The short version
- Choose Apify if you need structured data from a specific well-known site — a marketplace, a social network, a jobs board — where someone already maintains an Actor for it.
- Choose SarvCrawl if you want one generic call that turns any site or document into clean markdown, chunked and embedded for search.
SarvCrawl and Apify, side by side
| SarvCrawl | Apify | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Crawl-to-knowledge-base API | Scraping platform and Actor marketplace |
| Best for | Content you want to search — web pages and documents together | A ready-made scraper for one specific site |
| Output | Markdown, HTML, JSON, links, images | Whatever the Actor emits; datasets export to JSON, CSV and more |
| JavaScript rendering | Yes, where a page needs it | Yes, through browser-based Actors |
| Documents | PDF, Office, EPUB, images and audio; OCR for scans | Depends on the Actor |
| Chunking, embeddings, search | Built in (search on paid plans) | Build it yourself |
| Anti-bot and proxies | Not the focus | Proxies available on the platform |
| Pricing | 1 billion free tokens, no card; paid plans | Free with $5 usage; Starter $29/mo, Scale $199/mo, Business $999/mo |
| Hosting and licence | Hosted, or self-host: Apache-2.0 with an AGPL-3.0 engine | Hosted platform; its crawling library Crawlee is open source |
| Integrations | REST, Node, Python, CLI, n8n, 21 MCP tools | API, JavaScript and Python clients, Actor integrations |
Where they really differ
Apify's unit is the Actor: a packaged scraper you pick from thousands, or write yourself, and run with queueing, storage, scheduling and proxies attached. When the Actor you need exists, that is very hard to beat — including the part where the site changed its markup last month and someone else fixed it.
The trade is pricing and shape. Apify bills compute units, so cost follows runtime rather than pages, and the first month on a new workload is an experiment. Each Actor also has its own output, so ten sources can mean ten schemas.
SarvCrawl is the opposite shape: one generic endpoint for any URL, one output format, and everything lands in a knowledge base that is chunked, embedded and searchable. It will not give you a pre-built scraper for a particular marketplace's product listings.
Using both
A common split: Apify Actors for the handful of sites that need bespoke structured extraction, and SarvCrawl for documentation, help centres and everything you want an assistant to answer from.
SarvCrawl vs Apify: questions
Is SarvCrawl a good Apify alternative?
For turning arbitrary sites and documents into searchable content, yes. For structured extraction from one specific popular site, an existing Apify Actor is usually the faster route.
How does pricing compare?
Apify bills compute units, which follow runtime. SarvCrawl bills tokens for parsing, chunking and embedding, roughly 500 tokens per page of text, with 1 billion free on sign-up.
Does SarvCrawl have a marketplace like Apify Store?
No. SarvCrawl has one set of endpoints — scrape, crawl, map, web search, upload and monitor — that works on any site.
Can I search what I scrape with Apify?
Apify stores datasets; chunking, embeddings and a search index are yours to build. SarvCrawl includes them, with search on paid plans.