S3, webhooks, Slack and email after every run.
Use Apify when the actor you need already exists. Use Crawley Cloud when the scraper is yours and the bill has to be predictable.
Skip the actor marketplace — just build the scraper you need.
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