rtrvr.ai vs Apify: AI Web Agent vs Legacy Scraping Platform

Apify has been the go-to platform for developers building web scrapers since 2015. Their "actor" marketplace, compute-based pricing, and Puppeteer/Playwright infrastructure made them the default choice for technical teams.

But here's what's changed: You don't need to write JavaScript to scrape the web anymore.

While Apify users are debugging Puppeteer scripts and managing proxy rotation, rtrvr.ai users are typing:

"Extract all products with prices and reviews from this page"

And getting structured JSON back in seconds.

This isn't just about convenience. It's about a fundamental shift from code-first scraping to prompt-first automation—and the economics, capabilities, and accessibility that come with it.

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TL;DR: The 60-Second Comparison

Capability	Apify	rtrvr.ai
Price	$49-499/mo + compute units	Free with Gemini API key
Setup	Write JavaScript/Python code	Describe task in English
LinkedIn/Auth Sites	Blocked or requires proxies	Your authenticated sessions
Bot Detection	Puppeteer/Playwright (detectable)	Extension APIs (undetectable)
Maintenance	Update code when sites change	AI adapts automatically
Form Filling	Limited, requires coding	Native, natural language
Local Execution	Cloud only	Extension + Cloud
Learning Curve	Days/weeks (coding required)	Minutes (no code)
Benchmark Success	Not disclosed	81.39% (SOTA)

The fundamental question: Why write and maintain scraping code when AI can understand any website from a simple prompt?

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The Compute Unit Trap

Apify's pricing model sounds reasonable at first: pay for what you use. But let's look at how it actually works.

Apify's Pricing Structure

Plan	Monthly Cost	Included Compute Units	Overage
Free	$0	0.5 CU/day	N/A
Starter	$49/mo	100 CU	$0.40/CU
Scale	$499/mo	1,000 CU	$0.35/CU
Business	Custom	Custom	Negotiated

What's a Compute Unit?

1 CU = 1 GB of RAM running for 1 hour. Sounds simple, but:

• A basic Puppeteer scraper uses 1-4 GB RAM
• Complex sites with JavaScript rendering need 2-8 GB
• Running 100 pages through a typical actor burns 10-50 CU
• LinkedIn scrapers? 50-100+ CU for meaningful data

Real cost example: Scraping 1,000 product pages

Component	Apify Cost
Actor compute (~50 CU)	$20
Proxy traffic (~5 GB)	$25
Platform fee (Starter)	$49
Total	$94

rtrvr.ai Pricing

Option	Cost
Extension + BYOK Gemini	$0
Cloud Platform (1,000 pages)	~$120 (at $0.12/task avg)
Cloud + BYOK	~$50-80

But here's the real difference:

With rtrvr.ai's extension, you can scrape from your own browser for free. No compute units. No proxy costs. Just your Gemini API key (free tier available) and natural language prompts.

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Code vs. No-Code: The Accessibility Gap

Apify: JavaScript Required

To scrape with Apify, you need to either:

1. Use a pre-built actor from their marketplace (limited customization)
2. Write your own actor in JavaScript or Python

Here's what a basic Apify actor looks like:

import { Actor } from 'apify';
import { PuppeteerCrawler } from 'crawlee';

await Actor.init();

const crawler = new PuppeteerCrawler({
    async requestHandler({ page, request, enqueueLinks }) {
        const title = await page.title();
        
        // Extract products - hope the selectors don't change!
        const products = await page.$$eval('.product-card', cards => 
            cards.map(card => ({
                name: card.querySelector('.product-title')?.textContent,
                price: card.querySelector('.product-price')?.textContent,
                // What if they rename these classes tomorrow?
            }))
        );
        
        await Actor.pushData({ url: request.url, title, products });
        await enqueueLinks({ selector: '.pagination a' });
    },
});

await crawler.run(['https://example.com/products']);
await Actor.exit();

Problems with this approach:

• Requires JavaScript/Node.js knowledge
• CSS selectors break when sites update
• Need to handle pagination manually
• Error handling is your responsibility
• Proxy rotation requires configuration
• Testing requires deploying to Apify

rtrvr.ai: Natural Language

The same task in rtrvr.ai:

"Extract all products from this page including name, price, and any 
reviews. Handle pagination automatically."

