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# cdpfleet vs Apify

A browser you connect to from your own code, priced per thread, against a platform that runs your whole scraper — Actors in containers, billed in compute units with proxies and storage — and its Store of ready-made Actors for fetching, crawling and search. Prices, limits and features side by side.

Apify is a web-scraping platform: you package a scraper as an Actor — a Docker container, usually built on its open-source Crawlee library — and Apify runs it with storage, scheduling, an API and its own proxies, or you rent a ready-made Actor from the Apify Store. The browser lives inside your Actor run and is paid for as compute: memory × time. cdpfleet only does the browser: one HTTPS call returns a WebSocket to a real browser — Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, Naver Whale, Yandex Browser, Chromium, Patchright, Rebrowser, Camoufox, Firefox or WebKit — that your code drives from wherever it already runs. They overlap when you'd otherwise put Playwright in an Apify container just to have a browser in the cloud. Apify's ready-made Actors for one-call fetches, crawls, screenshots and search are set here next to cdpfleet [Functions](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/functions), [jobs](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/jobs) and [monitors](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/monitors).

|  | cdpfleet | Apify |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Browsers | 12 — Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, Naver Whale, Yandex Browser, Chromium, Patchright, Rebrowser, Camoufox, Firefox, WebKit, plus hardware Android phones and iOS WebView in early access. Chrome with stable, beta and dev channels and pinned previous majors. | What your Actor installs. Base images for Playwright with Chromium/Chrome, Firefox, WebKit or all three, Camoufox, and Puppeteer with Chrome; headful through Xvfb. |
| How you connect | Your code runs anywhere and connects over the Playwright protocol — `connect(wsUrl)` from Node.js, Python, Java, C# or Go — or over CDP with `"cdp": true` for Puppeteer and `connectOverCDP`. Nothing to deploy. | You deploy your code as an Actor (Docker image) and it launches the browser inside the run; Apify SDK and Crawlee for JavaScript/TypeScript and Python. Results go to Apify datasets and key-value stores. |
| Session length | Up to 24 h per session (shared threads: also capped by your remaining daily minutes). Idle timeout 120 s by default, up to 10 min on shared threads and 24 h on dedicated. | As long as the Actor run, which has a timeout you set. |
| Metering | Per second, as thread-seconds: a headless browser is 1 thread, headful 2. Billing stops when the WebSocket closes. | Compute units: 1 GB of memory for 1 hour = 1 CU, at $0.20 (Free, Starter), $0.16 (Scale) or $0.13 (Business). Browser Actors need at least 1 GB; "large and complex sites" 4 GB or more. Proxies and storage are billed on top. |
| Plans | Free [Community plan](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/pricing#community): 2 threads, 60 browser-minutes per thread a day, 15-minute sessions, proxies included. Paid from $7.50/month (5 shared threads, 60–480 browser-minutes a day per thread); dedicated threads for 24/7 use at $8.50/thread/month. [Pricing](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/pricing). | Free: $5 of usage a month, no card. Starter $19/month, Scale $199/month, Business $999/month — each fee is prepaid usage; 10% off billed annually. Concurrent runs 5 / 32 / 128 / 256; memory 16 GB / 64 GB / 256 GB / 512 GB; more of either as add-ons ($5 per run, $1 per GB). |
| One browser, around the clock | A dedicated thread: $8.50/month, i.e. $0.01/hour. | At 1 GB: 720 CU ≈ $144.00/month at $0.20 ($115.20 at Scale's $0.16, $93.60 at Business's $0.13), compute only; a 4 GB browser costs four times as much. |
| Concurrency | The threads you buy: 5 to 10,000 (more on request); each session takes 1–4 threads by type. | Concurrent runs per plan (above); one run can drive several browsers within its memory. |
| Proxies | Bring your own HTTP, HTTPS or SOCKS5 proxies — single, pool, or per-host rules (`proxy_rules`) — swap a running session's proxy live, see traffic per destination host and per rule; traffic through them is free. Or the [cdpfleet residential proxy](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/proxies#residential): 4 tiers from $0.50 to $5/GB from one prepaid balance ($5 free credit), mixable per host — e.g. Tier 4 for CDN assets, Tier 1 for pages. A launch without a proxy uses the free [Community proxy](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/proxies#community-proxy) — best effort, no guarantees. | Apify Proxy: datacenter (5 / 30 / 200 / 500 IPs included, then $1 / $0.80 / $0.60 per IP on Starter / Scale / Business), residential ($8 / $8 / $7.50 / $7 per GB), Google SERP ($2.50–$1.70 per 1,000 SERPs) and an Unblocker ($1.50–$1 per 1,000 requests); country targeting and sessions (residential sessions last about 30 minutes). Your own proxies work through Crawlee's `proxyUrls`. |
| Stealth | Real browsers by default (genuine Chrome, Edge, Brave…), headful by default, and three stealth builds — Patchright, Rebrowser, Camoufox — on every plan. See the [headless tells](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/cases/headless-tells) case. | Crawlee generates browser fingerprints for its crawlers; a Camoufox base image; the Unblocker proxy for anti-bot systems. |
