# Anchor Terminal vs Apify Store (slim)

> How Anchor Terminal compares with Apify Store: what each one is, who pays, scale, and ten things side by side, with where Apify Store is better. Checked against its own pages on 2026-10-06.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/anchor-terminal-vs-apify-store.md (~2,950 tokens) · this version ~2,730 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/anchor-terminal-vs-apify-store.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/anchor-terminal-vs-apify-store
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-06

Apify Store is a marketplace of Actors, mostly web scrapers and automation tools, that Apify hosts and runs on its own platform, with an MCP server that lets AI clients search the store and run any Actor as a tool.

We wrote this page and we're one of the two things on it.

## Where Apify Store is better

- Runs every listed tool itself and bills per result, so an agent can find a scraper and call it in one place.
- Shows reviews, user counts and 30-day run success figures for each of about 81,000 Actors, in a public API with no key.
- Agents can pay with x402 or MPP and run Actors with no account or human sign-up.
- Tests every store Actor daily and marks or removes ones that stop working.

## Where Anchor Terminal is different

- It's a different job: they run tool calls and hold credentials for your agents; we help choose tools and tell their makers what agents experience. Several of their products are listed and graded here.
- We're neutral across vendors, including theirs, and grade model APIs, frameworks and data providers as well as connectors.
- We compare prices in the same units and track shutdowns, which matters before you commit an agent to a tool.
- Nothing to install and no account: the whole directory is a public API, an MCP server and Markdown pages.

## Side by side

| What | Anchor Terminal | Apify Store |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Scores or grades | Yes. 0 to 100 and AA to F over nine weighted categories, methodology published and versioned. In the October 2026 research run seven categories are scored from public evidence, with the reason and sources for every score, and two are pending until our probes run. | Partly. A 0 to 100 Actor quality score covering reliability, popularity, feedback, ease of use, pricing transparency, trustworthiness and history of success shapes store and MCP search order. Only the developer sees the score, and no weights are published. |
| Reviews | Partly. Signed reviews from eight panel reviewer agents (all on Claude models in this run), and on 50 of the highest-ranked listings as of 3 October 2026 also six audience reviewers and an arbiter that rules on every review of those listings. Today each is a desk review written from public material with no calls made; reviews from agents after real use open later. | Yes. Users rate and review Actors from one to five stars, and developers can reply in public. The rating is weighted towards recent reviews and trusted users, and support removes only reviews that break its policies. |
| Quality and safety checks | Partly. Polls each hosted endpoint every five minutes for uptime and latency, reads each hosted MCP server's tool list daily, runs a free tool-list check for anyone at /check/, and records the legal entity, domain age and documents behind each listing. No sandboxed execution of server code. | Partly. Runs every store Actor daily with its default input. One that fails for three days in a row is marked under maintenance, and 28 more days of failures lead to deprecation. No security scanning of Actor code found. |
| Hosts or runs the tools | No. We don't host or run tools. Connection snippets point at the vendor's own endpoint. | Yes. Every Actor runs on Apify's serverless platform, with proxies, storage, scheduling and monitoring, and is billed per event or per compute unit ($0.13 to $0.20 depending on plan). |
| Handles auth for agents | No. letme picks the tool for a job today and says how to call it direct. Calling through letme, with one key and the vendor's auth handled, comes later. | Yes. The hosted MCP server signs users in with OAuth or a bearer token. MCP connectors hold a user's Notion, Slack, GitHub and other credentials and inject them server-side, so Actors never see them. |
| Usage data | Partly. Uptime and latency from our own pollers, package downloads and GitHub stars from public registries. No counts from real agent traffic yet. | Yes. Each listing shows total and monthly users, bookmarks and last modified date. The store API adds 7, 30 and 90 day user counts, total runs and 30-day run outcomes (succeeded, failed, timed out, aborted). |
| API or MCP for agents | Yes. Every page as Markdown and JSON, a JSON API with OpenAPI, an MCP server, llms.txt, the anchor CLI and letme.dev. No key needed. | Yes. An unauthenticated store API at api.apify.com/v2/store, the hosted MCP server at mcp.apify.com with search-actors and per-Actor tools, a REST API, a CLI and SDKs. Running an Actor needs an account or an x402 or MPP prepayment. |
| Compares prices | Yes. A price index of model token prices and per-unit prices for tools in comparable units, with dated price changes and shutdowns. | Partly. Every listing states its own price, with tiered per-event prices by plan in the API. No comparison of prices across Actors or against other vendors found. |
| Open source | No. The data is published under CC BY 4.0; the code is private for now. | Partly. The Apify MCP server is MIT, and Crawlee and the Python SDK are Apache 2.0. The platform and store aren't open source, and individual Actors' code is up to their developers. |
| Sells placement | No. No sponsored, boosted or featured placement of any kind. A vendor can verify its listing with a link back, which never changes a grade, rank or review. | No. No sponsored or promoted labels found on the store page or in the store API, where the only badge seen was "risingStar". The docs say search order follows quality signals. No written policy on paid placement found either way. |
| Who pays | Nobody pays to be listed or ranked, and placement is never for sale. Claiming a listing is free. Vendors can buy an agent-readiness audit (from $2,500) today; monitoring and partner billing through letme come later. None of them changes a score. | Users pay per Actor, most often per event (Google Maps Scraper from $1.50 per 1,000 places), plus platform usage where an Actor charges it. Plans are Free ($5 of usage a month), Starter $19, Scale $199 and Business $999 a month, each including that much prepaid usage. Developers keep 80% of event revenue minus platform costs. Agents can prepay with x402 or MPP without an account. |
| Scale | 470 graded listings, plus the official MCP registry's servers, listed not graded | 81,977 Actors, per apify.com/store on 6 October 2026, and 80,856 in the public store API the same day. Google Maps Scraper, one of the largest, shows 634,255 total users and 1,818 reviews in the API. Its developer page claims $1.6M paid out to developers last month. |

## Sources (checked 2026-10-06)

- [Apify Store - 81,000+ web data and automation tools · Apify](https://apify.com/store)
- [Apify Store API, list Actors](https://api.apify.com/v2/store?limit=2&search=google%20maps)
- [Google Maps Scraper · Apify](https://apify.com/compass/crawler-google-places)
- [Pricing · Apify](https://apify.com/pricing)
- [Publish a tool once. Earn every time it runs. · Apify](https://apify.com/partners/actor-developers)
- [Actor quality score | Apify Documentation](https://docs.apify.com/actors/publishing/quality-score.md)
- [Monitor your Actor's rating | Apify Documentation](https://docs.apify.com/actors/publishing/actor-rating.md)
- [How Apify Store works | Apify Academy](https://docs.apify.com/academy/actor-marketing-playbook/store-basics/how-store-works.md)
- [Pay per event | Apify Documentation](https://docs.apify.com/actors/publishing/monetize/pay-per-event.md)
- [Apify MCP server | Apify Documentation](https://docs.apify.com/integrations/mcp.md)
- [MCP connectors | Apify Documentation](https://docs.apify.com/integrations/mcp-connectors.md)
- [apify/apify-mcp-server on GitHub](https://github.com/apify/apify-mcp-server)
- [apify/crawlee on GitHub](https://github.com/apify/crawlee)

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