That's it. Our AI:

• Understands page structure semantically
• Handles pagination automatically
• Adapts when layouts change
• Returns structured JSON
• Works immediately, no deployment

Time comparison:

Task	Apify	rtrvr.ai
Initial setup	2-8 hours	2 minutes
Testing & debugging	1-4 hours	Instant
Handling edge cases	Ongoing	Automatic
Maintenance when site changes	Hours per change	Zero

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The Bot Detection Problem

Apify's CDP Fingerprint

Apify runs on Puppeteer and Playwright—both use Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP). This creates detectable automation fingerprints:

// Sites can detect Apify scrapers via:
navigator.webdriver  // true for CDP automation
window.cdc_adoQpoasnfa76pfcZLmcfl_*  // CDP artifacts
// Plus dozens of other fingerprinting techniques

What this means in practice:

• LinkedIn blocks Apify actors aggressively
• E-commerce sites serve different content to bots
• Rate limiting kicks in faster
• CAPTCHAs appear more frequently
• Some sites return fake/modified data to detected bots

Apify's solution? Expensive residential proxies and fingerprint spoofing. More cost, more complexity, inconsistent results.

rtrvr.ai's Extension Architecture

rtrvr.ai's Chrome extension uses native browser APIs—not CDP:

Apify: Puppeteer → CDP → Browser (detectable)
rtrvr: Extension APIs → Browser (native, undetectable)

No automation fingerprint. Your browser looks identical to manual browsing because it IS your browser.

Results:

• LinkedIn works perfectly (your session, your data)
• No bot detection triggers
• No proxy costs for basic scraping
• Consistent, accurate data
• 3.39% infrastructure error rate vs 20-30% for CDP tools

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Authenticated Sites: The Access Gap

This is where the comparison gets stark.

Apify: Locked Out of Walled Gardens

Try scraping LinkedIn with Apify:

1. You'll need expensive residential proxies
2. You'll need to manage cookies/sessions manually
3. LinkedIn will still detect and block you frequently
4. You'll get stale or incomplete data
5. Risk of account bans if you use your credentials

Same story for:

• Crunchbase (paywalled content)
• ZoomInfo (enterprise data)
• Your company's internal tools
• Banking/financial portals
• Government databases
• Any site behind login

rtrvr.ai: Your Sessions, Your Access

With rtrvr.ai's extension:

1. You're already logged into LinkedIn in your browser
2. rtrvr.ai uses YOUR authenticated session
3. Full access to everything you can see manually
4. No detection, no blocking, no proxies needed

What you can access:

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator searches
• Your LinkedIn connections and their activity
• Crunchbase with your subscription
• Internal company dashboards
• Banking portals (yes, with 2FA)
• Any authenticated web application

Example prompt:
"Go to LinkedIn Sales Navigator, search for CTOs at Series B 
fintech companies in NYC, and extract their profiles with 
recent post activity"

Apify literally cannot do this. No amount of proxy rotation or fingerprint spoofing gives you access to YOUR authenticated data.

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Beyond Scraping: The Capability Gap

Apify is a scraping platform. rtrvr.ai is an AI web agent.

The difference is fundamental.

What Apify Does

• Extract data from web pages
• Crawl and index websites
• Store scraped data
• Schedule recurring scrapes

What rtrvr.ai Does

Everything Apify does, plus:

Form Filling & Submissions

"Fill out this vendor registration form with our company 
details, upload our W-9, and submit"

Multi-Step Workflows

"For each company in my spreadsheet:
1. Find their careers page
2. Extract open engineering roles
3. Go to their LinkedIn
4. Find the hiring manager
5. Compile into a research brief"

Interactive Navigation

"Log into our CRM, export accounts assigned to me, and 
cross-reference with LinkedIn data"

Real-Time Monitoring

"Monitor these competitor pricing pages daily and alert 
me via Slack when prices change more than 5%"

File Handling

"Download all invoices from this vendor portal, extract 
the totals, and add them to my expense spreadsheet"

Apify actors can do some of these things—if you write hundreds of lines of code. rtrvr.ai does them from a sentence.

