Bardeen vs Apify
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Bardeen and Apify.
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Verdict: Apify wins
Apify scores 4.3/5, edging out Bardeen at 3.3/5. Developers and data teams who need web data as a recurring pipeline — prebuilt scrapers to start, custom Actors and proxy infrastructure as they scale.
Bardeen Automate your browser with AI | Apify Web scraping and automation platform | |
|---|---|---|
| Rating | 3.3 (1 review) | 4.3 (1 review) |
| Pricing Model | freemium | freemium |
| Starting Price | From $10/mo | Free tier available |
| Best For | Sales, recruiting, and research teams whose work is scraping LinkedIn and company pages, enriching the rows, and pushing them into a CRM or Sheet. | Developers and data teams who need web data as a recurring pipeline — prebuilt scrapers to start, custom Actors and proxy infrastructure as they scale. |
| Free Tier | ||
| API Access | ||
| Team Features | ||
| Open Source | ||
| Tags | browser extensionno codefree tier | free tierapi accessopen source |
| Visit Bardeen → | Visit Apify → |
Bardeen
Pros
- + Credit economics are legible: 1 credit per action row, 3 per enrichment row, exports free — my 40-row LinkedIn pass cost about 160 credits end to end
- + Cloud execution let a 200-row scrape finish unattended while the Chrome extension handled session-gated pages
- + Cheap, honest entry point: Basic at $10/mo with +100 credits, unlimited seats on all plans (bardeen.ai/pricing, captured 2026-07-30)
- + Magic scraper inferred 8 of 10 columns correctly on a structured page in my test, with manual overrides for the rest
- + Strategic backers (Dropbox, HubSpot, Insight Partners) and 300K+ users claimed suggest real usage, not a shelf product
Cons
- - Pricing has whipsawed — $10 (2023), $60 (Dec 2024), $129–$1,500 tiers (Mar 2025), back to $10/$50 (Dec 2025); budget month-to-month
- - Chrome-only browser extension; no Firefox/Safari/Edge support and no self-hosting
- - LinkedIn scraping rides your own session and account limits — platform terms restrict automation, and aggressive volumes risk the account
- - Natural-language playbook generation drafted flows quickly but got a conditional filter wrong in my test; hand-editing was still required
- - Credits expire at the end of each billing period and enrichment rows cost 3 credits each, so real months run well above the sticker credit count
Apify
Pros
- + Genuine free sandbox: $5 monthly credit covers real test runs of store Actors, not just a feature tour
- + Store breadth — flagship scrapers (Google Maps, Instagram, SERP) show 4.6–4.7 ratings across hundreds of reviews in their own store stats
- + Billing is itemized per compute unit, proxy GB and storage operation, so I could attribute a run's cost down to cents
- + First-class developer tooling: Crawlee (open source), Python and JS SDKs, CLI deploys, scheduling, webhooks, REST API
- + Proxy network (datacenter, residential, Google SERP) is integrated rather than a third-party add-on, with country-level rates published
Cons
- - Real cost is a stack of meters (Actor per-event price + compute units + proxy GB + storage) and is hard to forecast without test runs
- - Store catalog is noisy with heavy duplication — one reviewer counted 12,000+ job scrapers alone; long-tail quality is unvetted
- - Anything past running a prebuilt Actor requires coding skills and proxy knowledge
- - SSO is Enterprise-only; personal training is $150/hour; support is community-only below the $19 tier
- - Vendor's headline customer and catalog counts are self-reported and undefined — I could not verify them independently
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is better, Bardeen or Apify?▼
Apify scores higher at 4.3/5 vs 3.3/5 for Bardeen, making it the better-rated option in our comparison.
What is the difference between Bardeen and Apify?▼
Bardeen: Bardeen is a Chrome extension for sales teams that scrapes websites like LinkedIn, finds and enriches leads, and sends the data to Google Sheets or your CRM. Credit-based pricing. Apify: Apify is a marketplace and platform of ready-made web scrapers and automation actors, with tooling to build and host your own.
Is Bardeen or Apify more affordable?▼
Bardeen starts at €10/mo, Apify starts at €0/mo. Check the comparison table above for current pricing.
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