Apify, Bright Data, Zyte and Firecrawl get compared as if they were the same product. They are not. Each sits at a different layer of the web-data stack, and each now also sells some form of managed service. This page explains what each one sells, how it prices as listed in November 2026, who it suits, and where a managed service like ours fits.
One disclosure up front: we often use platforms like these as suppliers. When a source needs residential proxies, a rendering browser or an unblocking API, we buy that from an infrastructure vendor and build the monitored pipeline on top. So this is less “us versus them” than “which layer do you want to own?”
The four layers
- Marketplace and runtime: Apify. Pick a ready-made scraper (“Actor”), run it, pay per result or for compute.
- Network, unblocking and datasets: Bright Data. Proxies, unblocking APIs, scraper APIs and prebuilt datasets for large sites.
- Unblocking API for your own spiders: Zyte. You write the extraction logic; Zyte fetches the page, priced by how hard the site is.
- Pages as LLM-ready content: Firecrawl. Turn URLs into markdown or JSON for models, RAG pipelines and agents.
Apify
What it sells. A store of “thousands of ready-to-run tools” (Apify), a platform for running them, the open-source Crawlee library, and a hosted MCP server at mcp.apify.com that lets AI agents discover and run Actors.
Pricing, as listed in Nov 2026. Free ($5 monthly usage included), Starter $19, Scale $199 and Business $999 per month, with compute units priced from $0.20 down to $0.13 depending on plan. An Enterprise plan offers custom scraping solutions, SLAs and a dedicated team (Apify pricing). Many Actors charge per result instead; the Instagram Scraper, for example, lists $2.30 per 1,000 results (Apify pricing).
Who it suits. Developers, small teams and agent builders who need data from popular sites that already have a maintained Actor. Non-engineers can get far with it too.
Watch for. Many Actors are published by independent developers (Apify pays them about $1 million a month, according to Lupa.cz), so check each Actor’s recent runs, issue history and maintainer before you depend on it. On self-serve plans, checking that each run’s output is complete and correct is your responsibility.
Bright Data
What it sells. A proxy network, plus Web Unlocker, a Scraping Browser, a Web Scraper API, a dataset marketplace, a Web MCP server and a managed data service. It reported more than $300 million in annual recurring revenue in November 2025 (Calcalist).
Pricing, as listed in Nov 2026.
- Web Unlocker: $1.50 per 1,000 requests pay-as-you-go, or $499 a month for 383,000 requests (Bright Data).
- Web Scraper API: $1.50 per 1,000 records pay-as-you-go (Bright Data).
- Datasets: from $2.50 per 1,000 records, with discounts of up to 80% for monthly refresh subscriptions (Bright Data).
- Managed services: $1,000 monthly minimum, a $500 one-time setup per standard scraper and $4 per 1,000 requests (Bright Data).
- The Web MCP launched with a free tier of 5,000 requests a month (SiliconANGLE).
Vendr puts the median annual contract across all products at about $24,000 (Vendr).
Who it suits. Enterprises, AI companies and data teams scraping hard targets at scale, and anyone who can buy a prebuilt dataset instead of collecting it.
Watch for. Many products with separate pricing pages. Budget for usage on top of minimums.
Zyte
What it sells. Zyte API, which handles bans, proxies and browser rendering for requests your own code sends; a hosted MCP server that bills agent usage at Zyte API prices (Zyte docs); and Zyte Data, a managed feed service.
Pricing, as listed in Nov 2026. Zyte API is priced per 1,000 successful responses across five site-difficulty tiers. Pay-as-you-go runs from $0.13 (simple) to $1.27 (advanced) for HTTP responses and from $1.01 to $16.08 for browser-rendered pages. Monthly commitments of $100 to $500 lower the rates, to as little as $0.06. New accounts get $5 of free credit (Zyte pricing). Zyte Data says a custom feed from a single source “typically starts around $500 a month,” with each additional source adding about $200 (Zyte Data).
Who it suits. Data teams that write and maintain their own spiders and want unblocking priced by difficulty, with no proxy management.
Watch for. The most expensive browser-rendered tier costs over 100 times the cheapest HTTP tier per page, so test your target sites against the tiers before committing.
Firecrawl
What it sells. An open-source web data API that returns pages as clean markdown, HTML or JSON, with search, crawl, map, document parsing, browser interaction and change monitoring, plus an MCP server and SDKs (Firecrawl).
