We Benchmarked Anysite, Firecrawl, and Apify on the Same Pages. Here's What the Numbers Say.

Every AI product eventually needs web data, and three names come up in every comparison thread: Firecrawl, Apify, and Anysite. Instead of arguing about feature lists, we ran the same four URLs through all three APIs — fresh requests, no caching, wall-clock measured — and then did the pricing math.

All tests were run on July 7–8, 2026. Raw JSON outputs are available on request.

What a 100,000-page monthly agent pipeline costs on each service. With Firecrawl it is check parity; with Apify the gap is two orders of magnitude even at their best volume discount.

Test setup

Four pages covering the typical spectrum of what scrapers face in production. To keep things fair we picked neutral pages — none of the contenders' own websites:

Each page was fetched through:

• Anysite — POST /api/webparser/parse (fast HTTP parsing) and POST /api/webparser/render (full browser rendering — and not a vanilla headless Chrome, but an anti-detect browser with realistic fingerprints)
• Firecrawl — POST /v2/scrape with maxAge: 0 (see the caching note below)
• Apify — the apify/ai-web-scraper actor via run-sync-get-dataset-items, single-page mode

# Anysite
curl -X POST 'https://api.anysite.io/api/webparser/render' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer $ANYSITE_TOKEN' \
  -d '{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com"}'

# Firecrawl
curl -X POST 'https://api.firecrawl.dev/v2/scrape' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer $FIRECRAWL_KEY' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com", "maxAge": 0}'

# Apify
curl -X POST 'https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/apify~ai-web-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"prompt": "Extract the main content of this page",
       "startUrls": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com"}],
       "extractionMode": "single", "maxPagesToVisit": 1}'

One honest note about caching

Speed

Wall-clock seconds per page, fresh requests only. Anysite figures are the median of two runs, measured through the Anysite CLI with its ~1 s of local overhead subtracted; Firecrawl and Apify were called over direct HTTP. Hover a row for run details.

Takeaways:

• Anysite /parse came in fastest on all four pages — including Zillow, which sits behind PerimeterX bot protection, where it returned the real page (verified title and content, no captcha wall) in about two seconds.
• For the heaviest cases where lightweight parsing isn't enough, Anysite's /render (a full anti-detect browser session with realistic fingerprints) is the fallback — slower, but it gets through where vanilla headless browsers get blocked. Use /parse by default, /render when a site demands it.
• Apify's AI scraper is doing something fundamentally different — booting an actor and running LLM extraction — and it shows: 27–101 seconds per page, every page. To be fair, Apify's marketplace has thousands of cheaper specialized actors; but if you reach for their flagship universal AI scraper, this is the latency you get.

Cost per page

This is where the gap stops being incremental. Anysite prices the two usage patterns separately: an MCP line for agents — flat monthly plans (MCP $30 / x5 $99 / x15 $199) sized to how much your agent works, with no per-page meter — and API plans for high-volume integrations, billed in credits, up to Enterprise at $1,199/month for 1.2M credits. On the API plans a /parse call is 1 credit and /render is 10.

Sources: Firecrawl's published pricing (Hobby $19/mo for 5,000 credits; Scale $749/mo — $599 annually — for 1M credits); Apify Store's per-event price sheet for the actor ($0.03 on the free tier, tiered down to $0.02 on the Business plan), cross-checked against the actual charges on our runs. A fun aside: we pulled the actor's pricing and stats through Anysite's own Apify connector — /api/apify/actors returns the full Store record as JSON.

For agent workloads — the scenario all three products are actually courting — Anysite's MCP line is a flat $30–199/month with no per-page meter running in the back of your mind. A working agent's month that lands in Firecrawl's $99 Standard tier fits comfortably in Anysite's $99 x5 plan; a heavy 24/7 agent caps out at $199, where per-credit competitors keep scaling into the $399–749 range — and Apify's per-event pricing turns the same month into thousands of dollars.

At API scale, Anysite Enterprise lands at $0.001/page — on par with Firecrawl Standard, and 20–30× below Apify. Firecrawl's top-volume Scale plan is cheaper per raw page; the difference is what a credit buys: on Anysite the same credits also purchase structured, typed data from 450+ sources, not just HTML.

Concretely, a 100,000-page monthly agent pipeline costs:

• $99 on Anysite MCP x5
• $99 on Firecrawl Standard
• ~$2,000–3,000 on Apify's ai-web-scraper

One more number worth knowing before you build on the Apify actor: per Apify Store's own statistics, ~22% of its runs over the past 30 days ended in failure, timeout, or abort (1,405 of 6,434). Budget your retries accordingly — each retried page is billed again.

What you get back

Firecrawl returns clean, LLM-ready markdown — genuinely good output, arguably the nicest default format for feeding an LLM.

Apify's ai-web-scraper returns markdown plus prompt-driven AI extraction — flexible, but you pay for it in both dollars and seconds.

Anysite returns cleaned HTML by default, plain text with strip_all_tags=true, or — the interesting part — a structured contact object. One parameter, extract_contacts=true, pulls every email, phone number, link, and social profile off a page in the same single call:

{
  "title": "Firecrawl - The Web Data API for AI",
  "emails": ["help@firecrawl.com"],
  "phones": [],
  "links": ["https://github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl", "..."]
}

In our test it extracted a working support email and the full social footprint from a competitor's landing page. That's a lead-gen pipeline in one parameter — no post-processing, no regex, no second pass.

Fine-grained control is also built in: include_tags / exclude_tags CSS selectors (including wildcard masks like *banner*), only_main_content heuristics, srcset resolution, base64 image stripping.

The bigger difference: you often shouldn't be parsing HTML at all

A universal scraper is the right tool for the long tail of the web. But for the platforms most teams actually target — LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter/X, Reddit, YouTube, SEC filings, company registries, e-commerce, maps — Anysite ships structured endpoints across 450+ sources that return typed JSON: profiles, posts, jobs, filings, products.

No selectors. No markdown post-processing. No re-parsing when the site ships a redesign.

Firecrawl and Apify hand you the page; Anysite hands you the data. The universal webparser is there for everything else.

Bottom line

• Apify shines as a marketplace of thousands of specialized actors. Its universal AI scraper, though, is a slow and expensive convenience layer: 27–101 s and $0.02–0.03 per page.
• Firecrawl produces the nicest markdown and has smart caching — just know that the impressive default latency includes cache hits, and fresh scrapes run 3.2–5.5 s.
• Anysite was fastest on every page in the test, wins agent-workload economics by a wide margin — flat $30–199 plans against per-page metering — extracts contacts natively, and, for major platforms, replaces scraping entirely with structured APIs.

If your agents read the web at scale, run the math on your own volume. The spreadsheet usually makes the decision for you.

Methodology: all requests issued July 7–8, 2026 from the same machine; Firecrawl tested with maxAge: 0 to bypass its 2-day default cache; Apify costs taken from actual per-event charges on our runs. Each Anysite/Firecrawl measurement was repeated twice with consistent results. All prices re-verified July 8, 2026 against Firecrawl's published pricing and Apify Store's live actor record.