# Apify vs Firecrawl: web data for sheets or AI

Pick Apify if you need data from well-known sites such as Google Maps, Instagram or Amazon, because someone has already built and maintains a scraper for them that you run in a few clicks. Pick Firecrawl if you are a developer feeding web pages into an AI app or agent: you send a URL and get back clean markdown or fields that match your schema. Apify fits marketers who want rows in a spreadsheet. Firecrawl fits builders who want text a model can read.

- **[Apify](https://suiteintent.com/t/apify?m=GB)**: Ready-made web scrapers and automation. · Best for: Scraping popular sites without writing code · Free plan

- **[Firecrawl](https://suiteintent.com/t/firecrawl?m=GB)**: API that turns websites into clean data. · Best for: Feeding web pages to LLM apps and agents · Free plan

## Apify

Apify is the pick when your target is a popular site with a ready-made Actor, you want runs on a schedule and you would rather export a CSV than write code.

## Firecrawl

Firecrawl is the pick when you build with LLMs, need whole sites crawled into markdown, and want one API call per page instead of a scraper per site.

## Questions

### Which one costs less to start?

You can test either at $0. Apify's free plan includes $5 of platform usage each month, and Starter costs $19 a month. Firecrawl's free plan gives 1,000 credits a month without a card, and Hobby costs $16 a month billed annually. Run your real job on both free tiers and compare how far the credit goes.

### Do I need to code?

Apify's ready-made Actors run from a form: you paste a search or a list of URLs and press start. Writing your own Actor needs JavaScript or Python. Firecrawl is an API first, so you call it from code, a script or an automation tool. If nobody on your team writes code, Apify is the easier start.

### Can I get data from Google Maps or Instagram?

Apify's store has Actors built for those sites, and their authors keep them working when the pages change. Firecrawl reads the page you point it at and does not ship site-specific scrapers. For structured lists from big platforms, Apify saves you the work.

### Which is better for feeding an AI chatbot or agent?

Firecrawl returns pages as markdown that a model reads directly, and it can map and crawl a full site. You can also give it a schema or a prompt to pull out specific fields. Apify can do similar work through its own crawler Actors, but Firecrawl is built around this one job.

### Where does the data end up?

Apify stores each run's results in a dataset you can download as CSV or JSON, or fetch through its API. Firecrawl hands the result straight back in the API response, so it lands wherever your code sends it. Pick by where you want the data to live after the run.