| Watching a session | Live view with human takeover — Watch / Take control in the dashboard, or a link from the API — and [Launch interactive](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/live-view#launch-interactive): open any browser on a start page straight into live view from the dashboard's code generator (`start_url` over the API). [Session recordings](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/recordings) as MP4 (480p free, 720p or 1080p on a plan), and JPEG frames to your code with `page.screencast`. | Run logs, datasets and key-value-store files in the Apify Console. |
| Persistence | [Persistent profiles](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/profiles) keep cookies, local storage and IndexedDB between sessions (paid plans); Playwright `storageState`; `keep_alive` to reconnect to the same browser on dedicated threads. | Named key-value stores and datasets; Crawlee's session pool keeps cookies per proxy session. |
| Scraping in one call | [Functions](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/functions): screenshot, PDF, Markdown, [scrape](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/functions/scrape) (HTML, Markdown, text, links, screenshot, XHR calls, cookies; `wait_for`, `actions`, `extract` by CSS selector), [map](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/functions/map), [geo compare](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/functions/geo) and a [live tab](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/functions/livetab) — in a pooled browser, or in a browser and device of your choice on paid plans. Billed like a session (one thread while the call runs, one per country for geo compare); the Community proxy and your own proxies cost nothing extra. Free tools at [/functions](https://cdpfleet.com/functions). | No platform endpoint: one-call fetches are Store Actors. Web Fetch (`web-fetch.apify.actor`, always on, answers in the HTTP response): Markdown, HTML, text, links or the raw file, custom headers, and a `wait` that opens the page in a real browser — otherwise a plain fetch, with the Unblocker switching to a browser for protected sites; no actions, screenshots or country choice. $1.50 per 1,000 successful fetches on Free and Starter, $1.25 on Scale, $1.00 on Business; failures free. RAG Web Browser fetches pages or a search's top results as Markdown for agents ($2.28–$1.33 per 1,000 pages by plan). Anything else — actions, a login, extraction — is your own Actor or another Store Actor. |
| Crawling and bulk | [Jobs](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/jobs) on paid plans: batch (any number of URLs), crawl and map, with no size or time limit — runs continue past the 24-hour session limit by themselves; results as JSON lines or a zip archive, kept 14 days; stop and resume; signed webhooks. Plus [watch](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/jobs#watch) (live XHR/WebSocket/DOM events), [warmup](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/jobs#warmup) and [monitors](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/monitors) (scheduled change detection with diffs). | Website Content Crawler (pay per usage): from start URLs through links, sitemaps and llms.txt, include/exclude globs, depth and page limits (effectively unlimited by default), switching between a browser and plain HTTP per site; Markdown, text or HTML per page, files, only pages modified since a date. Its README estimates $0.50–$5 per 1,000 pages with a headless browser and $0.20 with plain HTTP, at a "baseline price of $0.25/CU" — the pricing page lists $0.20/CU and less. Any Actor runs on cron schedules (with time zones) and reports run events to webhooks; 100 schedules and 100 webhooks per user. No change detection of its own: Store Actors such as Content Checker compare a page between runs and email before-and-after screenshots. |
| Screenshots and PDFs | Screenshot (PNG/JPEG, viewport or full page) and PDF Functions — a text PDF from a Chromium-based browser. | Website Screenshot Generator (pay per usage): PNG by default, a viewport width, scrolling to the bottom, delays, elements to hide and a proxy — Apify says it serves "primarily as an example Actor". Website Content Crawler saves a screenshot per page with its Firefox crawler. No PDF Actor from Apify itself: community Store Actors (pay per event) or `page.pdf()` in your own Actor. |
| Search and site APIs | None — no search-engine or per-site APIs; a [scrape](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/functions/scrape) or a session reads whatever page you point it at. | Google Search Results Scraper: organic and paid results, AI Overviews, and add-ons for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot and Gemini answers — $4.50 per 1,000 results pages on Free, $2.50 on Starter, $1.95 on Scale, $1.80 on Business. The Apify Store has ready-made Actors for many popular sites, priced per result, per event or per usage. |
| Agent tooling | A hosted [MCP server](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/mcp/setup) at cdpfleet.com/mcp — add it in Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini and sign in with OAuth — or `npx cdpfleet-mcp`; [SDKs](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/sdk) for Node.js, Python and Go. | A hosted MCP server (`mcp.apify.com`, OAuth or a Bearer token; also local over stdio) that searches the Store, runs any Actor and reads its results, with Web Fetch and RAG Web Browser on by default; an Apify plugin and Agent Skills for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and GitHub Copilot; integrations for LangChain, CrewAI, OpenAI and others. Agents can pay without an account: a prepaid, spend-capped token (from $1, valid 14 days) bought over x402, MPP or Skyfire. |
| Examples | [89 cases](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/cases) run on production in five languages, all on [GitHub](https://github.com/cdpfleet/cdpfleet) with their output. | Crawlee and Actor templates. |

