Apify is a strong web scraping platform (4.7/5 on G2 across 400+ reviews) — but it's not the right fit for everyone. Some teams want a purpose-built tool for a specific job like B2B contact enrichment instead of a general scraping marketplace; others want simpler pricing, a no-code interface, or a different scale point. Here are 6 real alternatives, ranked and compared honestly, starting with the one we make.
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| Tool | Best for | Starting price | Free tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| LinkFinder AI | B2B contact & company enrichment | $49/mo flat | 150 credits, no card |
| Firecrawl | AI/LLM-ready web scraping | ~$16/mo | 1,000 credits/mo |
| ScraperAPI | Developer scraping infrastructure | ~$49/mo | 1,000 credits/mo |
| Bright Data | Enterprise-scale proxy & scraping | Pay-per-record, from ~$1.50/1K | Trial credits only |
| Octoparse | No-code visual scraping | ~$89/mo | Limited free plan |
| PhantomBuster | LinkedIn & social automation | ~$59–69/mo | 14-day trial |
Pricing above is approximate and changes often — third-party sources don't always agree down to the dollar. Check each vendor's official pricing page before budgeting.
LinkFinder AI is a data enrichment tool built specifically for sales teams and founders — not a general scraping platform. Email finder, LinkedIn profile enrichment, company data, and phone lookup all work natively through a dashboard or a full REST API on every plan, including the cheapest one. Pricing is flat: $49, $89, or $149 a month for a fixed number of credits, plus PAYG packs from $25 that never expire.
Why it's here: if your reason for looking at Apify was ever "I need an email address or a LinkedIn profile enriched," this replaces the Actor-hunting step entirely. It's not a fit if you need to scrape arbitrary websites outside B2B contact data — see Firecrawl or Bright Data below for that.
Firecrawl converts web pages into clean markdown rather than raw HTML, which matters if you're feeding scraped data into an LLM or AI agent. It's popular with teams building AI workflows and has strong open-source traction (100K+ GitHub stars on its underlying tooling).
Tradeoff: it's subscription-only with no pay-as-you-go option, and monthly credits expire without rollover — the same complaint that pushes some people off Apify in the first place. It's also a general scraping tool, not built for B2B contact data specifically.
ScraperAPI is a single API call that handles proxy rotation, CAPTCHA solving, and JavaScript rendering, then returns raw HTML. It's a good fit if you already have parsing code and just need reliable access to pages.
Tradeoff: credit costs multiply per request depending on target site and features enabled (JS rendering, premium proxies), so a 100,000-credit plan can cover far fewer real requests than the headline number suggests — a similar "the sticker price isn't the real price" issue to Apify's compute units.
Bright Data runs the largest residential proxy network in the industry (400M+ IPs) and independently benchmarks among the highest success rates against anti-bot defenses. It's the platform Fortune 500 teams reach for when a scrape absolutely cannot fail.
Tradeoff: it's the most expensive option here, pricing is genuinely complex (separate products and billing for proxies, Web Scraper API, and datasets), and there's no meaningful free tier to test on. Overkill if you just need B2B contact records.
Octoparse lets you build a scraper by clicking on the elements you want directly in a browser preview — genuinely no code required. It works well for consistent, stable sources like directories and catalogs, with cloud scraping and scheduled runs included.
Tradeoff: it bills by seat rather than usage, which can be less flexible for spiky needs, and point-and-click scrapers tend to break when a target site's layout changes — a maintenance cost Apify's actor-based model shares too.
PhantomBuster (also France-based) is built around chainable "Phantoms" for LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and other platforms — automating things like connection requests, profile visits, and data extraction from social sites specifically.
Tradeoff: pricing is split across three separate quotas (execution hours, phantom slots, and email credits), which reviewers say gets confusing fast, and LinkedIn automation runs on stored session cookies — a real account-ban risk that a data API like LinkFinder AI's doesn't carry.
Apify remains the strongest single choice if your job is broad, custom web scraping — its catalog of 7,000+ pre-built Actors covers use cases none of the tools above fully replace individually, from e-commerce price monitoring to arbitrary site crawling.
It's also a better fit than any tool on this list for engineering teams who want full code control, with the open-source Crawlee library and self-hosted deployment options.
If your Apify use case is really B2B contact and company data, see your own results before you decide. 150 credits land in your account instantly.
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It depends on the job. For B2B contact data — emails, LinkedIn profiles, company details, phone numbers — LinkFinder AI is purpose-built and avoids Apify's compute-unit billing entirely. For general-purpose or AI-ready web scraping at scale, Firecrawl, ScraperAPI, Bright Data, and Octoparse are the more established names, each with a different tradeoff on price, ease of use, and target-site coverage.
The most common reasons are unpredictable billing (a monthly platform fee stacked with compute units, proxy bandwidth, and per-result Actor fees), monthly credits that expire without rollover, a learning curve for non-developers, and the fact that Apify is a general scraping marketplace rather than a tool built for one specific job like B2B contact enrichment.
Yes. LinkFinder AI (for B2B contact and company enrichment) and Octoparse (for general point-and-click web scraping) both work without writing code or configuring an Actor. PhantomBuster also offers a no-code interface, though it runs on browser automation for LinkedIn and social platforms rather than a REST API.
For B2B contact data specifically, LinkFinder AI's PAYG packs start at $25 and never expire. For general web scraping, Firecrawl's Hobby plan starts around $16/month for a limited monthly credit allotment, though credits there also expire without rollover.
Yes. LinkFinder AI is based and operated in France within the EU and built to GDPR requirements. Apify, based in the Czech Republic, is also GDPR compliant, so both are safe choices for EU-based teams on this specific point.
Yes, most do. LinkFinder AI includes a full REST API on every plan starting at $49/month. Firecrawl, ScraperAPI, and Bright Data are all API-first products. Octoparse and PhantomBuster are built primarily around their own dashboards, with API access available on higher tiers.
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