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The Maintenance Burden

Apify: Constant Code Updates

When a website changes its structure (which happens constantly):

1. Your actor starts failing
2. You investigate the new page structure
3. You update selectors and logic
4. You test the changes
5. You deploy the new version
6. You hope nothing else broke

Average maintenance per actor: 2-10 hours/month

For teams running dozens of actors, this becomes a significant engineering burden.

rtrvr.ai: AI Adaptation

When a website changes:

1. Our Smart DOM Trees understand the page semantically
2. The AI recognizes "price" is still "price" even if the class changed
3. Extraction continues working
4. You do nothing

Maintenance: Zero

This isn't magic—it's the difference between pattern matching (CSS selectors) and semantic understanding (AI).

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The Marketplace Trap

Apify's actor marketplace seems convenient: thousands of pre-built scrapers ready to use.

The reality:

Issue	Impact
Actors break frequently	Sites update, actors lag behind
Limited customization	Can't modify closed-source actors
Inconsistent quality	Some actors are poorly maintained
Hidden costs	Many actors have additional fees
Vendor lock-in	Actor-specific data formats

Example: LinkedIn Sales Navigator Actor

• Listed price: "Free"
• Actual cost: $0.50-2.00 per profile (actor fees)
• Reliability: Frequently blocked, requires proxies
• Data quality: Often stale or incomplete

With rtrvr.ai:

"Extract profiles from this LinkedIn Sales Navigator search"

• Cost: $0 (extension) or ~$0.12/profile (cloud)
• Reliability: 81.39% success rate (verified)
• Data quality: Live, real-time, complete

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Speed & Parallelization

Apify: Cloud Scale, Cloud Costs

Apify can run actors in parallel across their infrastructure. But:

• Each parallel run consumes compute units
• Proxy costs multiply with parallelization
• Rate limiting often negates speed gains
• Cost scales linearly (or worse) with volume

rtrvr.ai: Smart Parallelization

Extension: 10+ Parallel Tabs

Your browser can run multiple extractions simultaneously:

Tab 1: LinkedIn extraction (background)
Tab 2: Competitor A pricing (background)
Tab 3: Competitor B pricing (background)
Tab 4: Your actual work (active)

All running in parallel, all free with BYOK.

Cloud: Massive Scale

Our cloud platform spins up parallel browser instances:

curl -X POST https://api.rtrvr.ai/agent \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "input": "Extract product data",
    "urls": ["url1.com", "url2.com", ... "url1000.com"]
  }'

1,000 URLs processed in parallel. Results in minutes, not hours.

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Real-World Cost Comparison

Scenario: E-commerce Price Monitoring

Monitor 500 products across 10 competitor sites daily.

Apify Approach:

Component	Monthly Cost
Platform (Scale plan)	$499
Compute (~500 CU/month)	Included
Proxy traffic (~50 GB)	$250
Actor maintenance (dev time)	$500+ (engineer hours)
Total	$1,249+/month

rtrvr.ai Approach:

Component	Monthly Cost
Cloud executions (500 × 30 days × $0.12)	$1,800
OR with scheduling optimization	~$600
OR extension with BYOK	$0

Wait, cloud looks more expensive?

Here's what the numbers miss:

1. rtrvr.ai extension is free - Run from your browser with BYOK
2. No proxy costs - Extension uses your IP
3. No maintenance - AI adapts to site changes
4. No engineering time - Natural language, not code
5. Scheduling optimization - Monitor changes, not re-scrape everything

Realistic comparison for most users:

Approach	Monthly Cost	Maintenance
Apify	$1,249+	10-20 hrs/mo
rtrvr.ai (extension)	$0	0 hrs/mo
rtrvr.ai (cloud optimized)	$300-600	0 hrs/mo

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When Apify Makes Sense

To be fair, Apify isn't wrong for every use case.

