Apify alternative
The best Apify alternatives
Apify is a platform for running scrapers, with thousands of Actors in its store. If you only ever need one page at a time, turned into clean data, a single endpoint is simpler.
By Roger Campos · Last updated: September 2026
TL;DR
Stay on Apify for crawling sites on a schedule and for ready-made scrapers of specific sites. Use a per-URL API when you only need the page in front of you: URLpipe returns Markdown, a screenshot, metadata, Lighthouse or console errors at a fixed price per call instead of compute time, with a hosted MCP server and async webhooks.
Free plan, no credit card. 1,000 credits a month.
Why switch
Why people look for an Apify alternative
- Compute billing is hard to predict. Actors are billed by compute units — $0.20 per GB-hour on Free and Starter — plus proxies. Apify's own estimate for Website Content Crawler is $0.50 to $5 per 1,000 pages with a headless browser.
- A platform to learn. Actors, runs, datasets and key-value stores are powerful and more than a one-URL job needs.
- Page health. Lighthouse and console capture live in third-party Actors, if at all.
Per URL
When one endpoint is enough
Apify's RAG Web Browser Actor — a default tool in its MCP server — fetches pages for an agent and returns Markdown. URLpipe does the per-URL half of that with no Actor to choose: /markdown is 1 credit a page, deterministic and without a model, and /scrape takes Markdown, metadata and a screenshot from one visit. Its MCP server at https://urlpipe.dev/mcp has 14 tools, and an organization token can be read-only.
{
"mcpServers": {
"urlpipe": {
"type": "http",
"url": "https://urlpipe.dev/mcp",
"headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_ORGANIZATION_TOKEN" }
}
}
}Benchmark
Markdown quality, measured
| Strategy | Visible text kept | Text the reader never sees | Cost / page |
|---|---|---|---|
| URLpipe — deterministic walk of the rendered DOM | 87.2% | 11.0% | $0 |
| Readability (the approach Jina Reader runs) | 88.2% | 21.3% | — |
| Firecrawl's selector blocklist | 85.8% | 17.0% | — |
| An LLM rewriting the page | 79.0% | 22.0% | $0.0025 |
Measured on 33 real pages, each strategy run on the same fetched DOM. These are the strategies, reimplemented — not the vendors' live APIs, which add their own tuning. URLpipe's converter reads no CSS, so text hidden only by a stylesheet can still leak.
Honestly
What you keep Apify for
Crawling. URLpipe does not discover URLs, follow links or schedule runs. If you ingest documentation sites into a vector store every night, Website Content Crawler does that and URLpipe does not. Many teams do both: a crawler for the bulk import, a per-URL API for the pages users paste in.
Side by side
URLpipe and Apify, feature by feature
| Capability | URLpipe | Apify |
|---|---|---|
| Clean Markdown from a URL | Yes | Yes |
| Renders JavaScript (real browser) | Yes | Yes |
| Rendered HTML | Yes | Yes |
| Screenshots | Yes | Partial |
| Full-page screenshots | Yes | — |
| Element, dark-mode and hidden-selector screenshots | Yes | — |
| Metadata / Open Graph | Yes | Partial |
| AI summary | Yes | Optional, extra cost |
| Keyword extraction endpoint | Yes | — |
| Lighthouse audits | Yes | — |
| JavaScript console capture | Yes | — |
| Several outputs from one page visit | /scrape | Yes |
| Whole-site crawling | No | Yes |
| Schema-based structured extraction | No | — |
| PDF input or output | No | Linked documents |
| MCP server | Hosted | Hosted |
| Async + webhook for a single URL | Yes | Yes |
| Idempotency key on retries | Yes | — |
| Your own labels on requests, usage by label | Yes | — |
| Cached results cost nothing | Yes | — |
| Residential-IP fetching | One exit, +25 credits/visit | Yes |
| Official SDKs | No | — |
| Self-hostable | No | — |
| Free tier | 1,000 credits/mo | $5 credit/mo |
| EU processing, AI included | Yes | — |
Apify: checked against apify.com/pricing, apify.com/apify/website-content-crawler, apify.com/apify/rag-web-browser, docs.apify.com/platform/integrations/mcp on September 24, 2026. Products change — confirm on each vendor's site before you decide.
Pricing
What each one costs
| URLpipe | Apify | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | $0 — 1,000 credits/mo, no card | $0 — $5 of platform credit/mo |
| Entry paid plan | Starter $19/mo — 20,000 credits | Starter $19/mo ($17 annual) |
| Mid plan | Pro $49/mo — 55,000 credits | Scale $199/mo ($179 annual) |
| Billing unit | Credits per call: Markdown, HTML, screenshot or console 1, Lighthouse 2, metadata 5 | Compute units ($0.20 per GB-hour on Free and Starter), plus proxies |
| Overage | Paid plans never cut off — $1.50 per 1,000 credits | Paid plans billed on the next invoice; Free stops |
| Cache hits | Free, up to 30 days old | — |
Apify's Free plan includes $5 of platform credit a month and Starter is $19. URLpipe's Starter at $19 is 20,000 pages as Markdown.
Who it's for
An honest recommendation
Choose URLpipe if…
- You process URLs one at a time, as they arrive
- You want a price per call you can put in a spreadsheet
- You want Markdown, screenshots, metadata, Lighthouse and console errors from one key
- You want async webhooks without managing runs and datasets
- Processing should stay in the EU, AI included
Choose Apify if…
- You crawl whole sites on a schedule
- You want a ready-made scraper for a specific site
- You want storage, scheduling and integrations with vector databases built in
- You write your own scrapers and want somewhere to run them
Keep comparing
More on Apify and its category
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Is URLpipe a good Apify alternative?
How does Apify charge?
Does Apify have an MCP server?
Try URLpipe on the free plan.
1,000 credits a month, no card. Confirm your email and your key is live — most people make their first request inside five minutes.