# Apify vs Backmesh Apify records 4,147,762 monthly visits with +3.9% month-over-month growth and Freemium, Contact for Pricing pricing. Backmesh records 874 monthly visits with +965.9% growth and Free Trial, Paid pricing. | Metric | [Apify](https://openaitools.app/tool/apify) | [Backmesh](https://openaitools.app/tool/backmesh) | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | Website URL | https://www.apify.com | https://backmesh.com | | Categories | AI Web Scraping, AI Agent, AI API, AI Developer Tools | AI API, Large Language Models (LLMs), Open Source AI Models | | Pricing Model | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | Free Trial, Paid | | Monthly Visits | 4,147,762 | 874 | | MoM Growth Rate | +3.9% | +965.9% | | Primary Market | United States | Nigeria | | Direct Visits | 1,816,433 | 394 | | Review Score | 4.6 | 4.3 | | Saved Count | 6 | 0 | | Supported Platforms | Website | Website | ## Apify Apify started as a general-purpose web automation cloud and has grown into one of the largest marketplaces of turnkey web data extractors. The platform exposes a store of Actors — small containerized programs built by Apify and by third-party developers — that handle jobs like pulling Google Maps listings, TikTok videos, Instagram posts, Amazon prices, or crawling a documentation site into clean Markdown for a RAG pipeline. Each Actor runs on Apify's cloud, can be triggered from an API, scheduled on a recurring basis, and wired into downstream storage or applications.\n\nBecause running scrapers in production is mostly an infrastructure problem, Apify bundles the unglamorous parts: rotating residential and datacenter proxies, browser fingerprinting and anti-blocking, retry logic, dataset and key-value storage, and monitoring. Developers who would rather write their own code can build Actors with the Apify SDK in Python or JavaScript, or use Crawlee, Apify's open-source crawling and browser-automation library, which works with Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium, and BeautifulSoup.\n\nRecently the platform has positioned itself around AI: the Apify MCP server and CLI let AI agents and assistants discover and call Actors as tools, and the Website Content Crawler Actor is explicitly designed to feed LLM applications and vector databases. Pricing follows a freemium model with monthly platform credits, pay-per-usage pricing for many Actors, and custom enterprise agreements. **Pricing & Plans:** Freemium: a free plan with monthly usage credits, paid subscription tiers that scale credits and concurrency, consumption-based charges for many marketplace Actors, and custom enterprise pricing. Developer payouts are also available for published Actors. - **Actor marketplace:** Over one hundred thousand ready-to-run scrapers and automation tools covering social media, maps, e-commerce, real estate, and general web crawling. - **MCP server and CLI:** Connect Apify Actors directly to AI assistants and agents so they can search the store, run scrapers, and pull structured results as tool calls. - **Anti-blocking and proxy infrastructure:** Managed proxy rotation and unblocking are built into the platform, so scrapers keep working when target sites add defenses. - **Crawlee and the Apify SDK:** An open-source crawling library plus Python and JavaScript SDKs for building custom Actors with Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium, or Cheerio. - **Scheduling, storage, and integrations:** Recurring runs, dataset exports to CSV/JSON/Excel, webhooks, and integrations with LangChain, LlamaIndex, Zapier, and thousands of apps. **Strengths:** Enormous library of maintained scrapers means many jobs need no code at all; Infrastructure concerns like proxies, retries, and blocking are handled for you; Agent-ready through MCP, CLI, and API, with LangChain and LlamaIndex integrations; Generous free tier for testing plus a developer revenue-share program **Limitations:** Costs scale with usage, so high-volume scraping can get expensive quickly; Quality varies between community-built Actors and first-party ones; Target sites change frequently, so some Actors break or need updating over time [Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/apify.md) ## Backmesh Backmesh solves a specific and expensive problem: GitHub-hosted runners are convenient but costly, and typical self-hosted runner setups require you to operate autoscaling infrastructure yourself. With a single install, Backmesh connects your GitHub organisation to spot VM capacity across AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, and launches one VM per job. Runners and their autoscaler run inside accounts you control, so your clouds bill you directly for compute. Security is designed around not holding your data. Backmesh stores no cloud keys: the install connects each cloud using a role created from your own cloud CLI session. Code, secrets, caches and logs travel only between GitHub and your runners, never to Backmesh, and only one small event per job is sent — describing the runner without naming the repository, workflow, job or branch. If Backmesh itself has an outage of roughly half an hour, in-flight jobs finish and new ones keep starting. Commercially, Backmesh charges by jobs started rather than minutes, with a 15-day free trial on every tier and monthly or yearly billing. The site publishes comparisons against GitHub-hosted runners — for example 150,000 minutes a month costing about $1,800 on GitHub versus roughly $210–$260 on Backmesh for 4-vCPU Linux jobs. The platform supports Linux x86-64, private repositories, and AWS, GCP