# Apify vs PDF.co

Apify records 4,147,762 monthly visits with +3.9% month-over-month growth and Freemium, Contact for Pricing pricing. PDF.co records 78,590 monthly visits with -8.2% growth and Free Trial, Paid pricing.

| Metric | [Apify](https://openaitools.app/tool/apify) | [PDF.co](https://openaitools.app/tool/pdf-co) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Website URL | https://www.apify.com | https://pdf.co |
| Categories | AI Web Scraping, AI Agent, AI API, AI Developer Tools | AI API, AI PDF, AI PDF Editor, AI Document Extraction |
| Pricing Model | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | Free Trial, Paid |
| Monthly Visits | 4,147,762 | 78,590 |
| MoM Growth Rate | +3.9% | -8.2% |
| Primary Market | United States | United States |
| Direct Visits | 1,816,433 | 31,907 |
| 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)

## PDF.co

PDF.co is a web API platform built for automating PDF and document processing at scale. Developers and operations teams use it to convert PDFs to Excel, CSV, XML, JSON, HTML and images, to merge, split and edit documents, and to extract structured data from invoices, orders, scans and reports. Every request is sent over HTTPS, and the platform can be used from any language or runtime that can make an HTTP call, with tutorials and source code samples available for popular stacks.

Beyond classic PDF tooling, PDF.co has added AI-powered capabilities. AI invoice parsing turns invoice PDFs into clean, standardized JSON without needing a template per supplier, and a document classifier automatically sorts and organizes incoming files according to custom rules. There is also support for modern compliance and archival formats such as PDF to E-Invoice (Factur-X/ZUGFeRD) and PDF to PDF/A-3b.

The platform is designed for both developers and no-code operators. Its Zapier and Make plugins connect it to thousands of other apps, and a visual API tester lets you try endpoints without writing code, while full REST documentation and SDK samples serve teams that build directly. PDF.co is operated by Artifex Software Inc., reports SOC 2 compliance, and is used by tens of thousands of customers worldwide.

**Pricing & Plans:** Free trial with 10,000 credits for one month and no credit card required, plus a free tier. Paid subscriptions run from Basic at $8.99/month (16,500 credits) through Personal, Business and Enterprise tiers, billed monthly or annually with a 10% annual discount; custom plans available above 500,000 credits/month.

- **REST API for PDF processing:** A low-code, HTTPS REST API handles conversion, merging, splitting, editing and generation of PDFs from any application or script.
- **AI invoice parsing:** Extracts structured data from PDF invoices and returns standardized JSON without building templates for each supplier format.
- **Document data extraction:** Pulls data from PDFs, scans, invoices, orders and reports, turning unstructured documents into machine-readable output.
- **Document classifier:** Automatically sorts and organizes incoming PDFs using custom classification rules to streamline document management.
- **3,000+ integrations:** Connectors for Zapier, Make and thousands of other platforms let non-developers automate PDF workflows with little or no code.

**Strengths:** Comprehensive PDF toolkit accessible from a single REST API; AI invoice parsing and document classification for structured data; Thousands of integrations via Zapier and Make for low-code automation; Free trial with generous credits and no credit card required

**Limitations:** Credit-based pricing can be hard to predict for high-volume jobs; Requires some technical knowledge to get the most out of the API; Advanced collaboration or manual UI editing is not the focus compared with desktop editors

[Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/pdf-co.md)

## Frequently Asked Questions

### How do Apify and PDF.co compare in monthly traffic?

Apify has 4,147,762 monthly visits, while PDF.co has 78,590. 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%; PDF.co has -8.2%.

### 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. PDF.co: Free Trial, Paid. Free trial with 10,000 credits for one month and no credit card required, plus a free tier. Paid subscriptions run from Basic at $8.99/month (16,500 credits) through Personal, Business and Enterprise tiers, billed monthly or annually with a 10% annual discount; custom plans available above 500,000 credits/month.

## 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 | [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) |
| 3 | [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) |
| 4 | [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) |
| 5 | [PDF.ai](https://openaitools.app/tool/pdf-ai) | 387,819 | -5.5% | Freemium, Free Trial | Chat with any PDF and get cited answers instantly | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/pdf-ai.md) |
| 6 | [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) |
| 7 | [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) |
| 8 | [Octoparse](https://openaitools.app/tool/octoparse) | 184,251 | +1.2% | Freemium, Free Trial, Paid, Contact for Pricing | Uses visual point-and-click scraping workflows instead of Apify's developer-centric actor ecosystem and cloud execution. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/octoparse.md) |
| 9 | [Parseur](https://openaitools.app/tool/parseur-com) | 132,677 | -16.3% | Freemium, Free Trial, Contact for Pricing | AI document parsing that turns PDFs and emails into structured data | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/parseur-com.md) |
| 10 | [Bannerbear](https://openaitools.app/tool/bannerbear-com) | 112,277 | -18% | Free Trial, Paid | Generate branded images, videos and PDFs at scale with a template API | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/bannerbear-com.md) |

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Source: https://openaitools.app/compare/apify-vs-pdf-co

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