Apify and Bright Data sell scraping infrastructure. UnifAPI sells finished HTTP endpoints. Pick the abstraction that matches your team and time horizon.

Apify and Bright Data are scraping platforms: they sell the underlying infrastructure — proxies, browser farms, actor runtimes, dataset storage — that you compose into a scrape. UnifAPI is API-first: it sells finished HTTP endpoints with predictable JSON, one per data shape, $0.001 per record returned. The right choice depends on whether you want to operate the scraping layer or consume the result of it.

What each one is

Apify is a marketplace of pre-built scraper actors plus a hosting platform for ones you write yourself. You pick an actor, configure inputs, run it, and receive a dataset. Bright Data is closer to the metal: a proxy network, a browser-based unblocker, and ready-made datasets for the largest platforms. Both expose an SDK and pay-as-you-go billing for compute and data.

UnifAPI is the layer above either of those. There are no actors to configure, no proxies to rent, no datasets to schedule. You call GET /v1/twitter/search?q=... and get JSON back in the response. The scraping work happens upstream, invisibly.

Time-to-first-record

On Apify or Bright Data, time-to-first-record is the time it takes to pick the right actor, configure its inputs, kick off the run, and parse the resulting dataset. For a familiar platform that's minutes; for a new one, it's a half-day of reading actor docs.

On UnifAPI, time-to-first-record is one HTTP call: paste your key in the Authorization header, hit the endpoint, get JSON. The 14 currently live platforms are documented identically — if you've called one, you've called all of them.

What you maintain

Apify and Bright Data give you levers: pick an actor version, tune proxies for a region, retry a failed run, re-schedule. The flip side is that you own the integration when the upstream changes shape, and you own the alerting when an actor goes red.

UnifAPI hides those levers and owns the maintenance. When a platform changes a field name, we catch it in our reshape layer and ship the fix. Your agent code keeps working without a redeploy. The trade is that you give up the fine-grained control — you can't pick a Brazilian proxy IP for one call.

Pricing model

Apify bills compute units plus dataset storage; Bright Data bills bandwidth, residential-proxy minutes, or dataset rows. Both are predictable for steady workloads and confusing for new ones — usage estimation takes a few runs to dial in.

UnifAPI is flat $0.001 per record returned across every endpoint. One unit, one rate. A search call that returns 10 results costs $0.01. A scrape that returns one page costs $0.001. The bill matches what your agent actually consumed.

When to pick which

Pick Apify or Bright Data if your team has scraping depth, you need fine-grained control over the scraping layer (custom selectors, residential geos, scheduled crawls of millions of pages), or your target site isn't in any agent-API catalog.

Pick UnifAPI if you want public-data inputs to your agent without operating a scraping stack — 14 live platforms behind one key, one bill, MCP-ready out of the box. You can always layer in a scraping platform later if your workload outgrows the abstraction.

The full catalog is at unifapi.com/apis, pricing at unifapi.com/pricing, MCP setup at unifapi.com/mcp.