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Apify vs Crawlbase

Apify scores higher on the AgentReady, 74/100 against 68/100. They differ on 15 of the 41 signals. Which ones decides whether an agent can adopt them without a person watching.

What each one is

Apify. Apify is the largest marketplace of trusted tools for AI.

Crawlbase. Crawlbase provides web crawling, scraping, and parsing APIs at scale.

Where Apify is ahead

Apify passes structured api reference, and Crawlbase does not. That is understand, whether an agent can read the docs and work out how the API behaves before calling it.

Where Crawlbase is ahead

Crawlbase passes search discoverable and public docs discoverable, and Apify does not. That is discover, whether an agent can find the product at all without being told it exists.

It also holds understand: authentication documented, pricing understandable and limits / constraints documented. Apify misses those.

And on adopt, self-service signup, free trial or free allowance, fast time to first request, copyable quickstart, official typescript sdk and official python sdk. Apify misses those.

Finally, on operate, canonical workflow succeeds, observable execution and agent compatibility verified. Apify misses those.

What neither does

Both fail openapi / spec quality, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, no mandatory sales call, programmatic credential creation, structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable. If your agent needs any of those, you will be building it yourself either way.

Score, pillar by pillar

The AgentReady splits into four pillars, scored separately, because a product can be easy to find and still impossible to adopt.

Discover. Both sit at 100/100 here. Apify misses search discoverable, public docs discoverable; Crawlbase misses nothing.

Understand is whether an agent can read the docs and work out how the API behaves before calling it. Apify leads 67 to 38. Apify misses openapi / spec quality, authentication documented, pricing understandable, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, limits / constraints documented; Crawlbase misses structured api reference, openapi / spec quality, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented.

Adopt. Crawlbase leads 81 to 63. Apify misses self-service signup, no mandatory sales call, programmatic credential creation, free trial or free allowance, fast time to first request, copyable quickstart, official typescript sdk, official python sdk; Crawlbase misses no mandatory sales call, programmatic credential creation.

Operate. Apify leads 67 to 53. Apify misses canonical workflow succeeds, structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable, observable execution, agent compatibility verified; Crawlbase misses structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable.

Pricing

Apify does not publish a machine-readable starting price. Crawlbase does not publish one and has a free tier.

Signal by signal

Which to pick

Crawlbase clears more of the signals an agent needs, so it is the safer default for unattended use. Full profiles: Apify and Crawlbase. Alternatives to each: Apify, Crawlbase.

An agent can fetch this as data: POST /v1/compare {"slugs": ["apify", "crawlbase"]}