# Apify vs Dagster Apify records 4,147,762 monthly visits with +3.9% month-over-month growth and Freemium, Contact for Pricing pricing. Dagster records 105,563 monthly visits with -18.5% growth and Free Trial, Paid, Contact for Pricing pricing. | Metric | [Apify](https://openaitools.app/tool/apify) | [Dagster](https://openaitools.app/tool/dagster) | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | Website URL | https://www.apify.com | https://www.dagster.io | | Categories | AI Web Scraping, AI Agent, AI API, AI Developer Tools | AI Developer Tools, AI Workflow, AI For Data Analytics, AI Productivity Tools | | Pricing Model | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | Free Trial, Paid, Contact for Pricing | | Monthly Visits | 4,147,762 | 105,563 | | MoM Growth Rate | +3.9% | -18.5% | | Primary Market | United States | China | | Direct Visits | 1,816,433 | 25,739 | | Review Score | 4.6 | 4.4 | | 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) ## Dagster Dagster approaches orchestration from the output side. Instead of defining a pipeline as a sequence of tasks that either finish or fail, you declare the data assets you want to produce and their dependencies. Dagster then handles scheduling, backfills, partitions and retries, and — because it knows which asset each run touched — it can tell you automatically what downstream data is affected when something breaks. That asset graph is also what generates lineage and data health views without bolting on a separate catalog. The platform covers the full DataOps loop. Orchestration runs asset-based pipelines across dbt, Snowflake, Fivetran, Spark, Python and other tools; observability surfaces lineage, freshness, dependencies and failures across the whole stack; and Dagster AI turns that accumulated context into diagnoses and actions. For organizations running data agents, a Compass layer lets teams build governed agents on top of trusted workflows. Deployment is flexible: Dagster+ managed cloud, hybrid where compute stays in your own infrastructure while the control plane is hosted, or fully self-hosted open source. Dagster's positioning against Apache Airflow rests on that asset-centric philosophy — Airflow tells you a job failed, Dagster aims to tell you which asset broke, why, and what depends on it. The project was developed by Dagster Labs and is now part of Prefect, which has committed to continuing the platform; the open-source core remains available on GitHub. **Pricing & Plans:** Freemium and open source. The core orchestration framework is free and self-hostable under an open-source licence, and there is a free entry tier for Dagster+. Paid team and business plans scale with usage, while enterprise deployments — branch deployments, hybrid compute, governance and SSO — are quoted through sales. [Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/dagster.md) ## Frequently Asked Questions ### How do Apify and Dagster compare in monthly traffic? Apify has 4,147,762 monthly visits, while Dagster has 105,563. 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%; Dagster has -18.5%. ### 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. Dagster: Free Trial, Paid, Contact for Pricing. Freemium and open source. The core orchestration framework is free and self-hostable under an open-source licence, and there is a free entry tier for Dagster+. Paid team and business plans scale with usage, while enterprise deployments — branch deployments, hybrid compute, governance and SSO — are quoted through sales. ## Alternatives | # | Tool Name | Monthly Visits | MoM Growth Rate | Pricing Model | Summary | Profile (Markdown) | | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | | 1 | [Zapier](https://openaitools.app/tool/zapier-com) | 5,065,248 | +0.4% | Freemium, Free Trial, Paid | Automate work across thousands of apps — no code required | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/zapier-com.md) | | 2 | [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) | | 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 | [Dify](https://openaitools.app/tool/dify-ai) | 819,691 | -15% | Freemium | Build, deploy, and govern production-ready agentic AI workflows | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/dify-ai.md) | | 6 | [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) | | 7 | [Labelbox](https://openaitools.app/tool/labelbox) | 762,803 | -22.8% | Contact for Pricing | The environments frontier AI trains on, and the agents that do the recurring work | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/labelbox.md) | | 8 | [Convex](https://openaitools.app/tool/convex) | 390,417 | -18.7% | Freemium, Paid | Reactive TypeScript backend with database, functions and AI gateway | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/convex.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-dagster More Markdown: [Categories](https://openaitools.app/categories.md) · [Traffic rankings](https://openaitools.app/rankings.md) · [llms.txt](https://openaitools.app/llms.txt)