# Apify vs XCrawl Apify records 4,147,762 monthly visits with +3.9% month-over-month growth and Freemium, Contact for Pricing pricing. XCrawl records 815 monthly visits with 0% growth and Freemium, Free Trial pricing. | Metric | [Apify](https://openaitools.app/tool/apify) | [XCrawl](https://openaitools.app/tool/xcrawl) | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | Website URL | https://www.apify.com | https://www.xcrawl.com | | Categories | AI Web Scraping, AI Agent, AI API, AI Developer Tools | AI Web Scraping, AI API, AI Developer Tools, AI Data Mining | | Pricing Model | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | Freemium, Free Trial | | Monthly Visits | 4,147,762 | 815 | | MoM Growth Rate | +3.9% | 0% | | Primary Market | United States | India | | Direct Visits | 1,816,433 | 335 | | Review Score | 4.6 | 4.2 | | Saved Count | 6 | 1 | | 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) ## XCrawl XCrawl is a web scraping API built specifically for AI applications. Rather than returning raw HTML, it hands back clean Markdown, structured JSON, or headless screenshots that can be dropped straight into an LLM context window, a RAG pipeline, or a database. The goal is to remove the parsing and cleanup work that normally sits between scraping a page and using its data. The platform is organized around a set of focused endpoints. The Scrape API handles single pages, the Crawl API walks multi-page sites with depth control, and the Map API exports every discoverable URL on a domain. On top of those sit Search and SERP APIs for pulling search engine results as structured data, plus a ChatGPT API for extracting structured output from AI interactions. Reliability is a core selling point: XCrawl advertises a 99%+ extraction success rate using rotating global residential proxies, browser fingerprinting, and automatic retries, so protected and JavaScript-heavy sites still return data. It is designed to plug into agent and automation stacks through a native MCP server and an n8n integration, and new users can start with 1,000 free credits to test the workflow before committing. **Pricing & Plans:** Freemium with a free trial. New users receive 1,000 free credits and no credit card is required to start. Paid plan details are handled in-app; a dedicated pricing page was not reachable at review time. - **Scrape API with LLM-ready output:** Send a URL and receive clean JSON, Markdown, or a headless screenshot from a single endpoint, with no post-processing needed for LLM use. - **Search and SERP APIs:** Extract structured SERP data from Google and other engines for SEO tracking, keyword research, and market monitoring. - **Crawl and Map APIs:** Crawl entire domains or specific sections with depth control, and use the Map API to discover every URL on a site. - **Anti-bot infrastructure:** Auto-rotating global residential proxies, browser fingerprinting, and built-in retries keep extraction stable on protected sites. - **MCP server and n8n integration:** A native MCP server connects XCrawl to AI assistants like Claude, and an n8n integration links it to 500+ apps in no-code workflows. **Strengths:** Outputs clean JSON and Markdown that need no extra parsing for LLMs; Broad API coverage from single-page scraping to SERP and site mapping; Built-in residential proxies and fingerprinting handle protected sites; MCP and n8n support fit agent and no-code automation stacks **Limitations:** Dedicated pricing page was not reachable during review, so plan details must be confirmed in-app; Usage scales with page volume, so costs grow with large crawling jobs; Relies on an API-first workflow, which assumes some developer familiarity [Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/xcrawl.md) ## Frequently Asked Questions ### How do Apify and XCrawl compare in monthly traffic? Apify has 4,147,762 monthly visits, while XCrawl has 815. 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%; XCrawl 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. XCrawl: Freemium, Free Trial. Freemium with a free trial. New users receive 1,000 free credits and no credit card is required to start. Paid plan details are handled in-app; a dedicated pricing page was not reachable at review time. ## 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 | Web data API that turns any site into clean, AI-ready content | [.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 | [Exa](https://openaitools.app/tool/exa-ai) | 1,062,574 | +16.8% | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | Web search API and crawler built for AI agents | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/exa-ai.md) | | 5 | [Bright Data](https://openaitools.app/tool/bright-data) | 802,752 | -5.9% | Free Trial, Paid | Web data infrastructure for scraping, proxies, and AI-ready datasets | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/bright-data.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 | [Thor Data](https://openaitools.app/tool/thor-data) | 181,966 | -3.5% | Free Trial, Paid | Proxies and web data APIs for scraping and AI pipelines | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/thor-data.md) | | 10 | [BrowserAct](https://openaitools.app/tool/browseract) | 99,679 | -15.2% | Freemium, Paid, Credit-based, Contact for Pricing | Enables autonomous cloud scraping pipelines via AI agents, but lacks Apify's mature community actor marketplace. | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/browseract.md) | --- Source: https://openaitools.app/compare/apify-vs-xcrawl More Markdown: [Categories](https://openaitools.app/categories.md) · [Traffic rankings](https://openaitools.app/rankings.md) · [llms.txt](https://openaitools.app/llms.txt)