Choose Apify if:

• You have JavaScript developers who enjoy writing scrapers
• You need massive scale (millions of pages/month)
• You're scraping public data that doesn't require auth
• You've already built actors and they're working
• You need specific actor marketplace tools
• You want infrastructure you fully control

Choose rtrvr.ai if:

• You want to minimize costs (free with BYOK)
• You need to access authenticated sites (LinkedIn, internal tools)
• You don't want to write or maintain code
• You need form filling and complex workflows
• Bot detection is blocking your scrapers
• You value time over infrastructure control
• You're not a developer (or don't want to be one for this)

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The Paradigm Shift

Apify represents the 2015 approach to web scraping:

• Developers write code
• Code breaks when sites change
• Proxies fight bot detection
• Scale requires infrastructure expertise

rtrvr.ai represents the 2025 approach:

• Anyone describes what they want
• AI understands and adapts
• Native browser APIs bypass detection
• Scale is just more prompts

This isn't about which tool has more features. It's about whether web automation should require engineering resources.

For most use cases, it shouldn't.

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Migration Path: Apify to rtrvr.ai

If you're currently using Apify, here's how to transition:

Step 1: Identify Your Actors

List what each actor does:

• What data does it extract?
• What sites does it scrape?
• How often does it run?
• What breaks most frequently?

Step 2: Translate to Prompts

Each actor becomes a natural language prompt:

Apify Actor	rtrvr.ai Prompt
E-commerce scraper	"Extract product name, price, reviews from this page"
LinkedIn scraper	"Get profile data for people in this search"
News aggregator	"Extract headlines, dates, summaries from these news sites"

Step 3: Test in Extension

Before committing to cloud costs:

1. Install rtrvr.ai extension
2. Add your Gemini API key (free)
3. Test your prompts on target sites
4. Verify data quality matches or exceeds Apify

Step 4: Scale to Cloud

For production workloads:

1. Move validated workflows to rtrvr.ai cloud
2. Set up scheduling for recurring tasks
3. Configure webhooks for data delivery
4. Monitor costs (usually much lower than Apify)

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Benchmark Performance

Metric	rtrvr.ai	Apify (typical)
Overall Success Rate	81.39%	60-75%*
Avg Execution Time	0.9 min	2-5 min
Cost per Task	$0.12 (cloud) / $0 (ext)	$0.10-0.50
Bot Detection Issues	3.39%	15-30%
Maintenance Required	None	Ongoing

*Apify success rates vary widely by actor quality and target site.

View rtrvr.ai benchmark data →

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The Bottom Line

Apify is a solid platform for developers who want to build and maintain scraping infrastructure. It's been the industry standard for years.

But the industry has moved on.

The question isn't "how do I write a better scraper?"

It's "why am I writing scrapers at all?"

rtrvr.ai gives you:

• Free extraction from your browser with BYOK
• Natural language instead of JavaScript
• Authenticated access to LinkedIn, Crunchbase, internal tools
• Zero maintenance as sites change
• Full automation beyond just scraping

Stop debugging Puppeteer scripts. Stop paying for compute units. Stop fighting bot detection.

Just describe what you want and get the data.

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Get Started Today

Option 1: Free with Your Own Keys

1. Install rtrvr.ai Chrome Extension
2. Get a free Gemini API key from Google AI Studio
3. Type /add-gemini-key in the extension
4. Start extracting—no code required

Option 2: Cloud Platform

• rtrvr.ai/cloud for API access
• Scale to thousands of parallel executions
• Pay only for what you use

Option 3: MCP Integration

• Connect to Claude.ai or any MCP client
• MCP Documentation

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Questions? Join our Discord community or email support@rtrvr.ai