Why it comes up: Hosted crawl API if you want pages-as-markdown more than an Actor store.
Stands out: Directory searches across 240M+ professional profiles cost no credits, so a recruiter can explore and refine a candidate search in ChatGPT or Claude and spend credits only when pulling full profile and work contact details. Every account gets 1,000 free credits a month with no card, shared with the scrape, crawl and search API.
Watch out: Hobby is 5,000 credits a month. Search costs 2 credits per 10 results, Directory profile and contact lookups also draw on credits, and extra credits come in $5 increments. Directory finds and researches people; it has no outreach sequencing or ATS of its own.
Best for
- Recruiters sourcing candidates by title, company and location from inside ChatGPT or Claude
- Builders who need markdown or JSON from URLs
- Agents that call Firecrawl over MCP
Read the Firecrawl write-up · Apify vs Firecrawl
$69/mo Free tier 14 day free trial MCP API
Why it comes up: Cloud Phantoms if LinkedIn and social automations are the whole job.
Stands out: Hosted MCP at mcp.phantombuster.com plus 100+ Phantoms that run without your browser open.
Watch out: You act through your own social accounts, so limits and bans are on you. Execution hours, slots, and email credits all cap out. Exports on the trial are 10 rows.
Best for
- Growth teams automating LinkedIn and Sales Nav lists
- Agencies running several Phantoms in parallel
- Builders wiring HubSpot, n8n, Zapier, Make, or MCP
4.5 on Capterra from 64 reviews
Read the PhantomBuster write-up · Apify vs PhantomBuster
Why it comes up: Simpler B2B scrape UI if you do not want to operate Actors.
Stands out: MCP and API access come on the entry Basic plan, not only on the top tiers.
Watch out: Export credits reset each month and do not roll over. Wider searches (county, state, country, radius) need higher tiers.
Best for
- Agencies building local business prospect lists
- Teams calling a maps data API from their own tools
- People who want maps searches inside an AI assistant
Read the Scrap.io write-up · Apify vs Scrap.io
€20/mo Free tier Free trial MCP API
Why it comes up: Workflow automation if scraping is one step in a larger pipeline.
Stands out: Billing counts full workflow executions, not individual steps, and the Community edition is free to self-host.
Watch out: Cloud prices are published in euros only. The Cloud trial is capped at 1,000 executions, and unused AI Assistant credits do not roll over.
Best for
- Technical teams that want to self-host for free
- Builders who prefer per-execution billing
- Teams that want to drive workflows from Claude via MCP
Read the n8n write-up · Apify vs n8n
