Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Apify VS BrowserCat

Compare Apify VS BrowserCat and see what are their differences

Apify logo Apify

Apify is a web scraping and automation platform that can turn any website into an API.

BrowserCat logo BrowserCat

Easy, fast, and reliable browser automation and headless browser APIs. The web is messy, but your code shouldn't be.
  • Apify Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-30

Apify is a JavaScript & Node.js based data extraction tool for websites that crawls lists of URLs and automates workflows on the web. With Apify you can manage and automatically scale a pool of headless Chrome / Puppeteer instances, maintain queues of URLs to crawl, store crawling results locally or in the cloud, rotate proxies and much more.

  • BrowserCat Home Page
    Home Page //
    2023-12-21
  • BrowserCat Metrics Dashboard
    Metrics Dashboard //
    2023-12-21
  • BrowserCat Easy Setup
    Easy Setup //
    2023-12-21

Finally, you can develop browser automation without the pain and the cost of deploying a fleet of headless browsers. Connect to BrowserCat, scale globally, and pay only for what you use. Scrape the web, automate your workflows, test your apps, generate beautiful images and pdfs from HTML, give you AI agent web access, and more.

Get started in minutes. Our forever-free plan gives you 1,000 free requests per month.

Apify

Website
apify.com
$ Details
-
Platforms
-
Startup details
Country
Czech Republic
City
Prague
Employees
10 - 19

BrowserCat

$ Details
freemium $10.0 / Monthly
Platforms
Web REST API Google Chrome Firefox Safari

Apify features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    Apify provides a user-friendly interface that makes it easy for users of all technical levels to create and manage web scraping tasks.
  • Scalability
    Apify is built to handle tasks of various sizes, from small-scale projects to enterprise-level operations, making it a scalable solution.
  • Integration and API Support
    It offers extensive API support, allowing for seamless integration with other tools and systems to enhance automated workflows.
  • Customizability
    Users can customize their scraping bots (actors) with different settings and scripts to fit specific needs and requirements.
  • Cloud-based
    Being a cloud-based platform, Apify allows users to run their scraping tasks without needing local resources, which is convenient and efficient.
  • Comprehensive Documentation
    Apify provides thorough documentation and tutorials, which help users get started quickly and solve issues efficiently.
  • Community and Support
    Apify has an active community and solid customer support to assist users with their needs and enhance their overall experience.

Possible disadvantages of Apify

  • Learning Curve
    While the interface is user-friendly, there may still be a learning curve for those new to web scraping and automation.
  • Cost
    Apify can be expensive compared to other web scraping tools, particularly for extensive use cases that require high volumes of data.
  • Dependency on External Factors
    Web scraping often depends on the stability of the target websites. Changes in website structures can break scripts, requiring ongoing maintenance.
  • Performance Limitations
    The performance of cloud-based scraping tasks can be affected by network latency and other external factors beyond user control.
  • Potential Legal Issues
    Web scraping can raise legal concerns, particularly when scraping data from websites that restrict such activities in their terms of service.
  • Resource Intensity
    Complex scraping tasks can be resource-intensive, potentially requiring higher-tier subscriptions and more computing resources, driving up costs.

BrowserCat features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

Apify videos

Apify product news - 2019/01/30

BrowserCat videos

No BrowserCat videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Apify and BrowserCat)
Web Scraping
92 92%
8% 8
Data Extraction
100 100%
0% 0
Web Crawling
0 0%
100% 100
Data
100 100%
0% 0

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing Apify and BrowserCat.

Which are the primary technologies used for building your product?

BrowserCat's answer:

BrowserCat is built on robust open source technology that's under active development. The star of the show is Playwright, which is our recommended automation library. It's maintained by Microsoft, it officially supports JS, Python, Java, and .NET, and it's fast becoming the industry standard. BrowserCat also supports Puppeteer and numerous unofficial Playwright ports to Go, Rust, PHP, and Ruby.

