Apify vs TrueScrape
These are not the same kind of product, and most comparisons of them are unhelpful because they pretend otherwise. Apify is a compute platform with a marketplace on top: someone writes an actor, you rent it, and it runs on their infrastructure with their storage, scheduling and run history. We are a fixed catalogue of social endpoints behind a single schema, and we cannot scrape a target that is not in it. The right question is not which is better — it is whether your target is already an endpoint here.
Apify figures read from their own pages on 2026-08-30. Pricing moves — check before you rely on it.
What Apify does better than us
Any target, not just the ones we happen to support
An actor is arbitrary code, so if your target is a niche forum, a regional marketplace or a site nobody has built an API for, someone can write a scraper for it and you can run it today. Our registry is a fixed list: if the endpoint does not exist, we cannot serve you at any price, and no amount of unified schema fixes that.
Official SDKs, a CLI, and a real platform around the scraper
Apify ships JavaScript and Python SDKs, a command-line tool, dataset storage, scheduling and a run-history UI you can hand to a non-engineer. We have none of those — we are an HTTP API and an OpenAPI document. That gap is real and it costs you integration time on day one.
Procurement and compliance paperwork that already exists
They can answer a security review with documents that are already written. We cannot: we have no SOC 2 report, no standard DPA and no SSO. If your purchase has to clear a vendor-security questionnaire, that is frequently the whole decision, and it is one we lose today.
Someone may have already built exactly what you need
The marketplace is genuinely valuable as a starting point — for an unusual target, finding a working actor written by someone else beats specifying the job yourself. The quality is uneven and unmaintained actors are a known problem, but the breadth is real and we have nothing equivalent.
Side by side
3 of 10 rows go to Apify.
| Axis | TrueScrape | Apify | Better |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you can scrape | A fixed registry of social endpoints. Nothing outside it, at any price. | Effectively anything — an actor is arbitrary code running on their compute. | Apify |
| Official SDKs and CLI | None. An HTTP API, an OpenAPI document and an MCP server. | JavaScript and Python SDKs, plus a CLI. | Apify |
| Compliance documents | No SOC 2 report and no standard DPA today. | Established compliance and procurement paperwork. | Apify |
| Platform fee | None. An account costs nothing to hold and credits are bought when you need them. | Free tier includes $5 of usage; paid plans run $29, $199 and $999 a month. | Us |
| Unused balance | Credits never expire. | Unused monthly usage credits do not roll over and expire at the end of the cycle. | Us |
| Unit you are billed in | One request, priced per endpoint and published as x-credit-cost in the spec. | Compute units — 1 GB of RAM for one hour — at $0.13 to $0.20 depending on plan. | Depends |
| Failed and empty results | Never charged. Refunded before the error reaches you, for every error class. | You are billed for the compute a run consumed, including a run that returns nothing. | Us |
| Cache hits | Zero credits, always. | No equivalent — a re-run is a fresh run and consumes compute. | Us |
| Cross-platform schema | One Creator, Post, Comment, Transcript and Ad shape across every platform, raw payload included. | Each actor returns its own shape; normalising across them is your job. | Us |
| Change monitoring | Subscriptions poll on our side and charge only when the content actually changed. | Scheduling and webhooks exist; the diffing and its billing consequences are yours. | Depends |
Choose Apify if
- Your targets are not all social platforms, or not all in our registry.
- You need custom crawl logic — pagination, form flows, a login-walled internal tool of your own.
- You are buying through a security review that needs SOC 2 and SSO.
- You want storage, scheduling and a run-history UI rather than just an API response.
Choose TrueScrape if
- Your targets are social platforms and you want one schema across all of them.
- You are billing customers for this and need failures and empty results to cost nothing.
- Your usage is spiky, and a monthly credit balance that expires does not fit.
- You want to know when something changes rather than re-fetching it on a cron.
Questions people actually ask
- Is Apify more expensive?
- Not comparably — the units genuinely differ. They bill compute time, we bill requests, and which is cheaper depends entirely on how heavy your runs are. A fast actor pulling one profile may cost less than our credit; a browser-driven run that sits on a page for a minute costs considerably more. The differences you can rely on are structural rather than per-unit: we do not charge a platform fee, our credits do not expire, and we do not charge for a run that fails or returns nothing.
- Can I use both?
- That is a common and sensible setup. Use us for the social platforms in our registry where one schema and change detection are worth something, and Apify for the long tail of targets nobody has built a fixed endpoint for. Nothing about either makes the other harder to run.
- What is the honest case against us here?
- We have no SDKs, no CLI, no SOC 2 and no customers yet, and our registry cannot be extended by you — if your target is missing, you wait for us. Apify has none of those limits. If your project is exploratory and you do not yet know what you will need to scrape, their model fits that uncertainty better than ours does.
Sources: Apify pricing · Our pricing
The free grant is 1,000 credits and needs no card. It is sized to answer whether the data is good enough, which is the only question worth resolving before you commit.