Bright Data vs Apify
The two heavyweight scraping platforms compared for social media data: per-record delivery against a scraper marketplace.
Checked August 2026 · public pricing pages · no affiliate links
Bright Data and Apify are the two biggest general scraping platforms people reach for when they need social media data at scale. Bright Data sells finished records from its own maintained scrapers on top of the industry's largest proxy network. Apify sells a marketplace of community scrapers running on metered compute. One is a data vendor, the other is a platform. That framing decides most choices.
Figures from public pricing pages, August 2026.
Cost model
Bright Data prices the output: about $1.50 per thousand records pay-as-you-go, dropping to ~$1.30 beyond the Scale plan's included volume. You can predict a job's cost from its record count before running it.
Apify prices the work: compute units (1 GB RAM × 1 hour) plus whatever the actor author charges. An efficient actor on Apify can undercut Bright Data substantially; an inefficient one can cost multiples. You only learn which by testing the specific actor, and a marketplace actor update can change your cost profile without warning.
Maintenance and risk
Social platforms break scrapers constantly. Bright Data absorbs that: its social scraper APIs are vendor-maintained products with success rates that lead independent benchmarks. On Apify, popular actors are patched fast, but each actor is one author's side project until proven otherwise. Check last-updated dates and issue queues before depending on one.
Apify's counterweight is flexibility: if no actor does what you need, you write one, with full control over logic and output. Bright Data's scrapers return what Bright Data decides a record contains.
Verdicts
Pricing and platform claims come from brightdata.com and apify.com public pages, read in August 2026. Vendors change pricing; check their pages before deciding. Tell us about an error and we will correct it.