# Apify vs mcp-use Apify records 4,147,762 monthly visits with +3.9% month-over-month growth and Freemium, Contact for Pricing pricing. mcp-use records 5,746 monthly visits with -2.9% growth and Contact for Pricing pricing. | Metric | [Apify](https://openaitools.app/tool/apify) | [mcp-use](https://openaitools.app/tool/mcp-use) | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | Website URL | https://www.apify.com | https://mcp-use.com | | Categories | AI Web Scraping, AI Agent, AI API, AI Developer Tools | AI Developer Tools, AI API, AI Agent, Large Language Models (LLMs) | | Pricing Model | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | Contact for Pricing | | Monthly Visits | 4,147,762 | 5,746 | | MoM Growth Rate | +3.9% | -2.9% | | Primary Market | United States | United States | | Direct Visits | 1,816,433 | 2,280 | | 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) ## mcp-use mcp-use began as an open-source framework for developers who wanted a faster way to build and debug MCP servers. At its core are an SDK available for TypeScript and Python, a browser-based Inspector for exploring a server's tools and responses, a terminal client CLI, and a set of deploy-ready templates. You can scaffold a server in a single command, run it locally, and point an AI client at it, or use templates to start from a production-shaped project. The code is MIT-licensed, self-hostable, and has passed ten million downloads across both language packages. The website mcp-use.com now redirects to Manufact Cloud, the commercial platform created by the same team. Manufact positions itself as the cloud for production MCP: it hosts MCP servers and apps, provides branch previews and custom domains, runs the same test harness across ChatGPT, Claude and coding-agent clients, and checks a server against ChatGPT Apps Store and Cloud Connectors publishing requirements. It also offers a Cloud Inspector that traces and replays MCP traffic in production. Together the two halves form a build-and-operate path. Teams that only need the framework can install the SDK and Inspector and run everything themselves; teams that need hosting, release verification and analytics can move the same server onto Manufact Cloud. The open-source tools remain the on-ramp, and the cloud is where the team's commercial offering sits. **Pricing & Plans:** The open-source mcp-use SDK, Inspector and CLI are free under the MIT licence and can be self-hosted. Manufact Cloud, the companion commercial platform, is priced on request — the website offers a free start and a "book a demo" path for teams and enterprise, without publishing public per-seat rates. - **TypeScript and Python SDK:** Build MCP servers and apps in either language with a single-command scaffold, plus an installable skill for coding agents. - **Browser-based Inspector:** Connect to an MCP server, browse its tools and inspect raw requests and responses without writing client code. - **Client CLI and tunneling:** Call MCP servers from the terminal and expose a local server through a secure tunnel for remote clients and testers. - **Deploy-ready templates:** Start from production-shaped MCP framework templates instead of assembling transport, auth and session handling yourself. - **Managed Cloud for production:** Optional hosting with branch previews, custom domains, cross-client test harnesses, store publishing checks and usage analytics. **Strengths:** Genuinely open source under MIT with both TypeScript and Python packages; Clear developer tooling: SDK, browser Inspector, CLI and templates in one ecosystem; Backed by an active team with a commercial cloud for production hosting and analytics; Strong adoption signals — millions of downloads and thousands of GitHub stars **Limitations:** The mcp-use.com domain now redirects to Manufact Cloud, which can be confusing if you expected a standalone site; Managed cloud pricing is not published, so budgeting requires a sales conversation; The tooling assumes familiarity with the Model Context Protocol and LLM client configuration [Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/mcp-use.md) ## Frequently Asked Questions ### How do Apify and mcp-use compare in monthly traffic? Apify has 4,147,762 monthly visits, while mcp-use has 5,746. 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%; mcp-use has -2.9%. ### 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. mcp-use: Contact for Pricing. The open-source mcp-use SDK, Inspector and CLI are free under the MIT licence and can be self-hosted. Manufact Cloud, the companion commercial platform, is priced on request — the website offers a free start and a "book a demo" path for teams and enterprise, without publishing public per-seat rates. ## 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 | [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 | [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) | | 8 | [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) | | 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 | [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) | --- Source: https://openaitools.app/compare/apify-vs-mcp-use More Markdown: [Categories](https://openaitools.app/categories.md) · [Traffic rankings](https://openaitools.app/rankings.md) · [llms.txt](https://openaitools.app/llms.txt)