Apify vs Zyte API

A general-purpose scraping cloud against a single unblocking endpoint that prices per successful response.

Apify is hosted actor platform with 5,000+ prebuilt scrapers, a managed proxy pool, scheduling and dataset storage. It is maintained by Apify Technologies, runs on Cloud · Node/Python SDK · REST API, and starts at $0 (free tier) · from $49/mo.

Zyte API is rendering, ban handling and automatic extraction as one API from the team that maintains Scrapy. It comes from Zyte (creators of Scrapy), runs on HTTP API · scrapy-zyte-api · Python/Node SDKs, and starts at from ≈ $0.20 / 1k requests.

Apify is a platform: you deploy code and it runs. Zyte API is an unblocker: you send a URL and get HTML back. Teams that own their crawl logic usually keep it and buy Zyte API only for the domains that fight back.

We score every scraping tool on five axes that decide real projects: how quickly a new engineer becomes productive, how far the tool scales before it needs replacing, how well it survives anti-bot systems, how good the documentation and community are, and what you get per dollar. Apify scores 8.7/10 overall against 8.6/10 for Zyte API, but the aggregate hides the trade-off that matters to you.

The clearest gaps are on ease of use and anti-bot handling. Read those two rows first; the rest are close enough that team familiarity should decide.

Throughput decides your proxy bill as much as your compute bill: a tool that needs a full browser to read a page transfers ten to thirty times more bytes than one that parses HTML directly, and residential bandwidth is priced per gigabyte.

Apify sustains Elastic — limited by plan concurrency and uses roughly Managed. Zyte API sustains Provider-side, elastic at roughly None (remote). On JavaScript-heavy targets, Apify handles rendering like this: Yes, in browser actors Zyte API: Optional per request

Apify: Usage-credit model: compute units, residential GB and datacenter IPs draw from the plan balance.

Zyte API: Tiered per request: plain fetches are cheap, browser rendering and AI extraction cost more.

Neither list price is your real cost. Add proxy bandwidth for every tool that does not bundle it, add the compute hours for anything that drives a browser, and add the engineering time that a self-hosted stack consumes every month. A framework that is free to license routinely costs more per delivered page than a paid unlocker once residential gigabytes and failed requests are counted honestly.

Proxy strategy is where most scraping projects leak money. Apify expects: Built-in datacenter and residential pools plus bring-your-own proxy URLs Managed pool by default; bring-your-own proxy URLs once volume justifies a direct contract.

Zyte API expects: Managed proxy selection with automatic escalation from datacenter to residential Proxies are included in the endpoint price — you do not manage exits.

Whichever tool you pick, tier your proxy network per domain rather than globally. Start every target on datacenter IPs, promote it to rotating residential when the block rate on that specific domain passes a few percent, use static ISP IPs for anything logged in, and reserve mobile exits for app-only endpoints. Teams that apply one proxy type to every target routinely overpay by five to ten times.

Neither tool is strictly better. The lists below are the differences that changed our recommendation during testing, not feature-sheet trivia.

Apify is a platform: you deploy code and it runs. Zyte API is an unblocker: you send a URL and get HTML back. Teams that own their crawl logic usually keep it and buy Zyte API only for the domains that fight back.

Choose Apify when: You want hosted execution, scheduling and storage for your own scrapers plus a marketplace of prebuilt actors.

Choose Zyte API when: Your crawler already works and the only missing piece is reliable retrieval on protected domains, billed per success.

A large share of production stacks run both. Using Apify for the bulk of the crawl and Zyte API for the fraction of domains it handles better is almost always cheaper than forcing one tool to cover every target, because the expensive path only gets used where it earns its price.