COMPARE:
Apify or Bright Data for web data at scale
Apify against Bright Data for collecting data from the public web at scale, with the same seven questions asked of each and neither one flattered. Mamba Labs builds the Apify actors here, Page Finder Extractor included, and the page says where it is the wrong answer.
The short answer
Bright Data sells the network that gets you through the door. Apify sells the place to run the program once you are in. Hard targets need the network and ordinary ones do not.
The same questions, both tools
| Apify | Bright Data | Page Finder Extractor | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it actually does | Runs a program against the public web on a schedule or on demand, and hands back a dataset. | Routes a request through residential or mobile IPs, or runs a managed scraper and delivers the dataset. | Takes a list of domains and a page to look for, then returns the URL and the extracted content. |
| Coverage and hit rate | A few thousand published actors, plus anything you write yourself, which is the part that matters. | The largest proxy pool in the category, which is what gets a hard target answered at all. | Any page type a site actually publishes: pricing, careers, security, leadership, integrations. |
| What it costs | Per event or per compute unit, depending on the actor, and it is usually cents per row. | Per gigabyte on the proxy products and per record on the datasets, with a monthly commitment on most plans. | Cents per domain, charged on a returned page rather than on a search. |
| How it fits a workflow | An API, a scheduler, webhooks, and a dataset you pull or push onward. Clay calls it as an HTTP step. | Proxy endpoints, a scraping browser, a managed dataset delivery, and an API over all of it. | One call for the whole list, from Clay or from a script, and finished rows come back. |
| Where the data comes from | The public web, read directly, which means you can see exactly where a field came from. | The live web, fetched through consented residential and mobile exit nodes. | The sites themselves, fetched directly, so the source URL is on every row. |
| What it takes to set up | Running a published actor takes minutes. Writing your own takes a developer. | The proxy side takes real configuration, and compliance review is part of the onboarding. | Give it the domains and say which page you want. |
| Where it stops | There is no table, no interface for a list, and no view of your accounts. | Priced and sold for scale. A small job carries the cost structure of a large one. | It reads pages. Anything behind a login is not something it can reach. |
The same seven questions are asked on every compare page here, in this order, so two of these pages can be read against each other.
Where each one genuinely wins
- Apify wins on what it costs, where the data comes from. A platform for running scrapers and data actors, yours or somebody else's.
- Bright Data wins on coverage and hit rate, how it fits a workflow. A proxy network with scraping products built on top of it.
- Page Finder Extractor wins on what it takes to set up. Finds one named page across hundreds of websites and extracts what is on it.
- Nobody wins on what it actually does, where it stops. Apify and Bright Data give the same answer on those, and we are not going to invent a difference.
Where to get them
What we would actually do
For most B2B data work, the target is a company website that is not defending itself, and Apify is the cheaper and simpler answer. Bright Data becomes the right call when the site actively blocks you, or when you need residential and mobile exit nodes. It also wins at volumes where per gigabyte pricing beats per compute unit. Its commitments and its compliance review are real overhead for a small job. Plenty of teams run an Apify actor and point it at a Bright Data proxy, which is the combination rather than the choice.
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