# Apify vs Skylight

Apify records 4,147,762 monthly visits with +3.9% month-over-month growth and Freemium, Contact for Pricing pricing. Skylight records 0 monthly visits with 0% growth and Freemium pricing.

| Metric | [Apify](https://openaitools.app/tool/apify) | [Skylight](https://openaitools.app/tool/skylight) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Website URL | https://www.apify.com | https://www.launchskylight.com |
| Categories | AI Web Scraping, AI Agent, AI API, AI Developer Tools | AI Agent, AI Testing, No-Code&Low-Code, AI Developer Tools |
| Pricing Model | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | Freemium |
| Monthly Visits | 4,147,762 | 0 |
| MoM Growth Rate | +3.9% | 0% |
| Primary Market | United States | Global |
| Direct Visits | 1,816,433 | 0 |
| Review Score | 4.6 | 4.7 |
| 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)

## Skylight

Skylight is infrastructure for computer-use agents. Rather than bolting automation onto a local machine, it hosts virtual Windows computers built specifically to be operated by AI, then exposes them through a clean API. The workflow is three steps: get a computer, drive it with agents, and supervise. Each instance comes ready with remote access and can be loaded with the custom applications a workflow depends on.

Agents talk to the machines through the Interactions API, which covers programmatic mouse clicks, keyboard input and screenshots. You can use Skylight's built-in agent, which learns how you like to work over time, or bring your own. Python and TypeScript SDKs can be used natively as an MCP server, which makes the platform a natural fit for agent frameworks. A no-code Playground lets anyone hand the agent a natural-language instruction and watch it act on a live Windows desktop in real time.

Control and scale are treated as core features, not extras. Every computer can be streamed live, safety guardrails restrict what the agent is allowed to do, and the agent asks for confirmation before destructive actions, so a human can intervene at any point. Multiple desktops can run concurrently, instances persist across stop and start, and files created on a virtual machine can be downloaded locally. The vendor reports over 30,000 instances launched and more than 10 million API interactions.

**Pricing & Plans:** Skylight offers a Free tier at $0/month that includes $5 worth of credits, no credit card required, plus unlimited concurrent computers, interactions and file downloads. Pro is $20/month and adds $20 of credits, unlimited file uploads and priority one-to-one support. Enterprise is custom-priced and can run on your own virtual machines. On top of plans, usage is metered: active computers cost $0.005 per minute, hibernated computers $0.0005 per minute, each agent step (screenshot, click, type) costs $0.003, and each file upload or download costs $0.05.

- **Virtual Windows computers on demand:** Spin up virtual Windows instances on demand, each ready to use with remote access and any custom apps your workflow needs.
- **Agentic control via API, SDKs and MCP:** Agents interact through the Interactions API to take screenshots, click, type and send keyboard commands, with Python and TypeScript SDKs and a native MCP server.
- **Human-in-the-loop supervision:** Define safety guardrails, require confirmation before destructive actions, stream all computers live and take over control at any moment.
- **No-code Playground:** Give natural-language instructions to the built-in Windows agent and watch it complete tasks on a real desktop without writing any code.
- **Scale, persistence and file transfer:** Deploy and coordinate many concurrent VMs, stop and resume instances without losing progress, and download files produced on the virtual machine.

**Strengths:** Purpose-built virtual Windows machines for agents instead of fragile local scripting; Free tier with $5 of credits and no credit card required to start; Python and TypeScript SDKs plus a native MCP server fit modern agent stacks; Human-in-the-loop confirmation, live streaming and guardrails reduce automation risk

**Limitations:** Metered consumption (per-minute VMs plus per-step agent actions) can be harder to forecast than a flat seat price; Focused on Windows-only virtual computers, so macOS or Linux workloads need other tooling; Fully guarded, large-scale automation is best supported through the SDKs, which assumes some developer skill; Enterprise pricing for deploying on your own VMs is custom and requires contacting sales

[Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/skylight.md)

## Frequently Asked Questions

### How do Apify and Skylight compare in monthly traffic?

Apify has 4,147,762 monthly visits, while Skylight has 0. 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%; Skylight has 0%.

### 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. Skylight: Freemium. Skylight offers a Free tier at $0/month that includes $5 worth of credits, no credit card required, plus unlimited concurrent computers, interactions and file downloads. Pro is $20/month and adds $20 of credits, unlimited file uploads and priority one-to-one support. Enterprise is custom-priced and can run on your own virtual machines. On top of plans, usage is metered: active computers cost $0.005 per minute, hibernated computers $0.0005 per minute, each agent step (screenshot, click, type) costs $0.003, and each file upload or download costs $0.05.

## 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 | [KaneAI](https://openaitools.app/tool/kaneai) | 901,340 | +13.2% | Freemium, Paid, Contact for Pricing | GenAI-native end-to-end QA agent that plans, writes and heals tests in plain language | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/kaneai.md) |
| 5 | [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) |
| 6 | [Gumloop](https://openaitools.app/tool/gumloop) | 379,557 | -21.1% | Freemium, Paid, Contact for Pricing | Build, share, and control AI agents that actually do the work | [.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 | [LightVela](https://openaitools.app/tool/lightvela) | 240,020 | +105.2% | Free Trial, Paid | A cloud-hosted Hermes AI agent that stays online and learns you over time | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/lightvela.md) |
| 9 | [Happycapy](https://openaitools.app/tool/happycapy) | 191,406 | +7.2% | Freemium | An agent-native computer that works while you sleep | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/happycapy.md) |
| 10 | [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) |

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Source: https://openaitools.app/compare/apify-vs-skylight

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