Loading comparison
COMPARE/AI INFRASTRUCTURE/APIFY · FIRECRAWL
AI INFRASTRUCTURE · HEAD TO HEAD● YOU PICK THE WINNER
ApifyvsFirecrawl
Two tools. Verified data. Side by side. Everything on this page is vendor-sourced and dated. We don't pick a winner. That's your call. Use the Lens to apply your own criteria.
Apify
Starts at$29/mo
Free planYes
Plans5 tiers
Features10 features
Integrations20 native
PlatformsWeb · API · Terminal
MCP serverYes
Firecrawl
Starts at$16/mo
Free planYes
Plans6 tiers
Features10 features
Integrations29 native
PlatformsWeb · API · Terminal
MCP serverYes
● THE LENS · YOUR COMPARISON · YOUR WINNER
Build the lens. Watch it lean.
Your criteria. Your weighting. Your verdict. Pick your axes and watch the data respond. You decide what's best for you, not us.
PRESETS
Based on your selections, the data leans this way, scroll down to read more.
AXES · 8 · PICK ANY
ALL TOOLS UPDATED 2026.04.30
CAPABILITIES
Where they overlap, where they don't
Functional roles from both tools, split by coverage. The corners are where the two tools become different products.
Only ApifyRoles covered exclusively by this tool.
2- Database
- Code Writer
Both8 of 10 roles in the verified union.
8- Web Scraper
- Data Extractor
- Research Assistant
- Workflow Automator
- Scheduler
- Webhook Manager
- Api Caller
- Competitive Analyser
Only FirecrawlRoles covered exclusively by this tool.
0- —
ROLE COVERAGE···
PLAN LADDER
Every plan, mapped to one ladder
Both tools laid out by ascending monthly cost. Expand any plan to see what's included.
AT A GLANCE
More comparable fields
Every data point from both tools, side by side. Nothing hidden, nothing weighted.
FACT
Category
AI Infrastructure
AI Infrastructure
Starting Price
$29/mo
$16/mo
Pricing Model
Freemium
Freemium
Plans
5 tiers
6 tiers
Free Plan
Yes
Yes
Free Trial
No
No
Platforms
Web · API · Terminal
Web · API · Terminal
Top Features
10 features
10 features
Integrations
20 native
29 native
Public API
Yes
Yes
Webhooks (In)
No
INTEGRATIONS · 44 TOOLS
Integrations from both tools, side by side
Integrations sourced from each tool's own documentation. Where both tools connect to the same app, you see it once. The rest shows where their ecosystems diverge.
BOTH5
15
24UNION44
INTEGRATION
NOTES
LangChain
✓api
✓
Both. Run LangChain Actors and load results into Vector DBs and LLMs
Langflow
✓api
✓
Both. Integrate with Langflow for AI agent workflows
LlamaIndex
✓api
✓
DEEP READ
What it does
Features and capabilities sourced from each tool's own documentation, structured for comparison.
Apify
TOP FEATURES · 10
F01
Apify Store — 25,000+ Ready-Made ActorssearchApify Store is a marketplace of over 25,000 pre-built web scraping and automation tools (Actors) covering social media, e-commerce, lead generation, AI, and more. Users can browse, run, and schedule any Actor instantly without writing code, with each Actor pre-configured with anti-blocking protections tailored to its target website.
F02
Actors — Serverless Automation ProgramscloudActors are lightweight, containerized programs that accept JSON inputs, execute web scraping or automation tasks in the cloud, and return structured outputs. They support long-running jobs beyond a single HTTP transaction, custom memory/CPU allocation, Docker containers, and can be run locally or deployed to Apify's cloud infrastructure at scale.
F03
Actor Standby ModeperformanceActor Standby mode keeps an Actor running in the background as a real-time API server, waiting for incoming HTTP requests just like a standard web server. This eliminates cold-start latency and enables synchronous, low-latency data retrieval for use cases that require immediate responses.
F04
Apify Proxy — IP Rotation & Anti-BlockingsecurityApify Proxy provides datacenter (shared and dedicated), residential, and Google SERP proxy types with dynamic IP rotation, automatic health monitoring, and geolocation targeting for accessing region-specific content. Fixed IP sessions allow retaining the same IP for login-based scraping workflows, and proxies integrate natively with all Actors and the Apify SDK.
F05
Anti-Blocking & FingerprintingsettingsApify's anti-blocking stack includes CAPTCHA solving, browser fingerprinting with real-world fingerprint datasets (via Crawlee's open-source Fingerprint Suite), TLS-level HTTP clients to pass network checks, and headless browser support for JavaScript-heavy sites. Actors in the Store come pre-configured with site-specific anti-blocking, and users are only charged for successful results.