Apify facts from its public pricing page and documentation, checked on 11 November 2026; list prices in USD. Tell us if something is out of date.

## Which one, when

### Pick Apify if…

-   You want the whole scraper hosted — queue, retries, scheduling, storage and an API — not just the browser.
-   A ready-made Actor from the Store already does what you need: Google results as data, a site crawled to Markdown for an LLM, or a page as Markdown for $1–$1.50 per 1,000.
-   Your jobs are small enough for $5 of free usage a month, or bursty enough that paying by memory-hour beats a monthly thread.

### Pick cdpfleet if…

-   Your code already runs somewhere and only needs a browser: no image to build, no deploy, five languages.
-   The site must see a specific real browser or version — Chrome channels, Edge, Brave, Opera, Firefox, WebKit, Camoufox — or a phone.
-   Browsers run for hours or around the clock: a dedicated thread is a flat monthly price, not memory × hours.
-   You want live takeover, recordings, persistent profiles and per-host proxy routing built in.
-   You want screenshots, PDFs, scrapes with actions, crawls and [monitors](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/monitors) from one API next to the browser, not an Actor per task.
-   You want to start free — the Community plan includes proxies — and try a browser in live view before writing any code.

## Try it

The [quickstart](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/quickstart) is one HTTPS call and five lines of Playwright; the [code builder](https://cdpfleet.com/docs/builder) writes the launch for any browser and option set in your language.

### Sources

-   [Apify pricing](https://apify.com/pricing)
-   [Apify docs: usage and resources (compute units)](https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/usage-and-resources)
-   [Apify docs: limits](https://docs.apify.com/account/limits)
-   [Apify docs: proxy](https://docs.apify.com/proxy)
-   [Apify docs: residential proxy](https://docs.apify.com/proxy/residential-proxy)
-   [Apify SDK: Docker images](https://docs.apify.com/sdk/js/docs/concepts/docker-images)
-   [Crawlee: proxy management](https://crawlee.dev/js/docs/guides/proxy-management)
-   [Apify Store: Web Fetch](https://apify.com/apify/web-fetch)
-   [Apify Store: RAG Web Browser](https://apify.com/apify/rag-web-browser)
-   [Apify Store: Website Content Crawler](https://apify.com/apify/website-content-crawler)
-   [Apify Store: Website Screenshot Generator](https://apify.com/apify/screenshot-url)
-   [Apify Store: Google Search Results Scraper](https://apify.com/apify/google-search-scraper)
-   [Apify Store: Content Checker](https://apify.com/jakubbalada/content-checker)
-   [Apify docs: schedules](https://docs.apify.com/actors/running/schedules)
-   [Apify docs: webhooks](https://docs.apify.com/integrations/webhooks)
-   [Apify docs: MCP server](https://docs.apify.com/mcp)
-   [Apify docs: agentic payments](https://docs.apify.com/agents/payments)

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Source: https://cdpfleet.com/docs/compare/cdpfleet-vs-apify · Markdown: https://cdpfleet.com/docs/compare/cdpfleet-vs-apify.md · All docs for AI tools: https://cdpfleet.com/llms.txt