Both crawl arbitrary sites and run pre-configured scrapers. crawlcrawl adds monitors, diff webhooks, search, and multi-tenant API keys in one endpoint.
Apify's strength is its marketplace of Actors, with thousands of pre-built scrapers maintained for specific sites. It is a strong fit when your workload concentrates on a handful of platforms with active, maintained Actors.
crawlcrawl is the API-first, credit-billed alternative for teams who want a single endpoint shape, transparent fixed pricing, and every feature included at every tier. Scheduled crawls, dataset storage, the diff endpoint, structured-data extraction, and webhooks ship in the box at $15 a month.
| Capability | crawlcrawl | Apify |
|---|---|---|
| Transparent fixed monthly pricing | ✓ from $15/month | Per-actor compute-unit billing |
| Multi-tenant API keys with rotation | ✓ Included | Account-level |
| Diff-only webhooks (HMAC-signed) | ✓ Included | Custom integration |
| Live search API under same key | ✓ Included | Separate Actor required |
| AI-bot policy resolver | ✓ Included | Not advertised |
| LLMs.txt builder | ✓ Included | Not advertised |
| Single endpoint shape (crawl + scrape + search) | ✓ Included | Multiple Actors composed |
You want one API, one auth header, one credit pool, and a published price per tier. You crawl across many sites rather than concentrating on a few. You want scheduled refreshes, dataset storage, and diff-aware updates without composing them across multiple products.
Your workload concentrates on a small set of specific platforms where Apify has maintained Actors that match your exact needs. You prefer their marketplace model and Actor-composition workflow.