# Apify vs boat Apify records 4,147,762 monthly visits with +3.9% month-over-month growth and Freemium, Contact for Pricing pricing. boat records 66,870 monthly visits with +520.8% growth and Free Trial, Paid pricing. | Metric | [Apify](https://openaitools.app/tool/apify) | [boat](https://openaitools.app/tool/boat) | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | Website URL | https://www.apify.com | https://boat.dev | | Categories | AI Web Scraping, AI Agent, AI API, AI Developer Tools | AI Agent, AI Developer Tools, AI Workflow, AI API | | Pricing Model | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | Free Trial, Paid | | Monthly Visits | 4,147,762 | 66,870 | | MoM Growth Rate | +3.9% | +520.8% | | Primary Market | United States | United States | | Direct Visits | 1,816,433 | 37,777 | | Review Score | 4.6 | 4.6 | | 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) ## boat boat targets teams running many agents at once, which it calls "agent factories". Instead of containers that reset on every session, boat hands out full Linux virtual machines with a persistent disk, so installed packages, cloned repos, and saved files survive between runs. Pre-configured images ship with Docker, VS Code, Chrome, the GitHub CLI, Rust, Node.js, and Bun, and you can bring any harness such as Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode. The standout capability is disk-level forking. You can snapshot a configured sandbox and clone it in seconds to run dozens or hundreds of parallel agents from an identical starting state. Sandboxes can be paused and resumed, with disk snapshots taken every minute and again at each stop, so billing only accrues while the VM runs. This makes it practical to fan out test, build, and research workloads without paying for idle time. Billing is metered by the second against a monthly minimum, and the service advertises one of the lowest list prices for comparable VM hours, with sizes ranging from 2 vCPU to 16 vCPU. Sandboxes run in Germany, Finland, and France; there is no US or Asia region and no GPU option, so graphical work runs on the CPU. It is a strong fit for developers who want a real machine rather than a constrained execution sandbox. **Pricing & Plans:** Per-second billing with a $20/month minimum. The default 4 vCPU / 8 GB sandbox lists at $0.036/h, with smaller (2 vCPU / 4 GB) and larger (8 vCPU / 16 GB, 16 vCPU / 32 GB) sizes available. A 7-day free trial with a card provides 25 compute hours, and stopped sandboxes incur no compute charge while the disk is retained for at least 14 days. - **Persistent full Linux VMs:** Each sandbox is a complete Ubuntu machine with systemd, Docker, databases, and cron, so anything that runs on Linux runs here. - **Fast snapshot forking:** Clone a configured sandbox from a disk snapshot in seconds to launch large fleets of identical parallel agents. - **SSH, SCP, and virtual desktop:** Connect over SSH and SCP or open a 60fps virtual desktop and browser to inspect web apps, IDEs, and 3D scenes. - **API, CLI, and SDKs:** Drive everything programmatically through the boat CLI (with --json output), an HTTP API, or Python and TypeScript SDKs. - **Per-second metered billing:** Pay only while sandboxes run, with no compute charge when stopped and disks kept for at least 14 days. **Strengths:** Full Ubuntu VMs rather than restricted containers, with Docker and systemd included; Very fast disk-level forking makes large parallel agent runs affordable; Transparent per-second pricing with no compute charge while stopped **Limitations:** No GPU option and no US or Asia data regions; A $20 monthly minimum applies, which is wasteful for light or occasional use [Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/boat.md) ## Frequently Asked Questions ### How do Apify and boat compare in monthly traffic? Apify has 4,147,762 monthly visits, while boat has 66,870. 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%; boat has +520.8%. ### 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. boat: Free Trial, Paid. Per-second billing with a $20/month minimum. The default 4 vCPU / 8 GB sandbox lists at $0.036/h, with smaller (2 vCPU / 4 GB) and larger (8 vCPU / 16 GB, 16 vCPU / 32 GB) sizes available. A 7-day free trial with a card provides 25 compute hours, and stopped sandboxes incur no compute charge while the disk is retained for at least 14 days. ## 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 | [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) | | 8 | [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) | | 9 | [Browserbase](https://openaitools.app/tool/browserbase) | 283,597 | -8% | Freemium | Cloud browsers and web APIs for AI agents | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/browserbase.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-boat More Markdown: [Categories](https://openaitools.app/categories.md) · [Traffic rankings](https://openaitools.app/rankings.md) · [llms.txt](https://openaitools.app/llms.txt)