replacing Apify
Open Source Apify Alternatives
Web scraping and automation platform with a hosted actor marketplace — Apify pricing: Free plan available; usage metered per compute unit (about $0.2/unit on entry tiers, less on higher commitments). Below: 3 free,
self-hostable open source projects that cover the same ground, ranked by real GitHub adoption.
There are 3 open source Apify alternatives tracked on this registry, against Apify pricing of Free plan available; usage metered per compute unit (about $0.2/unit on entry tiers, less on higher commitments). The most-adopted is scrapy with 64,438 GitHub stars under BSD-3-Clause, written in Python. Together the set has 99,846 stars across 2 languages and 2 licences. All 3 are free to self-host with no licence fee, and 3 of 3 received a commit in the last 90 days. 3 head-to-head Apify comparisons are available.
Apify is a hosted platform: you pay for compute units and proxy bandwidth rather than for page fetches, so cost scales with how long a scraper runs. The actor marketplace is useful but splits the code between your logic and Apify's hosting, and it is not self-hostable end to end.
Other hosted options
The open source projects below are free to self-host. If you would rather pay for a managed
service, these are the hosted products in the same space — listed with the vendor's own pricing.
Our top 3 Apify alternatives
Scrapy is a web scraping framework written in Python, distributed under the BSD-3-Clause license, and described in its own README as a tool to extract structured data from websites. It is cross-platform and requires Python 3.10 or newer. The project is maintained by Zyte, formerly known as Scrapinghub, together with a broader group of contributors, and it lives in the Python ecosystem as an installable library rather than a hosted service. Its repository is roughly seventeen years old, which places it among the longer-running projects in the web scraping space.
BSD-3-Clause · Python · Apify vs scrapy →
Crawlee is a web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js, written in TypeScript and published on npm as the `crawlee` package. It lives in the JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystem, and it covers crawling and scraping end to end: fetching pages, following links, extracting data, and storing the results to disk or to the cloud. The project also has a Python counterpart, Crawlee for Python, maintained alongside it by Apify.
Apache-2.0 · TypeScript · Apify vs crawlee →
Crawlee is a web scraping and browser automation library for Python, published on PyPI as the `crawlee` package under the Apache-2.0 licence and developed in the open by Apify. It covers crawling and scraping end to end: crawlers follow links across the web, extract data, and persistently store it in machine-readable formats, while the library handles the technical details around them. It works with Parsel, BeautifulSoup, Playwright, and raw HTTP, runs in both headful and headless mode, and includes proxy rotation. A TypeScript implementation of the same project exists for JavaScript and TypeScript users.
Apache-2.0 · Python · Apify vs crawlee-python →
scrapy ★ 64K
Scrapy, a fast high-level web crawling & scraping framework for Python.
rank001 licenseBSD-3-Clause written inPython
crawlee ★ 26K
Crawlee—A web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js to build reliable crawlers. In JavaScript and TypeScript. Extract data for AI, LLMs, RAG, or G
rank002 licenseApache-2.0 written inTypeScript
crawlee-python ★ 9.5K
Crawlee—A web scraping and browser automation library for Python to build reliable crawlers. Extract data for AI, LLMs, RAG, or GPTs. Download HTML, PDF, JPG, P
rank003 licenseApache-2.0 written inPython
last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked
Frequently asked questions
What is the best open source alternative to Apify?
scrapy is the most-starred open source alternative to Apify in this registry, with 64,438 GitHub stars. 3 alternatives are compared here in total.
Are there free alternatives to Apify?
Yes. Every project listed on this page is open source and free to self-host — there is no licence fee. Some projects also sell a managed hosted version, but the self-hosted path costs nothing.
What should I look at when replacing Apify?
Compare licence terms, community size (stars), primary language and release activity. A fast-moving project with a compatible licence and an active maintainer base matters more than raw star count when you are committing to a migration.