Apify vs Firecrawl: Which One Do You Need?

Short answer: pick by job, not by brand. Firecrawl answers "give me this website as text my LLM can read". Apify answers "give me structured data from this specific platform". People search for Firecrawl vs Apify like they compete head to head, but the overlap is smaller than it looks. Here is the honest breakdown.

What Each Tool Is

Firecrawl is an API that crawls a site and returns markdown or structured JSON. It strips navigation, ads, and boilerplate, and keeps the content. It is open source, and it has official integrations with LangChain and LlamaIndex. AI developers use it to feed websites into RAG systems and agents.

Apify is a scraping platform. Its core is a marketplace of 10,000+ prebuilt scrapers (actors) for specific sites: Amazon, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Google Maps, Zillow, and thousands more. You can also write and host your own scrapers on it. Output is structured data: JSON, CSV, Excel.

Feature Comparison

Prices are approximate as of August 2026. Check both pricing pages before you decide.

Pricing In Practice

Firecrawl charges credits per page. The free plan has about 500 one-time credits. The entry paid plan is around $16 a month for a few thousand pages. Crawling a 200-page docs site once costs about 200 credits. Cheap for small and medium AI projects.

Apify gives $5 in credit every month, forever, then plans start at $49 a month. Actors price per result or per event. Example from our tutorials: 1,000 Amazon reviews cost under $1 with the Axesso reviews scraper.

So for a one-off "crawl this site for my chatbot" job, Firecrawl costs less. For recurring platform data, Apify's per-result pricing plus prebuilt extraction is the better deal.

The Overlap Test

Ask one question: do you need the content of pages, or facts from a platform?

• Content of pages (docs, blogs, company sites, for an LLM): Firecrawl. One API call returns markdown with the junk stripped out. Apify can do this with crawler actors, but Firecrawl's defaults are better tuned for it.
• Facts from a platform (prices, reviews, followers, listings): Apify. Firecrawl would hand you the page text and leave extraction to you, and it is not built to fight Amazon-grade or Instagram-grade anti-bot systems. Apify actors already solved both parts.

When to Choose Firecrawl

• You are building RAG, agents, or any LLM pipeline that eats web content
• Your targets are normal websites, not locked-down platforms
• You want markdown out of the box with one simple API
• You want open source and the option to self-host
• Your budget starts at $0 to $16 a month

When to Choose Apify

• You need data from specific platforms: Amazon, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Google Maps
• You want rows and columns, not prose
• Your target site fights scrapers and you do not want that fight
• You want scheduling, storage, and monitoring in one place
• You want to host your own custom scrapers without managing servers

Can You Use Both?

Yes, and AI teams often do. A common split: Firecrawl ingests general web content into the vector store, and Apify actors pull structured platform data (reviews, prices, profiles) into the same pipeline. They are complements more than competitors.

Our Verdict

Firecrawl is the best tool on the market for web-to-markdown, and we say that as an Apify affiliate site. If that is your whole job, use it and skip the platform overhead.

For everything else in scraping, Apify covers more ground. The marketplace means most jobs start at "configure and run" instead of "build". That difference is hours versus weeks, and it is why Apify is our default recommendation.

Sources

• Apify Pricing
• Firecrawl Official Site
• Firecrawl on GitHub