Pricing, as listed in Nov 2026. Free (1,000 credits), Hobby $19 (5,000 credits), Standard $99 (100,000), Growth $399 (500,000) and Scale $749 (1 million) per month, with custom Enterprise plans. A basic page scrape costs one credit (Firecrawl pricing).
Who it suits. AI and agent developers who need web content inside a model’s context or a RAG index, quickly and with little setup.
Watch for. Markdown is ideal for models and less ideal when you need the same 30 typed fields on every row, every week. Firecrawl can return structured JSON, but defining the schema and checking each run against it is up to you.
What raw access actually costs
Take 50,000 simple pages a month, as listed in Nov 2026:
| Option | Approximate monthly cost |
|---|---|
| Zyte API, simple HTTP tier, pay-as-you-go | About $6.50 |
| Zyte API, simple browser-rendered tier, pay-as-you-go | About $50 |
| Bright Data Web Unlocker, pay-as-you-go | About $75 |
| Firecrawl Standard plan (100,000 credits) | $99 |
| Apify Instagram Scraper, 50,000 results | About $115 |
Raw access is cheap. What costs money is writing extractors, noticing when a site changes, fixing them, validating output and keeping the schema stable. That is the work you either staff or buy. Our guide on DIY agents versus managed feeds goes deeper on that trade-off.
Where a managed service fits
A managed service sells the outcome: a feed that arrives on schedule, in an agreed schema, monitored and repaired. You do not pick tiers or debug a blocked request.
Two of the platforms above sell exactly this, and they compete with us directly. Zyte Data’s stated entry price of around $500 per source per month is below our $600 starting price for a weekly feed. Bright Data’s managed tier starts at a $1,000 monthly minimum plus setup and usage. Specialist managed firms such as ScrapeHero, Grepsr and PromptCloud are covered in our managed-services comparison.
What we do differently:
- Provenance on every value. Each field carries its source URL and collection timestamp (see our data provenance checklist).
- Delivery into agents. Besides files and API, we can deliver through a hosted MCP server so your own agents query the data directly (+$300/month, included from the Team bundle up).
- Agent-built, engineer-checked pipelines. Agents write and repair extractors; a QA gate and an engineer check what ships, as on our Nomad Watch case study.
- Vendor-neutral access. Because we buy access, we can pick whichever supplier handles a given site best and switch when it stops working.
When to choose them instead of us
- You have an engineer who will own the pipeline. On access costs alone, any of the four platforms is far cheaper than a managed feed, as the cost table above shows.
- A maintained Apify Actor already covers your source. Run it. Pay per result and skip the setup.
- You need a prebuilt dataset of a large site. Bright Data’s dataset marketplace may already have it, and buying is faster than collecting.
- You feed LLMs, not spreadsheets. If you need pages as markdown for RAG or an agent’s context, Firecrawl is purpose-built for that.
- You run Scrapy-style spiders at volume. Zyte API slots in with difficulty-based pricing and no proxy management.
- You want a managed feed from a larger vendor. Zyte Data and Bright Data’s managed tier are backed by much larger companies that run their own access infrastructure, and Zyte states ISO 27001 certification on its Zyte Data page.
Summary comparison
| Apify | Bright Data | Zyte | Firecrawl | Managed service (us) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core product | Actor marketplace and runtime | Proxies, unblocking, datasets | Unblocking API | Pages to markdown/JSON | Monitored data feeds |
| Entry price (Nov 2026) | Free; $19/mo Starter | $1.50/1k requests PAYG | $0.13/1k simple HTTP | Free; $19/mo Hobby | $600/source/mo weekly |
| Pricing model | Plan plus compute, or per result | Per request or per record | Per response, by difficulty | Credits per month | Per source per month |
| Managed tier | Enterprise, custom | From $1,000/mo minimum | Zyte Data, ~$500/mo per source | None listed (Enterprise plan is custom) | Core offer |
| MCP server | Yes, hosted | Yes, Web MCP | Yes, hosted | Yes | Hosted, +$300/mo |
| Who owns the pipeline | You | You (unless managed) | You (unless Zyte Data) | You | Us |
| Best for | Popular sites, quick starts | Hard targets, scale, datasets | In-house spider teams | AI and RAG builders | Teams that want outcomes |
Choosing your layer
If you are unsure which layer you need, start with what you want to own. If the answer is “the data, not the plumbing,” look at our managed data feeds. Send your sources and fields through the contact page for a free 100-row sample within 2 business days. If one of the platforms above is the better fit for your job, we will tell you which one.