Apify

Apify — Actor platform for scraping and agents, with Crawlee as the open-source core. Apify is a compute platform where scrapers run as containerised Actors, billed in compute units, with a marketplace of thousands of prebuilt ones. Crawlee, its open-source crawler library, is the piece most engineers use directly and handles browser pooling, session rotation and fingerprinting. You do not get a CDP endpoint to connect to from outside — you deploy code that runs browsers inside the platform. Built by Apify Technologies. Founded 2015. Series A. Open source under Apache-2.0.

We track it in 1 comparison — Browser APIs — so every claim below is a cell in a table you can open and check rather than an impression. Across those rosters it sits against 12 other tools, and what follows is where it visibly separates from them.

Where it gives ground.

• CDP endpoint — No. Browserbase records Yes.
• Session replay — No. Browserbase records Yes.
• Human handoff — No. Browserless records Yes.
• Pricing model — per-credit, 9th of 13. Browserbase records per-hour.

None of these disqualify it on their own. They are the fields to check against your own requirements before you commit, because they are the ones where a competitor genuinely does better.

Provenance. 22 of 26 tracked fields carry a value for Apify, and 6 of those cite a document you can open. Last verified 2026-07-01. Every figure keeps its own provenance — measured by us, claimed by the vendor, inferred, or community-reported — and we would rather print a dash than a guess.

Its nearest neighbour in our data is Airtop. Apify is ahead on Open-source core (Partial against No) and File downloads (Yes against Partial). Airtop takes Human handoff (Yes against No) and CDP endpoint (Partial against No). That pattern repeats across the rest of the roster — see Apify alternatives for the other rivals, each compared the same way.

Company

Apify Technologies

Founded

2015

Funding

Series A

Licence

Apache-2.0 (open source)

Fields we track

22 of 26

Last verified

2026-07-01

Not really a browser API and shouldn't be evaluated as one — it is a place to run scraping code, with a marketplace attached. Crawlee is excellent and free. Choose Apify when the job is a scheduled pipeline with storage and monitoring, not when an agent needs a browser right now.

CDP endpoint

○No12th of 13

Inferred

Session replay

○No10th of 13

Inferred

Stealth mode

●Yes1st of 13

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-07-01source

Playwright

●Yes1st of 13

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-07-01source

Live view

●Yes1st of 13

Inferred

Human handoff

○No8th of 13

Inferred

GitHub stars

17,0002nd of 5

Inferred

Puppeteer

●Yes1st of 13

Vendor-claimedverified 2026-07-01source

Apify is the right call in these situations, each one drawn from a field we actually record:

• Scheduled crawls that need storage, queues and monitoring.
• Reusing an existing Actor instead of writing a scraper.
• Teams standardising on Crawlee.

Reach for something else when any of the following is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have:

• CDP endpoint. Apify records No on the Browser APIs table. Browserbase records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Session replay. Apify records No on the Browser APIs table. Browserbase records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Human handoff. Apify records No on the Browser APIs table. Browserless records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Pricing model. Apify records per-credit, 9th of 13 in the Browser APIs roster. Browserbase records per-hour on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.

We publish this block because a comparison that only lists what a tool is good at is marketing. Every figure above sits on the same page as its source, and the field definitions are on the category tables if you want to check how we measured them.

What we don't know. 4 of the 26 fields we track for Apify are still blank: Anti-bot pass rate, Cold start, Max concurrency and Per browser-hour. Those render as dashes rather than as zeroes or assumptions, because an empty cell and a bad cell are not the same thing and only one of them is honest. If you know any of these figures and can point at a document, tell us.