# Apify vs Merlin AI

Apify records 4,147,762 monthly visits with +3.9% month-over-month growth and Freemium, Contact for Pricing pricing. Merlin AI records 1,382,634 monthly visits with +13.1% growth and Freemium pricing.

| Metric | [Apify](https://openaitools.app/tool/apify) | [Merlin AI](https://openaitools.app/tool/merlin-ai-plugins) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Website URL | https://www.apify.com | https://www.getmerlin.in |
| Categories | AI Web Scraping, AI Agent, AI API, AI Developer Tools | AI Assistant, AI Summarizer, AI Writing Assistants, AI Chatbot |
| Pricing Model | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | Freemium |
| Monthly Visits | 4,147,762 | 1,382,634 |
| MoM Growth Rate | +3.9% | +13.1% |
| Primary Market | United States | United States |
| Direct Visits | 1,816,433 | 695,322 |
| Review Score | 4.6 | 4.3 |
| Saved Count | 6 | 17 |
| Supported Platforms | Website | Browser Extension |

## 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)

## Merlin AI

Merlin is built around a simple idea: instead of opening a separate chat tab for every task, you summon one assistant with a click while staying inside whatever you are reading or working on. The extension injects a sidebar on any web page, so it can read the article, the PDF, the YouTube transcript or the Gmail thread you currently have open and respond with that context already loaded. That makes summarization, rewriting, replying and research feel like part of the page rather than a separate tool.

Under the hood Merlin routes requests across a broad set of models — OpenAI's GPT family, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, DeepSeek, Mistral, Meta's Llama and others — so you can pick the model that suits a task without holding separate subscriptions for each. Beyond chat there is an image generator with multiple models and aspect ratios, a search mode that answers questions from live web results, document and video summarization, and a library of saved prompts. Newer additions like Projects (reusable knowledge bases) and Crafts (generated diagrams, mind maps and charts) push it toward light research and prototyping work.

Merlin is available as a Chrome extension, a web app, an iOS app and an Android app with synced history, custom prompts and custom bots across devices. The vendor highlights GDPR, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 alignment for data handling, and positions itself as accessible in 200+ countries where some other assistants are restricted. It is squarely a productivity assistant rather than a developer platform.

**Pricing & Plans:** Freemium. A free tier covers everyday use, and Merlin Pro is promoted at $2/month as a special offer, with the standard plan advertised around $19/month billed annually and described as replacing roughly $130/month of separate AI subscriptions. Paid tiers add higher limits, more capable models and advanced features.

- **Multi-model access in one place:** Switch between GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, Mistral and Llama class models from a single interface instead of juggling separate subscriptions.
- **Universal page summarization:** Summarize articles, YouTube videos, PDFs and documents in place, then ask follow-up questions grounded in that content.
- **Writing and social drafts:** Draft and reply to emails in Gmail, compose posts and comments for X and LinkedIn, and repurpose web pages or videos into blogs and articles.
- **Image generation:** Generate images from prompts using more than 20 image models and multiple aspect ratios for web and social output.
- **Projects, Crafts and custom bots:** Build reusable knowledge bases, generate diagrams and charts from a prompt, and assemble custom chatbots from your own instructions and context.

**Strengths:** Replaces several separate AI subscriptions with one interface and one bill; Works inline on any page, so context is captured without copy-pasting; Covers a wide range of tasks: chat, summarization, writing, images, search and light research; Syncs across browser, web, iOS and Android with custom prompts and bots preserved

**Limitations:** The free tier is limited, and heavy use pushes you toward the paid plan; Covering so many features means individual tools may be less deep than dedicated apps; Requires trusting a third party with the pages and documents you send it, even with the stated compliance certifications

[Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/merlin-ai-plugins.md)

## Frequently Asked Questions

### How do Apify and Merlin AI compare in monthly traffic?

Apify has 4,147,762 monthly visits, while Merlin AI has 1,382,634. 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%; Merlin AI has +13.1%.

### 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. Merlin AI: Freemium. Freemium. A free tier covers everyday use, and Merlin Pro is promoted at $2/month as a special offer, with the standard plan advertised around $19/month billed annually and described as replacing roughly $130/month of separate AI subscriptions. Paid tiers add higher limits, more capable models and advanced features.

## Alternatives

| # | Tool Name | Monthly Visits | MoM Growth Rate | Pricing Model | Summary | Profile (Markdown) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |
| 1 | [ChatGPT](https://openaitools.app/tool/chatgpt-4) | 6,048,022,723 | +2.2% | Freemium | Provides superior core reasoning and advanced coding agents, but lacks Merlin's seamless one-click browser tab integration and sidebar shortcuts. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/chatgpt-4.md) |
| 2 | [Google Gemini](https://openaitools.app/tool/gemini-gemini-advanced) | 2,637,398,242 | -0.1% | Freemium | Offers massive context windows and Google Workspace integration, but functions as a standalone web app rather than an inline sidebar. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/gemini-gemini-advanced.md) |
| 3 | [Claude](https://openaitools.app/tool/claude-2) | 1,253,439,413 | +23.8% | Freemium | Excels at nuanced document analysis and writing, but operates as a dedicated web workspace rather than a browser extension. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/claude-2.md) |
| 4 | [Perplexity](https://openaitools.app/tool/perplexity-ai) | 88,310,223 | -3.7% | Freemium | Delivers superior citation-backed web research and real-time search, but lacks Merlin's multi-purpose browser writing tools and sidebar utilities. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/perplexity-ai.md) |
| 5 | [Poe](https://openaitools.app/tool/poe) | 5,894,702 | +9.1% | Freemium | Aggregates diverse frontier models into one conversational interface, but operates primarily as a web/app client rather than a native extension. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/poe.md) |
| 6 | [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) |
| 7 | [Monica](https://openaitools.app/tool/monica-ai) | 4,512,775 | -11.3% | Freemium | Provides comparable all-in-one browser assistance and multi-model chat, but includes more robust built-in painting and drawing suites. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/monica-ai.md) |
| 8 | [Sider](https://openaitools.app/tool/sider) | 2,644,740 | -10.6% | Freemium | Offers a similar browser sidebar experience with multi-model support, but features cleaner tab integration and smoother reading tools. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/sider.md) |
| 9 | [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) |
| 10 | [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) |

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Source: https://openaitools.app/compare/apify-vs-merlin-ai-plugins

More Markdown: [Categories](https://openaitools.app/categories.md) · [Traffic rankings](https://openaitools.app/rankings.md) · [llms.txt](https://openaitools.app/llms.txt)