COMPARE:
Apify or PhantomBuster for scraping social profiles
Apify and PhantomBuster both do pulling data out of social platforms, and this page puts them on the same seven questions. Mamba Labs builds Apify actors. Company Social Presence Mapper is ours, it is the third column, and it does not win most of these rows.
If you only read one part
PhantomBuster runs on your own logged in session and reaches what you can see. Apify runs a program in the cloud and reaches what is public. The session is the whole difference.
Dimension by dimension
| Apify | PhantomBuster | Company Social Presence Mapper | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it actually does | Runs a program against the public web on a schedule or on demand, and hands back a dataset. | Runs a named automation against a platform, on a schedule, and hands back a CSV or a JSON feed. | Takes a domain and returns the company's profile URLs and audience size on each platform. |
| Coverage and hit rate | A few thousand published actors, plus anything you write yourself, which is the part that matters. | A hundred or so ready automations across LinkedIn, Instagram, X, Sales Navigator and Google Maps. | The main networks in one pass, so one call replaces a scraper per platform. |
| What it costs | Per event or per compute unit, depending on the actor, and it is usually cents per row. | Per execution minute, pooled monthly, so a slow scrape costs more than a fast one. | Cents per domain, charged on a returned row. |
| 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. | Chain phantoms into a flow, or call one over the API and read the result file. | One HTTP column in Clay, or one call per domain from your own code. |
| Where the data comes from | The public web, read directly, which means you can see exactly where a field came from. | The platforms themselves, read through your own logged in session. | The company's own site and the public profile pages it links to. |
| What it takes to set up | Running a published actor takes minutes. Writing your own takes a developer. | Paste a session cookie, set the input, run it. Minutes to a first result. | Send the domains. There is no account to connect and no cookie to paste. |
| Where it stops | There is no table, no interface for a list, and no view of your accounts. | It automates a page. It does not run a sequence, hold a reply, or keep a conversation. | It reads public profiles. Post level engagement is a different actor. |
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.
What each is actually better at
- Apify wins on what it costs, where the data comes from. A platform for running scrapers and data actors, yours or somebody else's.
- PhantomBuster wins on what it actually does. A catalog of hosted automations that scrape and act on social platforms.
- Company Social Presence Mapper wins on how it fits a workflow. Maps a company domain to its accounts across the social platforms, with follower counts.
- Nobody wins on coverage and hit rate, what it takes to set up, where it stops. Apify and PhantomBuster give the same answer on those, and we are not going to invent a difference.
Where to get them
What is best for you
If the data is behind your own login, such as a Sales Navigator search or your own connections, PhantomBuster is the tool and Apify is not. If the data is public, Apify is cheaper, schedules properly, and does not depend on a cookie that expires. Execution minute pricing catches people out on PhantomBuster: a slow platform costs more than a fast one for the same rows. Using your own session also puts your own account in front of the platform's enforcement, which is a decision worth making deliberately.
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