# Apify vs SocialCrawl

A marketplace of per-actor schemas against one unified schema over 48 platforms: platform flexibility versus integration speed.

Checked August 2026. Public pricing pages. No affiliate links.

Apify and SocialCrawl solve the same problem from opposite directions. Apify is a marketplace of thousands of community actors on metered compute, each with its own schema and quality. SocialCrawl is one vendor exposing 380 endpoints across 48 platforms behind a single unified schema. If you want one integration that reads everything the same way, SocialCrawl is built for that; if you want to run arbitrary scraping logic, Apify is.

## At a glance

| Criteria | Apify | SocialCrawl | Openhandle |
|---|---|---|---|
| Model | Third-party actors, billed on metered compute | Prepaid credit packs, one unified API | Pay after use. No credits, no subscription |
| Pricing | Plans $0-$999/month plus $0.13-$0.20 per compute unit. Actors can add per-result fees on top | GBP only. £15 for 2,500 credits (~£6/1k); £49 for 8,000-20,000; £299 for 50,000-150,000 | $3 per 1k, down to $1.50 per 1k at volume. 30-day cache hits are free |
| Free tier | $5 of usage a month, spent in compute units | 100 credits, one time, no card. Advanced calls burn 5-10 each | 100 free requests, no card |
| Credits per call | Depends on the actor. Compute plus possible per-result fees | 1 standard, 5-10 advanced, 20 for search. Vendor claims ~3.1 average | No credits. One answer, one request |
| Platform depth | Depth depends on the actor you pick. Thousands of actors, any platform, quality differs per actor | 21 TikTok and 33 Instagram endpoints, about 8 per platform across 48 platforms, mostly shopping and search sites | 45 Instagram, 28 TikTok, and 17 X endpoints. More platforms and data added by demand |
| Schema | No shared schema. Every actor defines its own | One unified schema, vendor-defined, across all platforms | One schema across Instagram, TikTok, and X |
| Extras | Custom logic means writing your own actor | Sentiment scores, cross-platform search at 20 credits, MCP, retries. Credits never expire | REST, OpenAPI, MCP server, SDKs for TypeScript, Python, and Go |
| Uptime | No uptime figure published | No uptime figure published | 99.9% uptime |

Figures from public pricing pages, August 2026.

## Schema and integration

This is the sharpest difference. Every Apify actor defines its own output schema, parameters, and quality, and maintenance depends on that actor's author: five platforms can mean five shapes and five authors. SocialCrawl normalizes all 48 platforms into one schema and layers cross-platform features on top: universal search, sentiment scores, MCP integration, and built-in retries. One parser covers everything, at the cost of accepting the vendor's idea of what a record contains.

## Cost predictability

Note the currencies: SocialCrawl prices in GBP £, Apify in USD.

SocialCrawl's credits vary by call: 1 for standard endpoints, 5-10 for advanced, 20 for universal search, with a vendor-stated mixed average around 3.1 credits per call. Variable, but bounded and published, so you can price a workload from its endpoint mix.

Apify meters compute: 1 GB RAM for one hour is a compute unit at $0.13-$0.20 depending on plan, and store actors add pay-per-event fees set by the author. Cost depends on how efficiently a given actor runs, which you only learn by testing it, and an actor update can change your cost profile. Even SocialCrawl's 20-credit universal search is a knowable price; an actor's compute bill is not until you run it.

## Verdicts

- **One integration across many platforms, fast.** SocialCrawl: unified schema, built-in retries, cross-platform search.
- **Custom scraping logic or a platform SocialCrawl's 48 do not cover.** Apify. Find an actor or write your own.
- **Budgeting.** SocialCrawl's published credit costs beat compute metering for predictability; still benchmark real workloads in both, minding the GBP/USD split.
- **Uptime guarantees.** neither publishes uptime figures.

## How we checked

Pricing and platform claims come from apify.com and socialcrawl.dev public pages, read in August 2026. Vendors change pricing; check their pages before deciding. Tell us about an error and we will correct it.