What makes your product unique?

BrowserCat's answer:

Unlike other headless browser providers, BrowserCat gives you total control over your browser instances for as long as you need them. Leverage the browsers cache, cookies, and storage for bespoke browser automation jobs that truly differentiate your business from the competition.

What's the story behind your product?

BrowserCat's answer:

In previous corporate and startup gigs, I faced the challenge of developing robust, fast, and scalable browser automation. Most APIs in the space are too limiting for our needs and they were often incredibly slow. On the other hand, hosting your own headless browser fleet was a pain. I founded BrowserCat to make scaling up browser automation as easy, reliable, and affordable as deploying a serverless function.

How would you describe your primary audience?

BrowserCat's answer:

We primarily serve developers, whether the seek to develop unique browser automation jobs or radically improve the performance of their integration tests. However, we frequently work with management, biz ops, and product leaders to solve problems they can't solve any way but through automation.

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

BrowserCat's answer:

BrowserCat is built for performance, scalability, stability, and affordability using modern web technologies. Many of our competitors were early to market and compete on entrenchment rather than functionality. Still others are bound by their existing users to continue supporting legacy tech, rather than embrace improved, modern standards. BrowserCat is focused on supporting your for the next ten years, rather than the past ten years.

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Apify and BrowserCat

Apify Reviews

Top 15 Best TinyTask Alternatives in 2022
This is another tinytask alternative. For you to link various web services and APIs, Apify has provided many web integration options. You can add data processing and customised computation processes in addition to letting the data flow between them. With the data that is freely accessible on the web, you may provide crucial insights, and easy lead creation allows you to...

BrowserCat Reviews

We have no reviews of BrowserCat yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Apify seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 26 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Apify mentions (26)

  • How to scrape TikTok using Python
    For deployment, we'll use the Apify platform. It's a simple and effective environment for cloud deployment, allowing efficient interaction with your crawler. Call it via API, schedule tasks, integrate with various services, and much more. - Source: dev.to / 5 days ago
  • How to scrape Bluesky with Python
    We already have a fully functional implementation for local execution. Let us explore how to adapt it for running on the Apify Platform and transform in Apify Actor. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Web scraping with GPT-4o: powerful but expensive
    We've had the best success by first converting the HTML to a simpler format (i.e. markdown) before passing it to the LLM. There are a few ways to do this that we've tried, namely Extractus[0] and dom-to-semantic-markdown[1]. Internally we use Apify[2] and Firecrawl[3] for Magic Loops[4] that run in the cloud, both of which have options for simplifying pages built-in, but for our Chrome Extension we use... - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • Current problems and mistakes of web scraping in Python and tricks to solve them!
    Developed by Apify, it is a Python adaptation of their famous JS framework crawlee, first released on Jul 9, 2019. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Show HN: Crawlee for Python – a web scraping and browser automation library
    Hey all, This is Jan, the founder of [Apify](https://apify.com/)—a full-stack web scraping platform. After the success of [Crawlee for JavaScript](https://github.com/apify/crawlee/) today! The main features are: - A unified programming interface for both HTTP (HTTPX with BeautifulSoup) & headless browser crawling (Playwright). - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
View more

BrowserCat mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of BrowserCat yet. Tracking of BrowserCat recommendations started around Dec 2023.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Apify and BrowserCat, you can also consider the following products

import.io - Import. io helps its users find the internet data they need, organize and store it, and transform it into a format that provides them with the context they need.

Microlink - Extract structured data from any website

Scrapy - Scrapy | A Fast and Powerful Scraping and Web Crawling Framework

ParseHub - ParseHub is a free web scraping tool. With our advanced web scraper, extracting data is as easy as clicking the data you need.

Scraper API - Scale Data Collection with a Simple API.

Octoparse - Octoparse provides easy web scraping for anyone. Our advanced web crawler, allows users to turn web pages into structured spreadsheets within clicks.