# Apify vs PhantomBuster Apify records 4,147,762 monthly visits with +3.9% month-over-month growth and Freemium, Contact for Pricing pricing. PhantomBuster records 279,012 monthly visits with -10.1% growth and Freemium, Free Trial, Paid pricing. | Metric | [Apify](https://openaitools.app/tool/apify) | [PhantomBuster](https://openaitools.app/tool/phantombuster) | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | Website URL | https://www.apify.com | https://phantombuster.com | | Categories | AI Web Scraping, AI Agent, AI API, AI Developer Tools | AI Lead Generation, No-Code&Low-Code, AI Web Scraping, AI Productivity Tools | | Pricing Model | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | Freemium, Free Trial, Paid | | Monthly Visits | 4,147,762 | 279,012 | | MoM Growth Rate | +3.9% | -10.1% | | Primary Market | United States | United States | | Direct Visits | 1,816,433 | 132,635 | | Review Score | 4.6 | 4.5 | | Saved Count | 6 | 6 | | 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) ## PhantomBuster PhantomBuster is a browser-automation-as-a-service tool aimed at sales development, recruiting and growth teams. Instead of writing scrapers or scripts, users pick from a library of ready-made automations called Phantoms — for example extracting a Sales Navigator search into a CSV, finding verified email addresses, or visiting a list of LinkedIn profiles. Phantoms can be chained together into Flows so that the output of one step feeds the next, and runs can be scheduled or triggered on demand. The platform runs these jobs in the cloud on managed browsers, so no software has to be installed locally and runs keep going when the user's laptop is closed. Results can be delivered to Google Sheets, CSV, webhooks, Zapier, Make or directly into CRMs such as HubSpot, Pipedrive and Salesforce. Because automation touches social platforms, PhantomBuster provides built-in throttling, per-account limits and retry logic to keep activity within reasonable bounds. Typical buyers are B2B sales teams, agencies and recruiters who want repeatable prospecting pipelines without engineering effort. The product is commercial and operating, with a free trial and tiered subscription plans based on a monthly pool of execution hours and concurrent Phantoms. **Pricing & Plans:** Freemium model with a free trial and paid subscription tiers. Plans are metered by monthly execution hours and the number of Phantoms/Flows that can run, plus seat limits. Check the official pricing page for current numbers. - **Ready-made Phantoms:** A large library of prebuilt automations for LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, Instagram, X/Twitter, Facebook, Google Maps, websites and more. - **Flows:** Chain multiple Phantoms together so the output of one step becomes the input of the next, building end-to-end pipelines without code. - **Cloud execution:** Runs on managed cloud browsers, so jobs continue 24/7 without keeping a local machine switched on. - **CRM and app integrations:** Send results to Google Sheets, CSV, webhooks, Zapier, Make, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce and other tools. - **Scheduling and throttling:** Schedule runs, set per-account limits and use built-in retries to keep social-platform activity controlled. **Strengths:** Large library of no-code automations covering most major social and web sources; Runs in the cloud with scheduling, so pipelines execute without a local machine; Broad integration options including Sheets, webhooks, Zapier, Make and major CRMs; Flows let you chain steps into an end-to-end pipeline without engineering **Limitations:** Automating social platforms carries inherent risk of platform restrictions and requires careful throttling; Usage is metered by execution hours, which can feel opaque to estimate for heavy jobs; Some advanced or high-volume workflows need a deeper understanding of selectors and limits [Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/phantombuster.md) ## Frequently Asked Questions ### How do Apify and PhantomBuster compare in monthly traffic? Apify has 4,147,762 monthly visits, while PhantomBuster has 279,012. 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%; PhantomBuster has -10.1%. ### 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. PhantomBuster: Freemium, Free Trial, Paid. Freemium model with a free trial and paid subscription tiers. Plans are metered by monthly execution hours and the number of Phantoms/Flows that can run, plus seat limits. Check the official pricing page for current numbers. ## 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 | [Instantly](https://openaitools.app/tool/instantly) | 2,336,279 | +6% | Paid, Contact for Pricing | Sales engagement platform with AI agents for lead finding, outreach and deliverability | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/instantly.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 | Much more powerful for B2B enrichment and CRM workflows, though less focused on casual social media scraping. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/clay-2-0.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 | [Gumloop](https://openaitools.app/tool/gumloop) | 379,557 | -21.1% | Freemium, Paid, Contact for Pricing | Leverages flexible AI agent blocks for custom web automation, but has a steeper learning curve for simple tasks. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/gumloop.md) | | 8 | [Octoparse](https://openaitools.app/tool/octoparse) | 184,251 | +1.2% | Freemium, Free Trial, Paid, Contact for Pricing | Provides robust visual point-and-click scraping for complex websites, but lacks PhantomBuster's native social outreach integrations. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/octoparse.md) | | 9 | [Linked Helper](https://openaitools.app/tool/linked-helper-the-safest-and-most-powerful-linkedin-automation-tool) | 176,865 | -32.3% | Free Trial, Paid | Desktop-first LinkedIn outreach automation with AI-written messages | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/linked-helper-the-safest-and-most-powerful-linkedin-automation-tool.md) | | 10 | [BrowserAct](https://openaitools.app/tool/browseract) | 99,679 | -15.2% | Freemium, Paid, Credit-based, Contact for Pricing | Uses AI agents to build and run web scraping pipelines, but with a newer and less mature ecosystem. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/browseract.md) | --- Source: https://openaitools.app/compare/apify-vs-phantombuster More Markdown: [Categories](https://openaitools.app/categories.md) · [Traffic rankings](https://openaitools.app/rankings.md) · [llms.txt](https://openaitools.app/llms.txt)