head to head
Apify vs crawlee-python
crawlee-python is the open source alternative to Apify — web scraping and automation platform with a hosted actor marketplace. Here is the honest comparison.
Yes — crawlee-python is a viable free replacement for Apify. crawlee-python is open source under Apache-2.0, written in Python, with 9,543 GitHub stars, 809 forks and 100 open issues; it was last pushed 7 hours ago. Apify costs from $0, while self-hosting crawlee-python carries no licence fee — the trade is your operational time instead of a subscription. 2 other open source Apify alternatives are tracked here, led by scrapy at 64,438 stars. crawlee-python ranks #3 of 3 tracked open source Apify alternatives by stars. The tracked set, by adoption: scrapy (64,438 stars), crawlee (25,865 stars). Replacement criteria on this page: 4 reasons to move to crawlee-python and 3 reasons to stay on Apify.
choose crawlee-python if
- Your Apify bill is growing with seats or usage
- You need your data in a format and server you control
- Your compliance posture requires auditing the code that touches sensitive data
- You have (or can rent) a server and basic Docker comfort
stick with Apify if
- You need the polished onboarding and support SLAs of a commercial vendor
- Your team has zero capacity to operate software, even self-hosted-simple
- You depend on a Apify integration ecosystem that the OSS alternatives have not replicated
Side by side
| crawlee-python (open source) | Apify | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (self-hosted) | Free plan available; usage metered per compute unit (about $0.2/unit on entry tiers, less on higher commitments) |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Proprietary |
| Source code | Public, auditable | Closed |
| Self-hosting | Yes — apify/crawlee-python | Cloud only |
| Data ownership | Your server, your format | Vendor's cloud |
| Community | ★ 9.5K · ⑂ 809 | — |
| Built with | Python | — |
Why people look for a Apify alternative
About crawlee-python
Crawlee for Python is an open source, Apache 2.0 licensed web scraping and browser automation library that lets Python developers build reliable crawlers for extracting data for AI, LLM, RAG, and GPT pipelines, and it is aimed at anyone who needs to crawl sites at scale without hand writing the surrounding infrastructure.
read the full crawlee-python overview →
Other open source alternatives to Apify
last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked
Frequently asked questions
Is crawlee-python a good replacement for Apify?
crawlee-python is an open source alternative to Apify (Web scraping and automation platform with a hosted actor marketplace). It is written in Python and licensed under Apache-2.0, with 9,543 GitHub stars.
Is crawlee-python free compared to Apify?
Yes. crawlee-python is open source — there is no licence fee, and you can self-host it. Apify is typically a paid subscription, so the trade-off is licence cost against the operational work of running it yourself.
How do I migrate from Apify to crawlee-python?
Migration effort depends on the data formats involved. Check crawlee-python's documentation for import options, and compare the feature table above to confirm the capabilities you depend on are covered before switching.