# Apify vs Surf

Apify records 4,147,762 monthly visits with +3.9% month-over-month growth and Freemium, Contact for Pricing pricing. Surf records 116,252 monthly visits with -18.9% growth and Free, Pro, Max, API credits pricing.

| Metric | [Apify](https://openaitools.app/tool/apify) | [Surf](https://openaitools.app/tool/surf) |
| :--- | :--- | :--- |
| Website URL | https://www.apify.com | https://asksurf.ai |
| Categories | AI Web Scraping, AI Agent, AI API, AI Developer Tools | AI Crypto, AI Copywriting, AI Creative Writing, AI For Finance |
| Pricing Model | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | Free, Pro, Max, API credits |
| Monthly Visits | 4,147,762 | 116,252 |
| MoM Growth Rate | +3.9% | -18.9% |
| Primary Market | United States | South Korea |
| Direct Visits | 1,816,433 | 88,813 |
| Review Score | 4.6 | 4.2 |
| 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)

## Surf

Surf positions itself as the intelligence layer for open financial markets. The core experience is conversational: you ask a question about a token, a protocol, a company, or a market move, and the system returns an answer grounded in live market feeds, onchain events, SEC filings, and news, with the underlying sources cited so you can verify the reasoning. Around that chat experience, Surf layers a set of named products such as CryptoPulse and Cryptopedia, plus an in-browser Studio for building analysis.

What separates Surf from a generic chatbot is the data plumbing behind it. The company says its datasets are kept current, structured, and unified across fragmented sources before any model touches them, which matters because much of crypto data is scattered across exchanges, chains, and regional venues. Surf also highlights its coverage of hard-to-source markets, including multilingual Asian centralized exchange data, as a differentiator for institutional research.

For builders, Surf exposes the same intelligence through an API, an MCP server, a CLI, and reusable agent skills, so a research desk can embed crypto and equities context directly into its own agents and internal tools. Surf states it is used by more than 500,000 users across 700-plus organizations, and its developer layer is documented separately for teams that want to integrate rather than click. Surf is operated by Cybertino Inc. and is not affiliated with any exchange or broker; outputs are research assistance, not investment advice.

**Pricing & Plans:** Surf publishes a tiered pricing page covering Free, Pro, and Max plans alongside API credit packages, with annual billing options and Studio credits bundled at higher tiers. Exact figures change over time, so check the official pricing page before purchasing.

- **Cited conversational analyst:** Ask questions about tokens, protocols, or equities in plain language and receive answers backed by visible sources rather than unsupported assertions.
- **Unified multi-source data:** Market prices, onchain events, SEC filings, and news are normalized into one structured layer so the model reasons over consistent inputs.
- **Developer integration layer:** API, MCP server, CLI, and agent skills let teams wire Surf intelligence into their own agents, dashboards, and internal research workflows.
- **CryptoPulse and Cryptopedia products:** Purpose-built modules for tracking market-moving developments and for looking up structured context on projects and assets.
- **Coverage of hard-to-source markets:** Surf emphasizes structured multilingual data from Asian centralized exchanges, a category many Western data vendors handle poorly.

**Strengths:** Answers come with citations, which makes verification practical rather than a leap of faith.; Covers both onchain crypto data and US equities in a single interface, useful for cross-asset research.; Genuine developer surface area: API, MCP, CLI, and agent skills, not just a chat box.; Institutional framing and published case studies signal real deployments with funds and exchanges.

**Limitations:** It is a research and intelligence tool, not a trading or execution venue, so it will not place orders for you.; Deeper data access and higher usage tiers sit behind paid plans and API credits.; Coverage quality varies by asset and venue; niche or thinly traded markets may return thinner answers.

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

## Frequently Asked Questions

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

Apify has 4,147,762 monthly visits, while Surf has 116,252. 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%; Surf has -18.9%.

### 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. Surf: Free, Pro, Max, API credits. Surf publishes a tiered pricing page covering Free, Pro, and Max plans alongside API credit packages, with annual billing options and Studio credits bundled at higher tiers. Exact figures change over time, so check the official pricing page before purchasing.

## 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 | [LuxAlgo](https://openaitools.app/tool/luxalgo) | 985,376 | +9.8% | Freemium, Free Trial, Paid | AI trading indicators, real-trade orderflow and charts in one platform | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/luxalgo.md) |
| 5 | [MacroMicro](https://openaitools.app/tool/macromicro) | 928,258 | +22.5% | Freemium, Paid | Global macro data and AI research platform for smarter economic decisions | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/macromicro.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 | 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) |
| 8 | [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) |
| 9 | [Aime](https://openaitools.app/tool/aime) | 260,428 | +11.4% | Freemium | AI investing copilot for stock research, screening and market signals | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/aime.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-surf

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