or Azure per workflow. **Pricing & Plans:** Subscription tiers priced by jobs started over a rolling 30-day window, with a 15-day free trial on every tier and up to 30% off on yearly billing; tier prices and job caps are listed on the pricing page. - **One install across three clouds:** A single Backmesh install receives your GitHub queued jobs and dispatches each to its own spot VM in AWS, Google Cloud or Azure. - **No cloud keys stored:** Cloud connections use roles created from your own CLI session, and Backmesh never receives your code, secrets, caches or logs. - **Cost visibility and control:** A status command reports runner VMs, queue times, 24-hour and 7-day job stats and month-to-date cost in one place. - **Per-job resource telemetry:** Every job log ends with peak memory, OOM kills, CPU and disk usage so you can right-size jobs. - **Resilient by design:** Running jobs complete and new jobs keep starting through a Backmesh outage of about 30 minutes. **Strengths:** Substantially lower CI compute cost than GitHub-hosted runners on equivalent workloads; Runners and autoscaler live in your own cloud accounts, with no cloud keys stored by Backmesh; Works across AWS, GCP and Azure from a single install with unified status reporting; Per-job resource telemetry helps size runners accurately **Limitations:** Linux x86-64 and private repositories only — no macOS, Windows, Arm or GPU runners; Each job waits for its own VM to boot, roughly 30 s on AWS and 60–70 s on GCP and Azure; A reclaimed spot VM fails its job and must be rerun; Each job starts with an empty Docker layer cache [Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/backmesh.md) ## Frequently Asked Questions ### How do Apify and Backmesh compare in monthly traffic? Apify has 4,147,762 monthly visits, while Backmesh has 874. Traffic estimates describe audience size, not product quality. ### How do their growth rates compare? Apify has a month-over-month growth rate of +3.9%; Backmesh has +965.9%. ### How does pricing compare? Apify: Freemium, Contact for Pricing. Freemium: a free plan with monthly usage credits, paid subscription tiers that scale credits and concurrency, consumption-based charges for many marketplace Actors, and custom enterprise pricing. Developer payouts are also available for published Actors. Backmesh: Free Trial, Paid. Subscription tiers priced by jobs started over a rolling 30-day window, with a 15-day free trial on every tier and up to 30% off on yearly billing; tier prices and job caps are listed on the pricing page. ## Alternatives | # | Tool Name | Monthly Visits | MoM Growth Rate | Pricing Model | Summary | Profile (Markdown) | | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | | 1 | [n8n](https://openaitools.app/tool/n8n) | 4,522,449 | -7.4% | Freemium | Open-source workflow automation built for AI agents and technical teams | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/n8n.md) | | 2 | [RunPod](https://openaitools.app/tool/runpod) | 2,881,043 | +5.9% | Paid | The AI developer cloud for GPU pods, serverless inference and clustering | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/runpod.md) | | 3 | [Firecrawl](https://openaitools.app/tool/firecrawl-dev) | 1,828,239 | -1.9% | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | Provides direct LLM-ready markdown conversion via API, but lacks Apify's massive marketplace of pre-built scraping actors. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/firecrawl-dev.md) | | 4 | [Clay](https://openaitools.app/tool/clay-2-0) | 1,267,465 | -2.7% | Freemium, Free Trial, Contact for Pricing | Build GTM systems that turn data into revenue | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/clay-2-0.md) | | 5 | [Browser Use](https://openaitools.app/tool/browser-use) | 1,206,376 | +41.1% | Freemium, Paid, Contact for Pricing | Browser agents and stealth cloud browsers for real web tasks | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/browser-use.md) | | 6 | [Modal](https://openaitools.app/tool/modal-com) | 1,196,021 | +30.2% | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | Serverless cloud infrastructure for AI and data workloads | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/modal-com.md) | | 7 | [OrcaRouter](https://openaitools.app/tool/orcarouter) | 975,300 | -5.2% | Freemium | One OpenAI-compatible gateway for adaptive LLM routing, guardrails, and spend control | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/orcarouter.md) | | 8 | [Bright Data](https://openaitools.app/tool/bright-data) | 802,752 | -5.9% | Free Trial, Paid | Offers enterprise-grade proxy networks and raw web data infrastructure, but lacks Apify's plug-and-play actor marketplace. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/bright-data.md) | | 9 | [Gumloop](https://openaitools.app/tool/gumloop) | 379,557 | -21.1% | Freemium, Paid, Contact for Pricing | Automates complex business workflows with AI agents, but is less specialized for raw large-scale web scraping actors. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/gumloop.md) | | 10 | [PhantomBuster](https://openaitools.app/tool/phantombuster) | 279,012 | -10.1% | Freemium, Free Trial, Paid | Focuses heavily on pre-built social media automation and lead generation workflows rather than general web scraping. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/phantombuster.md) | --- Source: https://openaitools.app/compare/apify-vs-backmesh More Markdown: [Categories](https://openaitools.app/categories.md) · [Traffic rankings](https://openaitools.app/rankings.md) · [llms.txt](https://openaitools.app/llms.txt)