Looking for an Apify alternative is rarely about extraction quality: on Google Maps, the reference Actor does the job. The real question sits elsewhere, and it's the more awkward one to ask out loud — did you want a scraping platform, or did you want a list of companies to contact? Both are sold in the same place, priced differently, and they don't require the same job.
A marketplace, not a tool
Apify isn't a scraper: it's a store of scrapers, 64,042 "Actors" at the vendor's own count, written by third-party developers, running on shared infrastructure with proxies, anti-blocking, scheduling, an API and an SDK. That's a genuine strength and it deserves to be said before anything else: no other offering on the market covers as many sources. If your target platform changes every quarter — Maps today, a trade directory tomorrow, a marketplace next — you won't find better elsewhere.
The trade-off is structural: a marketplace sells components, not an outcome. A Maps Actor returns places; deduplication, legal qualification, email verification and final formatting are other bricks, to be chosen, wired and maintained. That assembly work is invisible in the demo and very real in the calendar.
The billing unit matters more than the price tag
This is the point most comparisons miss. On the platform, the billed unit is the compute unit — $0.2 per unit on the Free and Starter plans, with a monthly credit to spend on the Store. So the bill isn't indexed on what you get, but on what the machine consumed to get it. A dense area, a badly scoped query, an Actor that runs longer than expected: same result, different invoice.
Some Actors fix that by publishing a per-result price — the Google Maps Scraper advertises from $1.50 per 1,000 scraped places, which is readable and fair. But as soon as your chain has two or three bricks, you mix two billing modes and lose the ability to state a cost before you launch. For an engineering team steering a cloud budget, that's normal. For someone preparing an outreach campaign over an area, it's uncertainty with nothing in return.
When Apify is the right call — and when it isn't
You have a developer, or you are one. Stay on Apify. The API, the SDK, the integrations and the option to write your own Actor have no equivalent among dedicated tools. A "finished" tool would cost you in freedom what it gives you in comfort.
Your sources change often, or you scrape things other than companies. Listings, profiles, catalogues, content: that's Apify's ground, and it isn't ours. Here again the alternative question doesn't really arise.
You want a usable list of French companies by next week. That's where the platform works against you. What you're after isn't an extraction engine, it's the state of the data after extraction: businesses in an area, tied to their legal entity, with contact addresses that actually exist. Scraping is only the first of four steps, and it's the only one the platform covers.
What's left to do after the export
A raw Google Maps file gives you a trading name, an address, a front-desk phone number and sometimes a website. To contact French companies, you still need the link to the official register — SIRET, legal form, officers, active or struck-off status — and then verified email addresses. At outsend these steps sit in the same chain: extracting an area from Google Maps, automatic SIRET, VAT and RCS enrichment, legal data and company officers to qualify the list, then deliverability checks before the first send. During the alpha, access is free, by application.
This isn't a technical superiority, it's a different scope: Apify sells the means, a dedicated tool sells the finished state. Both are defensible; they simply don't address the same person. Comparable trade-offs are laid out in our comparison of prospecting tools, and the neighbouring case of a Maps scraper billed by monthly credits is covered in the Lobstr.io alternative.
The table, objective criteria only
| Criterion | Apify | outsend |
|---|---|---|
| Nature of the offering | Platform and Actor marketplace | Chain dedicated to company lists |
| Sources covered | 64,042 Actors, any kind of site | Worldwide Google Maps + French Sirene register |
| Billing unit | Compute unit, or per result depending on the Actor | Free alpha, by application |
| French legal enrichment (SIRET, officers) | Via another Actor or a third-party tool | Built into the chain |
| Email verification | Separate brick | Built in |
| Custom code, API, SDK | Yes, core of the product | No |
| Intended user | Developers, data teams | Campaign-based prospecting, no code |
Two rows of this table cut against us, and they should be read that way. If your chain has to be programmed, versioned and wired into your information system, the absence of a custom API on our side is a real gap, not an ergonomic detail. And if your scraping needs go beyond Google Maps, Apify's coverage is out of reach for any specialised tool — ours included.
The questions that keep coming up
Is Apify's free plan enough to evaluate?
It's designed for that: the vendor advertises $5 of credit to spend on the Store, no card required. On a Maps Actor billed per thousand places, that's enough to validate extraction quality on a real area. It's a serious test bench, not a production volume.
Why is the cost of a run hard to state in advance?
Because the platform bills the resource consumed, not the row returned. Two runs returning the same number of businesses can cost differently depending on area density, requested depth and run duration. Actors that publish a per-result price remove part of that uncertainty, but it comes back as soon as you chain several bricks.
Can Apify return the SIRET numbers of the businesses it extracts?
Not from the Maps extraction itself: Google Maps doesn't carry the legal identifier. Matching to the official register is an extra step, done in another Actor or a third-party tool. That step is precisely what decides the quality of a French outreach file.
Are there open-source alternatives to Apify?
Yes, and the vendor publishes one itself: the crawling library it maintains, Crawlee, is open source. It's a real option if you have the skills to host and maintain it — but you then take back operations, proxies and anti-blocking, which is exactly what the platform was charging for.
What should I pick for a one-off campaign on a single city?
A dedicated tool, almost every time. A one-off campaign justifies neither learning a platform nor assembling a chain of bricks you won't use next month. Time-to-first-list weighs more than extraction cost in that case.
And for a daily flow feeding a data warehouse?
Apify, without hesitation. Fine-grained scheduling, API, integrations and scaling are exactly what you need, and a campaign-oriented tool would be the wrong choice for that job.