Apify vs SocialHolmes

Apify is a real product and this page says what it is good at. On price alone it is about 3.0× what we charge for the same thousand results.

	SocialHolmes	Apify
Per 1,000 results	$0.50	$1.50
Paid before your first call	None	None
Subscription	No	Yes
A run that returns nothing	Costs nothing	Usually billed
Free tier	1,000 credits on sign-up	A monthly platform credit

At 100,000 results a month

$50.00

SocialHolmes

$150.00

Apify

What Apify is better at

Apify is a platform rather than an API, and if what you want is a marketplace of ready-made scrapers for hundreds of sites, it is the best answer on this list. Actors for almost anything, a scheduler, a storage layer and an integrations ecosystem come in the box.

It is also the right choice if your targets go well beyond social media. We cover four platforms deeply; Apify covers the open web shallowly, and that is a genuinely different product.

Where SocialHolmes wins

Per-result billing and a much lower rate. Apify's actors are priced by whoever wrote them, so the same job can cost three different amounts depending on which actor you picked, and the compute-unit model makes the bill hard to predict before you run it.

One schema across every platform, rather than one per actor author. If you are pulling Instagram and TikTok comments through two different actors, you are writing two parsers.

Is this comparison fair to Apify?

We have tried to make it so, which is why the page says what Apify is better at before it says anything else. The prices are their own published figures, normalised to the same unit and dated. If something here is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will fix it — a comparison people trust is worth more to us than a flattering one.

Why are you cheaper than Apify?

Two structural reasons rather than a promotion. We bill for results delivered rather than for attempts, so failures cost you nothing; and there is no subscription underneath the rate, so nothing has to be recovered from customers who use less than they pay for.

Can I run both while I decide?

Yes, and it is the sensible way to choose. Take the same hundred targets, run them through both, and compare completeness and latency rather than marketing pages. Our free credits are enough to do that without paying us anything.

What if I need something you do not cover?

Tell us. We serve four platforms deeply rather than forty shallowly, so there are real gaps — and if the thing you need is one we are already thinking about, knowing somebody wants it moves it up.

Try it against your own targets

The only comparison that settles this is your own. A new account gets 1,000 credits, needs no card, and runs against the same endpoints and the same rate as a paying one.

Start free — no card See the full rate card

Other providers' figures are their own published rates as at August 28, 2026, normalised to dollars per thousand results. They change often — check before you rely on them, and tell us if one is wrong.