F06
MCP Server for AI AgentsaiThe Apify MCP Server exposes all Actors as tools accessible by AI agents via the Model Context Protocol, compatible with Claude Desktop, Claude.ai, Cursor, ChatGPT, VS Code, and other MCP clients. Agents can dynamically search Apify Store for suitable Actors, run them, and retrieve structured results — enabling autonomous web data workflows without human intervention.
Firecrawl
TOP FEATURES · 10
F01
Web Scraping (Scrape Endpoint)dataConverts any URL into clean LLM-ready data — outputting markdown, HTML, raw HTML, screenshots, structured JSON, links, images, branding profiles, or audio — all in a single API call. Handles JavaScript rendering, smart wait, proxy routing, rate limits, and dynamic content automatically without manual configuration.
F02
Web Search with Content RetrievalsearchPass a query to the /search endpoint and get back titles, descriptions, and URLs from live web results — with optional scrapeOptions to also retrieve full-page markdown, HTML, links, or screenshots for each result in one operation. Supports result types including web, news, images, and category-filtered searches (GitHub, research, PDF).
F03
Full-Site CrawlcloudSubmit a starting URL and Firecrawl recursively discovers and scrapes every reachable subpage, handling sitemaps, JavaScript rendering, path filtering, depth limits, and subdomain control automatically. Results stream in real-time via polling, WebSocket watcher, or webhook events — with pagination handled automatically in the SDK.
F04
Site Map GenerationapiThe /map endpoint takes a single URL and returns a structured list of all discoverable URLs across that website — extremely fast and priced at 1 credit per call regardless of URL count. Supports search-filtered mapping to surface only topic-relevant pages, and geo-location/language targeting to retrieve location-specific URL sets.
F05
Browser Interaction (Interact Endpoint)automationAfter scraping a page, call /interact to take live browser actions using natural-language prompts or executable Playwright/Python/Bash code within a sandboxed session. Supports clicking, typing, scrolling, form-filling, navigation, and screenshot capture — with a live embeddable view URL and persistent browser profiles for staying logged in across sessions.
F06
Autonomous Data AgentaiThe /agent endpoint is a magic API that searches, navigates, and gathers structured data from the widest range of websites without requiring URLs — just a natural-language prompt. It processes multiple sources in parallel, supports JSON schema output (via Pydantic/Zod), and offers two model tiers: Spark 1 Mini (default, 60% cheaper) and Spark 1 Pro for complex multi-domain research tasks.
WHO IT'S FOR
Who each tool is built for
Use cases and fit tags from each tool's own positioning. Match these to your context, not their marketing.
AI/ML engineers and data scientists building generative AI modelsTeams use Apify's Website Content Crawler and other Actors to extract clean, structured text from documentation sites, knowledge bases, forums, blog posts, and PDFs at scale. The scraped data is loaded directly into vector databases (Pinecone, Qdrant, Milvus) via LangChain or LlamaIndex integrations for RAG pipelines, or used to fine-tune models via the OpenAI fine-tuning API and similar services. Apify handles CAPTCHA, anti-blocking, and Markdown-formatted output so ML teams receive clean training datasets without managing scraper infrastructure.
B2B sales teams, marketing agencies, and growth teamsSales teams use Apify's Google Maps Scraper to extract thousands of business records — including full names, emails, phone numbers, websites, social profiles, opening hours, and ratings — filtered by category, location, and rating. Results are exported to CSV or pushed directly to CRMs like Salesforce via API. Groupon used Apify to enrich thousands of merchant records and sync them with Salesforce, accelerating time-to-campaign; LFG reached 2,500+ prospects daily using this automated workflow.
AI product developers and agent framework engineersAI agents connected to the Apify MCP Server can autonomously search for the right Actor for any web data task, execute it, and retrieve structured results — all without manual prompting. This gives agents access to up-to-the-second data from any website through frameworks like LangGraph, CrewAI, Haystack, and OpenAI Agents SDK. Agents can also operate with agentic payments via Skyfire tokens, running Actor jobs and paying for compute without human-in-the-loop approval.
KEEP COMPARING
Related comparisons
Other head-to-heads featuring one of these tools.
● FINAL READ · YOUR WINNERYou've seen the data.
You've seen the data.
The decision is yours.
Stackology doesn't review tools. We source, structure, and map them, and hand you the lens. See what fits, build a stack around it, and ship.
No editorial winner. No sponsored placement. No weighted score. The same dataset feeds every comparison page, the canvas, and the stack builder.