Playwright alternatives

3 tools to consider instead of Playwright, shown against it.

Playwright Scrapy Firecrawl Apify
Vendor Microsoft Zyte (open-source project) Mendable AI, Inc. Apify Technologies s.r.o.
Pricing model Open source + paid options Open source + paid options Free tier + paid plans Subscription
Free tier Yes Yes Yes Yes
Deployment Self-hosted Self-hosted Cloud, Self-hosted Cloud
Open source Yes (Apache-2.0) Yes (BSD-3-Clause) Yes (AGPL-3.0) No
Best for Engineers who need real-browser rendering for JS-heavy or interaction-gated pages and are building their own crawler. Engineering teams who want full control of crawl logic and are willing to run and maintain their own infrastructure. Teams feeding web content into LLM, RAG or agent pipelines rather than building traditional scrapers. Teams that want to rent or run scrapers as managed cloud jobs without operating their own infrastructure.
Pricing

Free and open source; no vendor pricing. Costs are the compute you run it on and any proxies you add.

Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.

Free and open source; no vendor pricing. Costs are whatever compute, proxies or hosting a team adds around it.

Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site.

Monthly plans include a credit allowance consumed per page scraped; higher tiers add crawling depth and priority support; pay-as-you-go credit top-ups available.

Free $0/month
Hobby $19/month ($16/month billed annually)
Standard $83/month billed annually
Growth $333/month billed annually

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Monthly plans include a platform-credit allowance that covers compute, proxy and storage usage; overage is billed on top.

Free $0/month
Starter $19/month ($17/month billed annually)
Scale $199/month ($179/month billed annually)
Business $999/month ($899/month billed annually)

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Features
  • Drives real Chromium, Firefox and WebKit engines
  • Auto-waiting and network interception for JS-rendered content
  • Multi-language APIs (JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Java, .NET)
  • Headless and headed execution, screenshots and video capture
  • Built-in test runner with parallel execution (for testing use cases)
  • Context isolation for running many independent sessions
  • Codegen tool that records interactions into a script
  • Asynchronous request scheduling and throttling
  • Built-in HTML/XML selectors (CSS and XPath)
  • Item pipelines for cleaning and storing scraped data
  • Middleware system for proxies, retries and custom headers
  • Built-in export to JSON, CSV and XML
  • Extensible with headless-browser middlewares for JS-heavy sites
  • Command-line tooling for generating and running spiders
  • URL-to-Markdown/JSON scraping API
  • Site crawl mode that follows internal links
  • Schema- or prompt-based structured extraction
  • JavaScript rendering for dynamic pages
  • Map endpoint for fast URL discovery across a domain
  • Open-source self-hosted engine available
  • SDKs for Python, Node.js and LangChain/LlamaIndex integration
  • Marketplace of pre-built scraper "Actors" for common sites
  • SDK for building custom Actors (JavaScript/Python, open-source Crawlee core)
  • Built-in rotating proxy pool
  • Scheduling, webhooks and REST/GraphQL API
  • Managed storage for datasets, key-value stores and request queues
  • Headless browser and HTTP-based crawling support
  • Team and usage-based billing dashboard

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