# 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.

## At a glance

| Criteria | Bright Data | Apify | Openhandle |
|---|---|---|---|
| Model | Vendor-run scraper APIs, every record billed | Third-party actors, billed on metered compute | Pay after use. No credits, no subscription |
| Social pricing | ~$1.50 per 1k records pay-as-you-go. Lower rate needs $499/month (384k records) | Plans $0-$999/month plus $0.13-$0.20 per compute unit. Actors can add per-result fees on top | $3 per 1k, down to $1.50 per 1k at volume. 30-day cache hits are free |
| Free tier | 5,000 records a month, no card. Then per-record billing | $5 of usage a month, spent in compute units | 100 free requests, no card |
| Platform depth | Depth per platform not published. Instagram, TikTok, X, and 8 more, each priced per record | Depth depends on the actor you pick. Any platform an actor exists for, if its author keeps it alive | 45 Instagram, 28 TikTok, and 17 X endpoints. More platforms and data added by demand |
| Who maintains scrapers | Bright Data, an enterprise vendor | Individual actor authors, who can abandon them | Openhandle handles platform changes |
| Output | JSON/NDJSON/CSV by webhook or API. Built for batch and scheduled jobs | Schema differs per actor. Results land in datasets, fetched via API | One schema across Instagram, TikTok, and X |
| Scale posture | Built for enterprise. Leading benchmark success rates, 195-country proxy network | Startup-friendly. Quality swings from actor to actor | 99.9% uptime |

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

- **Predictable per-record budgets, enterprise procurement, compliance review.** Bright Data.
- **Custom scraping logic, niche platforms, or tight startup budgets.** Apify. Pick actively maintained actors and measure real compute cost.
- **Social data as an input to a product you sell.** either works, but benchmark both on your exact targets; the quality gap between an average actor and a maintained scraper API is larger than the price gap.

## How we checked

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.