# Apify vs Higress Apify records 4,147,762 monthly visits with +3.9% month-over-month growth and Freemium, Contact for Pricing pricing. Higress records 13,318 monthly visits with -17.9% growth and Contact for Pricing pricing. | Metric | [Apify](https://openaitools.app/tool/apify) | [Higress](https://openaitools.app/tool/higress) | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | Website URL | https://www.apify.com | https://higress.ai | | Categories | AI Web Scraping, AI Agent, AI API, AI Developer Tools | AI API, AI Agent, AI Developer Tools, Large Language Models (LLMs) | | Pricing Model | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | Contact for Pricing | | Monthly Visits | 4,147,762 | 13,318 | | MoM Growth Rate | +3.9% | -17.9% | | Primary Market | United States | China | | Direct Visits | 1,816,433 | 5,143 | | 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) ## Higress Higress is an AI-native API gateway that grew out of Alibaba's internal cloud-native gateway work and is now governed as a CNCF Sandbox project. It is built on top of the Istio control plane and the Envoy data plane, so it inherits mature traffic-management, security and observability primitives while adding AI-specific capabilities such as unified protocol conversion for 100+ model APIs, model-level fallback and token-aware rate limiting. The gateway's core idea is "one Higress, three categories of AI traffic." It acts as a unified LLM gateway for model APIs, an MCP gateway for tool calling and protocol translation, and an inference gateway for Kubernetes inference workloads through the Gateway API Inference Extension. Beyond routing, it covers data privacy on model input, content filtering on output, exact and semantic caching to cut token cost and latency, and per-consumer token quota tracking. Higress is available both as free open source you can self-host with a single Docker command, and as a fully managed commercial edition on Alibaba Cloud with a serverless pay-as-you-go tier and an enterprise tier offering higher SLAs, dedicated entry points and custom domains. It is widely deployed by enterprises such as Ctrip, SOFA Community and Alibaba for large-scale MCP and multi-model gateway scenarios. **Pricing & Plans:** Free open-source edition (self-hosted, Docker quick start, no signup) plus Alibaba Cloud managed editions: a serverless standard tier billed by usage with pay-as-you-go elasticity, and an enterprise tier with a 99.95% SLA, dedicated ingress, custom domains and transit encryption. - **Unified LLM API gateway:** Route requests to 100+ model APIs through unified protocol conversion, with model-level fallback and flexible backend scheduling. - **MCP gateway and tool governance:** Expose existing services as MCP servers, proxy and translate protocols, and apply authentication, traffic scheduling and parameter mapping to tool calls. - **Token quota and semantic caching:** Track token consumption per consumer, enforce quotas on overuse, and cache exact or semantically similar answers to save tokens and reduce latency. - **Security and content protection:** Protect privacy on data sent to external models and filter model output before it reaches users, alongside standard gateway auth and rate limiting. - **Istio and Envoy extensibility:** Wasm plugin model, multi-registry service discovery and plugin market let teams extend the gateway without rebuilding infrastructure. **Strengths:** Backed by the CNCF and a large open-source community with regular releases; Built on proven Istio and Envoy foundations, so advanced traffic management comes for free; Deep AI-specific features: MCP proxying, semantic caching and token governance; Clear path from free self-hosted Docker deployment to managed enterprise SLA **Limitations:** Self-hosting requires Kubernetes and gateway expertise; Some of the richest features are easiest to access on the Alibaba Cloud managed edition; Documentation and community content skew heavily toward Chinese-language and Alibaba Cloud ecosystems [Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/higress.md) ## Frequently Asked Questions ### How do Apify and Higress compare in monthly traffic? Apify has 4,147,762 monthly visits, while Higress has 13,318. 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%; Higress has -17.9%. ### 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. Higress: Contact for Pricing. Free open-source edition (self-hosted, Docker quick start, no signup) plus Alibaba Cloud managed editions: a serverless standard tier billed by usage with pay-as-you-go elasticity, and an enterprise tier with a 99.95% SLA, dedicated ingress, custom domains and transit encryption. ## Alternatives | # | Tool Name | Monthly Visits | MoM Growth Rate | Pricing Model | Summary | Profile (Markdown) | | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | | 1 | [OpenRouter](https://openaitools.app/tool/openrouter-ai) | 19,941,437 | -6.2% | Paid | One API key for hundreds of AI models from every major provider | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/openrouter-ai.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 | [Composio](https://openaitools.app/tool/composio) | 2,782,603 | +22.8% | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | Give your AI agents secure, authenticated access to 1,700+ apps | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/composio.md) | | 4 | [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) | | 5 | [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) | | 6 | [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) | | 7 | [Nebius](https://openaitools.app/tool/nebius) | 1,145,711 | +10.7% | Paid, Contact for Pricing | An AI-native cloud built from silicon to API for training, tuning, and serving models | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/nebius.md) | | 8 | [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) | | 9 | [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) | | 10 | [LiteLLM](https://openaitools.app/tool/litellm) | 576,967 | +7.9% | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | One open-source AI gateway for 100+ LLM providers | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/litellm.md) | --- Source: https://openaitools.app/compare/apify-vs-higress More Markdown: [Categories](https://openaitools.app/categories.md) · [Traffic rankings](https://openaitools.app/rankings.md) · [llms.txt](https://openaitools.app/llms.txt)