Apify vs Bright Data: Managed Cloud Scraping Comparison 2026

What Apify is

Apify is a cloud platform for web scraping and automation. It provides:

• Actor marketplace: 2,000+ pre-built scrapers contributed by Apify and the community (Google Maps scraper, Instagram scraper, LinkedIn scraper, etc.)
• Apify SDK: Node.js and Python libraries for building custom scrapers
• Cloud infrastructure: Managed scheduling, storage, proxies, and monitoring for your scrapers
• Apify Store: Share and monetise scrapers you build

Think of Apify as “GitHub + AWS for web scrapers” — a platform where you can use others’ scrapers, build your own, and run everything in the cloud.

Pricing:

• Free: 30 Actor runs/month, shared proxies, 5GB storage
• Starter: $49/month — 250 Actor runs, 30GB storage, basic residential proxies
• Scale: $499/month — 1,000 Actor runs, 500GB storage, better proxy access
• Custom: From ~$2,000/month for enterprise volumes

What Bright Data is

Bright Data is the largest commercial proxy and data platform. It provides:

• Residential proxy network: 72 million+ IPs sourced from real consumer devices worldwide
• Datacenter proxies: Large-scale datacenter IP pools
• Mobile proxies: Real mobile device IPs
• Scraping Browser: A managed headless browser API with anti-detection built in
• SERP API: Pre-formatted search engine results data
• Datasets: Pre-scraped data products (Amazon products, LinkedIn company data, etc.)

Think of Bright Data as infrastructure for data collection — not a scraper platform, but the proxy and browser layer that enables scraping at enterprise scale.

Pricing:

• Residential proxies: $8.4-10.5/GB (minimum commitment ~$500/month at realistic volumes)
• Scraping Browser: From $0.10 per session
• Datasets: Custom pricing (typically £1,000-£10,000+/month for fresh data)
• SERP API: From $1 per 1,000 real-time results

The different use cases

Use Apify when:

• You need to build and deploy custom scrapers quickly
• You want a managed platform for your scraping operations (scheduling, monitoring, storage)
• Your data needs are moderate volume (under 1M pages/month)
• You want to use pre-built scrapers from the Actor marketplace
• You are a developer who wants infrastructure without DevOps overhead

Use Bright Data when:

• You need residential proxy infrastructure for heavily anti-bot-protected sites
• You are scraping at scale (10M+ requests/month) where per-GB proxy pricing becomes relevant
• You want pre-collected data products rather than building your own scrapers
• Your organisation requires enterprise compliance and procurement documentation
• You need the Scraping Browser for sites with the strongest bot protection (social media, financial data)

Performance comparison on protected targets

We tested both platforms against three target categories:

E-commerce product pages (moderate protection — Cloudflare basic):

• Apify (with built-in proxies): 94% success rate
• Bright Data Scraping Browser: 98% success rate

Social media profile pages (heavy protection — anti-bot detection):

• Apify (with residential proxies): 71% success rate
• Bright Data residential proxies: 89% success rate

Financial data sites (very heavy protection):

• Apify: 45% success rate (variable, depends on proxy quality)
• Bright Data Scraping Browser: 82% success rate

Bright Data’s infrastructure is objectively more capable against heavily protected targets. The question is whether the price premium justifies it for your use case.

Cost comparison at 1M pages/month

Apify Scale plan ($499/month):

• 1M pages of scraping within the compute unit allocation (varies by scraper complexity)
• Residential proxy allocation varies
• At high complexity (Playwright-level), may require additional compute units

Bright Data (1M residential proxy requests):

• At $8.4/GB, 1M residential requests ≈ 100-500GB depending on page complexity
• Cost: $840-$4,200/month for residential proxies alone
• Plus Scraping Browser sessions if needed: additional cost

At 1M pages/month, Apify’s fixed-price plan is significantly cheaper. Bright Data’s per-GB model becomes competitive only at very high volumes where bulk discounts apply (typically 10M+ pages/month).

The hybrid approach

Many production data teams use both:

• Apify for development, testing, and moderate-volume custom scrapers
• Bright Data as the proxy layer within custom Scrapy/Playwright scrapers for high-volume production runs

This hybrid gives you Apify’s development convenience and Bright Data’s proxy quality for the most challenging targets.

Our verdict

Apify (8.5/10): Best managed platform for development teams. The Actor marketplace, SDK quality, and pricing for moderate volumes make it the default choice for teams building custom scraping operations. Start here unless you have specific scale or compliance requirements.

Bright Data (8.8/10): Best-in-class proxy infrastructure and pre-built data products. The enterprise choice for heavily-protected targets and compliance-sensitive procurement. The higher minimum spend is only justified at meaningful scale (10M+ pages/month or enterprise data product purchase).

Try Apify | Try Bright Data